Conversations with David J. Temple
Selection, Desire and the Becoming of the Universe
Descripción
About the podcast: These are unscripted, early David J. Temple conversations where Dr. Marc Gafni, Ken Wilber and Dr. Zak Stein are unfolding the inner workings of CosmoErotic Humanism in real time. Formal statements and propositions will be published in forthcoming volumes by the World Philosophy and Religion Press. About this episode: In this dialogue, Dr. Marc Gafni and Dr. Zak Stein explore the profound interplay between selection, desire, value, and the evolutionary process of the universe. They discuss: why does the universe select certain structures instead of others, across all levels of matter, life, and mind? They engage with the deep cosmic question: what does the universe value? — and argue that in order to respond to our escalating challenge of humans overriding natural selection with their own choices, we have to be able to clearly see and distinguish between value and its counterfeit forms. If you deploy any material from David J. Temple in this episode, please cite directly using the following reference: Temple, David J., Conversations with David J. Temple, World Philosophy and Religion Press, May 2026, Episode: “Selection, Desire and the Becoming of the Universe” Get the book: First Principles and First Values [https://www.amazon.com/First-Principles-Values-Propositions-CosmoErotic-ebook/dp/B0CWYDGFZY] is the tip of the spear in the fight for a humane future. Establishing frameworks for a new school of thought called CosmoErotic Humanism, the book is built around forty-two propositions that provide new source code for the future of planetary culture. Like Europe in the early Renaissance, humanity is in a time between worlds, at a time between stories. First Principles and First Values contains blueprints for the bridge needed to cross from this world to the next. About the Authorial Voice of David J. Temple: David J. Temple is a pseudonym created for enabling ongoing collaborative authorship between Dr. Marc Gafni, Dr. Zak Stein and Ken Wilber at the Center for World Philosophy and Religion, a leading international think tank whose mission is to address existential risk by articulating a shared universal Story of Value for global intimacy and global coordination. The Center focuses its work on a world philosophy, Cosmo-Erotic Humanism, as the ground for a global vision of value, economics, politics, and spiritual coherence. The Center for World Philosophy and Religion is a reader-supported publication. Consider becoming a paid subscriber and get instant access to a 7-day deep dive into CosmoErotic Humanism course [https://worldphilosophyreligion.substack.com/p/new-self-study-course-cosmoerotic], valued in $297, for only $9/month. Chapters: 0:00 — Introduction 0:41 — Context Setting 1:02 — Framing the Conversation: There Is a Selection Process across the Levels of Matter, Life, and Mind 3:20 — There Must Have Been a Point in Which Humanity Started to Override the Organic Selection Processes of the Biosphere 6:44 — Distinguishing Between Value and its Counterfeit Forms Is Not So Simple 13:13 — We Have to Be Able to Say that Selection Is Off Course 15:38 — About First Principles and First Values 16:25 — To Liberate Yourself from Pseudo-Eros and Counterfeit Values, You Need a Better Script of Desire That’s Part of the Field of Value 26:36 — You Don’t Want to Make the Fantasy into Reality, but to Bring the Fantasy in Touch with What Is Real 33:27 — It’s Through Imagination that We Can Be Covenanted with All of the Present, All of the Past, and All of the Future 39:08 — Invitation to Who We Must Become End — Mentioned Sources End — Mentioned People Episode Transcript: Context Setting Zak: So, joking aside, David was in touch. He hangs out in a bunch of places. He was over at CRI with me and Schmachtenberger and others, thinking about this topic of what sometimes is called generator functions. We’ve talked about this with regards to X-Risk with David quite a bit. Marc: Right. That sweetheart, Chris, who was at the house here for a couple of weeks, was he there? Zak: Precisely. Yeah, he’s a sweetheart. Framing the Conversation: There Is a Selection Process across the Levels of Matter, Life, and Mind Zak: One of the things that emerged was this notion of selection. It’s a very deep topic. Meaning, we know selection from natural selection. That’s where there’s a genetic mutation, and then it either lives or it doesn’t live. And that’s interesting, because that’s kind of the whole biosphere deciding if this thing stays or goes. But what’s interesting is before you get biological selection, there are structures in the universe that simply don’t exist, and other structures that are super, super common. There’s a selection process at the level of the physiosphere, meaning, physics. So, there’s this deep question about multi-level selection across basically matter, life, and mind. It’s a deep issue. And another way to frame it, to bring it into our bailiwick in terms of value theory, is: One of the deeper questions is: why is there something rather than nothing? Which is, why was there first, the universe, selected for at all? Meaning, the universe was chosen. And then, if you set the universe adrift temporally, it means at any moment you can ask the question, why is the universe in this state and not in some other state? This is the big question of cosmic selection, which is, what does the universe value? Why does the universe have some things hanging around? Other things are basically impossible, and other sets of things come for a time and then disappear and be selected out. Deep questions. It begins with thermodynamics and then self-organization at the level of physics. So, that’s the biggest frame. And then, there are these layers of the selection process. And again, we know natural selection because it’s popular and it totally exists. 1) Natural selection is very common. But there’s also all of these other ones, which you know a lot about. 2) Group selection, what’s called co-selection. The lion becomes more powerful, but then the gazelle becomes faster. And so, you get symmetry of co-selection, balancing ecosystems. You also get niche creation, which results in phenotypic accommodation. This was the Baldwin effect, where the organism creates for itself an environment that protects it until there’s a genetic mutation that allows it to adapt better. That’s a quasi-Lamarckian mechanism. There Must Have Been a Point in Which Humanity Started to Override the Organic Selection Processes of the Biosphere Zak: 3) Then this abrupt thing occurs, and this is where the whole conversation started, which was: How is it that the things that are selected for in the biosphere lead to more life, and then at a certain point, the things that start to get selected for in the biosphere start to destroy life? Marc: The meta-crisis. Zak: The meta-crisis. And at a micro level, something like suicide. How is it that an organism emerges, which has the capacity to destroy itself when that just didn’t exist in nature? There’s not suicide in nature. Humans are unique in the category of suicide. And so, this question of species suicide—which is what the meta-crisis is—and ecocide, we take the whole biosphere with us. What that means is there must have been some switch in selection where humanity at some point started to override the organic selection processes of the biosphere. So: * Technological group augmentation becomes the predominant mode of selection. * That turns into self-domestication, which means we start to self-alter our own genetic codes, the genetic codes of animals, crops and other things—and start to radically alter through our own choice, not the holistic selection of nature, but our own choice augmented by technology. * Then, eventually we’re at this moment of cyborgic self-augmentation, which even more fundamentally augments what’s possible to select into or out of existence. So, there’s this stack. And what’s interesting about that is that at all of those layers, First Principles and First Values suffuse the mechanisms by which selection work. And so, this is the classic thing we’ve said for long, just slightly reframed. In the first minutes after the Big Bang, there are these processes of intimacy and Eros which draw together certain structures. Those structures survive to this day and constitute us. Every moment of the universe, they’re continually selected for, and they instantiate these principles. Now, the things that get selected out, like a civilization that self-terminates, for example, must somehow have deviated from those things which are selected for which confer survival. And of course, we don’t mean that in the simple Darwinian sense. We mean in this really richly ontologically stratified way. So, that biggest question of selection is this question of what the universe values, and the human steps in at this juncture and starts to override, through its own freedom and creativity, that universal structure. That’s the thing. And it’s so related to First Principles and First Values, but that specific launchpad to reflect this was useful… Marc: Yeah. In some sense, it’s the same conversation, but with a unique formulation, which is always good. There’s always a particular formulation that reopens it again in a very fructifying and rich way. I love the presentation, thank you. I haven’t thought this through, so this is not like a prefabricated home. We’ll build it together. Let me just put a few pieces together. First, just a meta comment. Distinguishing Between Value and its Counterfeit Forms Is Not So Simple Marc: What we found over the years is that there’s these series of issues that we frame in terms of existential risk as particular problems. Like, existential risk is a particular problem, of a particular nature, which, of course, never existed before. And as a result of a unique set of variables, both in the interiors and the exteriors that conflate at a particular moment in time in a way that they never have before. At the same time, we became aware. I remember that phone call, that, oh, right, right. Okay. Existential risk. That has something to do with a sheath of material extant in sources, transculturally, cross-culturally, which talk about this end of days, this collapse. And then they also talk about this new possibility, whether they call it: * messianic, whatever the name they give to it, * this arhat who’s become a bodhisattva, or * this new way beyond Kali Yuga, * we go into this new era, however you tell the story. Some version of this new human, new humanity, some version of Homo amor. So, in some sense, this is not entirely dissimilar. Let me just say why. We’ve talked about over the years, but particularly over the last year, we’ve had a whole bunch of new conversations about value and anti-value. And that was a porch conversation on a Saturday afternoon. Now, what value and anti-value say is, citing a verse from the Solomon lineage—this corresponding to this, did the Divine manifest, ze le’umat ze asa ha’Elohim. Meaning, there are actually always two potential trajectories. There are always two vectors at play. And it’s very fascinating because one of the things that we basically said is that at the moment of the Big Bang, and our dear friend Howard Bloom has done a lot of physics on this, you already have autonomy and communion in the first nanoseconds after the Big Bang. We’ve talked about, what is it that causes a particular neutron to need a proton? There’s this need-desire which creates two up quarks and a down quark proton, two down quarks and an up quark neutron, etc. And there’s this movement, this desire for value. We talked about in a recent conversation, there’s a line between: * mathematical value, * musical value, * molecular value, * moral value, and * mystical value. We pointed out, they all share certain core characteristics in common in the very fabric of Cosmos. Having said that, there’s also another vector. I want to just point to it in three ways. For example, every particular First Value and First Principle has a counterfeit form. 1) Let’s say you have a principle of Uniqueness. Uniqueness is your principle. So, your counterfeit form is separateness. It’s very not so simple to disambiguate between them. As we know in the early dharma of CosmoErotic Humanism that we’ve both written about, the distinction between Uniqueness and separateness was actually very core. Uniqueness is the First Value and First Principle, but then, the structural nature of Reality is that it demands the clarification so that we don’t get stuck in the eddy or the undertow of separateness. We transform to uniqueness. 2) Let’s take something like Transformation. You and I have talked about, transformation is very different than growth. Right? Developmental transformation, that’s a genuine transformation, which is measured by a number of variables. That’s different than growing. And so, there’s this value, First Principle, First Value of Transformation. But of course there is the broken version of it, or the untransformed version of it, if you will—or it can even have an anti-value version. 3) For example, there’s a particular quality of Reality, which is a quality of power, which acts for its own sake. It has the self-evident goodness of that experience, which is the power of, that moves through Reality. It’s the elegance of relationship and power for, when the father protects his daughter and has power. It’s both the power over and the power for, but then if you dissociate that power, you decontextualize it from a larger Field of Value, it becomes an anti-value. If we would take a look at pages 168, 169 and 170 of the First Principles and First Values book, we go through all these 18 First Principles and First Values. And what we had committed to do and God willing will do, in the next iteration of this book is precisely what’s the anti-value version of each one of them. There’s two forms. There’s an anti-value version, and then there’s a broken or counterfeit form, which is not an anti-value version, it’s a counterfeit form. One last example. 4) Let’s say, pleasure, which is the interior experience of Eros. The interior feeling of Eros is pleasure. It feels pleasurable. One of the counterfeit forms of pleasure, for example, would be novelty. Novelty is not anti-pleasure. It’s just a counterfeit form. If we actually consider both the counterfeit form and the anti-form, then that allows us to approach this and actually begin to understand what happened. And then, it also points us towards, critically—that’s why I got so excited this morning, I got so excited because of this last sentence—because what that then does is validates for us, which is really important, how we need to approach the meta-crisis. In other words, if it veered off based on either: a) anti-value, or b) a counterfeit form of value; Or a disqualification of the universe—Mumford, who’s on actually your book here to the left, it’s this disqualification, the machine—then reanimating the machine or re-grounding the Field of Value or telling a New Story of Value is the evolutionary structural move that re-uploads the appropriate selection process. So, boom, that’s just a larger sense. It’s exciting on so many levels. We Have to Be Able to Say that Selection Is Off Course Zak: If you’re a techno-optimist transhumanist, an effective accelerationist, you think we’re right on course. The whole thing was meant to have us excarnate into silicon and destroy all of biology — that’s the thing going well. What we have to be able to say is that no, the thing’s off course. And in order to say that, you have to be able to say some things can be selected for in the universe. Marc: That there’s a course. There has to be a course. Zak: That there’s a course, and that things can be off course—that’s very complicated. How can it be that things can be selected to exist in the universe that “shouldn’t be there?” That’s this question of pseudo-selection mechanisms, or sitra achra— Marc: Or selection mechanisms that select for pseudo-eros. Zak: If Uniqueness is the actual thing, separateness is close enough that you could run a lot of s**t for a while on separateness. And what that means is that there’s something just adjacent to many of the existing generative dynamics that would be congruent with—and not self-terminating with—the long-existing selection processes that brought the universe to this point of intricacy and beauty. That’s very intriguing, because otherwise you’re stuck with the view that evolution does this and thermodynamics does that, and therefore humans had to do this—there was no way not to. We have to get out of that story and into this place where the ability to point to the actual existing grammar of value in the Cosmos gives the opportunity to weave civilizational progress into that, rather than just making it up like some Tower of Babel thing. Marc: Without that you literally don’t have a chance. You can’t boot the conversation. There’s literally no way to boot the conversation. It can’t be done. Zak: And that’s what the effective accelerationists are saying: you don’t have a chance. Thermodynamics wins. The cyborgs have already won. Why are you so attached to this whole humanity, trees, and nature? Marc: What they’re assuming is that the inertia force of the lowest common denominator, non-effort, will win. Get the book: First Principles and First Values [https://www.amazon.com/First-Principles-Values-Propositions-CosmoErotic-ebook/dp/B0CWYDGFZY] 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. To Liberate Yourself from Pseudo-Eros and Counterfeit Values, You Need a Better Script of Desire That’s Part of the Field of Value Marc: And this is very important. I’m going to give an example. I was writing today in the personal myth meta-psychology domain, thinking through scripts of desire. There are basically eight iterations of scripts of desire, and I’m finally at the end—getting to fantasy. The literature on fantasies is in complete confusion, so I went inside and tried to outline four kinds: * Archetypal fantasy, * Unique fantasy, which itself divides into two: * Fantasy as pathology — emergent from pain and wound * Fantasy as prophecy — the call of potency and wonder When you look at fantasy as pathology, you have an early wound, an early pain. Dr. Kincaid (Kristina) has spoken publicly about her experience of early abuse. So, in the story that she’s told publicly, which is also in the Phenomenology, she did what we call, she eroticized the wound. She developed this fantasy called Lord of the Manor. Meaning, you can only get aroused sexually if you have some vision of Lord of the Manor—your mother kind of works for the Lord of the Manor and he takes you when you’re young and you can’t say anything because he’s the protector, etc. So, that becomes the fantasy for arousal. You eroticize the wound. And here’s what’s so interesting. You can’t overcome that or liberate yourself from that hijacking of your script of desire unless you have something more potent, more powerful, and more authentic. When Kristina came to work within the context of CosmoErotic Humanism, three things changed everything: * Reality is desire. * Desire is a value of Cosmos. It’s an actual value of Cosmos. * I am desire. Desire lives in me, and I’m a unique configuration of desire. In the same way that only your unique script of desire can overcome the hijacked script of desire of the pornographic universe—if you think that your desire is the whole story, your desire is the separate-self desire in a valueless universe, it means basically, desire is, from a Freudian perspective, this broken thing in your system, in your equilibirum. You’re a steam engine. You’ve got a broken engine, and not much you can do with a broken engine. How much can you fix a broken engine? So you’re this little rivulet of desire and you’ve got these undertows and these eddies and these things that drown you. But if you realize, no, no, your little rivulet of desire is part of a larger current—there’s a river that goes forth from Eden, the overpowering verse of the Zohar. There’s a larger river of desire, and that desire is sacred, moving towards value, moving through you uniquely. That’s enough power to liberate yourself from the old thing. Now, why is this relevant? Because if you don’t have the pull, the strange attractor, of a Field of Value; if you don’t have a value called transformation, or a value called clarification of desire; what you’re going to do is the Skinner move, or the MIT Media Lab Pentlandian move: speak to the lowest common denominator. You can’t really work that stuff out, you create some pseudo-Eros to cover over your emptiness and then, reality will go where reality goes. You can’t change the natural vector of the lazy versions, the untransformed, pseudo-forms, counterfeit forms of value—the effective accelerationists are right about that—unless you have a Field of Value. In a Field of Value, effort, transformation, virtue, and nobility are strange attractors towards something. Unless those are intrinsic, inherent features of Cosmos., then you’re always going to be stuck in the old scripts, which are very easy to write. Then those old scripts keep getting iterated again and again. You can only change the script if you have a better script, a better plotline, a better strange attractor. Howard Bloom is a great example of that… Zak: Tie it into selection and… Marc: Yeah. You’re always going to select. Let’s say, evolution wants Uniqueness, but it’s easier to do separateness—and as you said, separateness will make it for a while. Evolution holds Desire as a value of Cosmos, and desire is a desire for Value. But there’s a counterfeit version where desire becomes a desire for pseudo-erotic fulfillment, which is pseudo-value. The desire will come up. You’ll fulfill it pseudo-erotically, and you’ll become a modern consumer, activating your desire all the time at a lowest common denominator expression. If you don’t activate your desire at all, you feel like an idiot, you want to commit suicide. That’s why people go shopping, to feel better. If you have no capacity to actually activate your desire, whether that’s for consumption, for food, for sexuality, for entertainment, if you can’t activate your desire, you’re fucked. But you have this very lowest common denominator way of activating desire. What would cause you not to do that? What would change the selection criteria? What would change the story? You’d have to insert a value. And what would that value be? The clarification of desire. Aragon, in Lord of the Rings, has to clarify his desire and his destiny. He is called by this inherent value of Cosmos. Arwen says to him: go. She sleeps with him once in a dream and says: I’m not available to you unless you go and be your destiny. Go. Go with Frodo, and I’ll meet you on the other side if I do. But I’m calling you— sexual selection—I’m the woman who’s calling you to the Field of Value to go transform, and be a hero. That is a form of sexual selection, which is tied into a Field of Value, which demands that the masculine rise and meet it. That is just one example. Otherwise, you’ve got this thing called desire… I mean, you just go f**k Arwen. What’s the problem? You’ve got desire operating at the lowest common denominator field. It’s only when Transformation is itself a desire, only when you have a larger Field of Value which demands that those values be realized in their clarified form, that selection shifts. It’s not enough for Zak to be an incredibly successful separate self academic and rise to the top of the academy. No, his life might take him on a particular path where he wants to give his unique gifts in a very particular way towards addressing the meta-crisis—and he might not do as well as a tenured professor at Yale. Even though he could decide: okay, I’m now at a particular moment where I can go be a tenured professor at Yale. I’m going to do that. F**k this stuff, Schmachtenberger, Gafni, you guys are all crazy anyways. I’ve got all the credentials. I’m going to get a f*****g great job with a great tenure, with a great department and have a nice next 40, 50 years. Don’t tell me you’re doing that. Please. Zak: That would be a fantasy. Those things don’t exist. [Laughs] Marc: You get my point though. Zak: I hear you saying that all of the things about selection at the level of the physical, biological, and ecological cash out in human phenomenology in terms of clarification of desire—because that’s where we do our selecting. What do you want to be there in the future? Right now we’re selecting in terms of an insane fantasy of, say, infinite growth and perfect control of nature. Marc: And separate-self dominance… Zak: Exactly. And so, swapping out that script of desire for a realistic fantasy about what should be in the future requires introducing a grammar of value that can articulate that future. Marc: And remember we said that value arouses us. Value is a strange attractor. Value arouses political will and moral will. That’s one of the things Temple said in the First Principles and First Values book—when he went through the seven links between existential risk and the collapse of the Field of Value. I think number seven was: Value arouses will. Without Value arousing will, we have the effective accelerationist fantasies correct. You Don’t Want to Make the Fantasy into Reality, but to Bring the Fantasy in Touch with What Is Real Zak: Something like that. And it is actually quite complicated, because fantasy is involved in the distinct and unique ability for humans to take things so off course that we put all of life at risk. How could we do that without something like this imaginal capability, and specifically the ability for that imaginal capability to be distorted? Marc: Yes. Zak: For there to be fantasy. For there to be fantasy wrought from trauma, fantasy wrought from illusion, and delusion… And then the task of CosmoErotic Humanism is to tell that story, to replace fantasy with— Marc: Or to clarify the fantasy. Zak: Clarify the fantasy. Right. So, the exploration of fantasy. Marc: That’s right. We live a fantasy-aroused existence. That’s who we are. Human beings live a fantasy-aroused existence. We don’t have an option not to have fantasies; we have an option to clarify our fantasies. The verse in the lineage is, by the hands of my prophets, I’m imagined. You know, everything around Ibn Arabi is about this power to imagine and the clarification of that power. There is no possibility of non-imagining. You and I have talked about Harry Potter before. The gift Harry Potter gives to children is: after an entire generation of reductive materialists told them it’s just your imagination, Harry Potter comes back and re-ontologizes imagination. It says, of course there’s a Hogwarts School. Of course you can go through at Platform Nine and Three-Quarters and find your way in the Hogwarts School. Of course Dumbledore is real—and so is Voldemort. You have to take those things seriously. This is the re-ontologizing of imagination. We think we can kill imagination and still survive. But we’ve said in CosmoErotic Humanism, we’re not just Homo sapiens, we’re Homo imaginus. The need to reimagine a fantasy is essential. The reductive materialists thought you could remove value and keep the fantasy good. The best example of that is someone who I’m sure we’re both madly in love with, though we haven’t discussed him extensively, it’s someone like Rilke. Rilke is structurally an atheist, a rejecter of all previous systems. But he’s living this obviously gorgeous fantasy-aroused existence, because it’s a given to him that you can throw out the old fields of value and reject their faulty empiricisms, and yet still remain in an appropriate fantasy. He just didn’t get cut-flower ethics. Herberg’s idea from late ‘50s sociology: you cut a rose, one generation it’s okay, two, pretty good—second day, third day, the rose is a little wilted, fourth day, the rose is dead. You think you can cut off from the ground of the Field of Value and survive. That’s what Rilke does. Rilke cuts off from the ground of the Field of Value, and yet, the rose is completely a rose. You’re convinced that it’s going to go on. And this is an educational point—your domain—it won’t. Over several generations, you lose the arousal quality of desire that lives in the Field of Value, and then that desire will have to be filled pseudo-erotically. And now you’re in a meta-crisis. Zak: And what’s interesting too, psychoanalytically, as you were getting into the case study example with KK, there’s this movement of: you don’t want to concretize fantasy. You don’t want to make the fantasy into a concrete reality, but you want to bring the fantasy in touch with what is real. Marc: That’s a very nice way to say it. Zak: And so, the exploration of fantasy is also thinking about what is in it that is real, even though it remains a fantasy. Like, the First Principles and First Values, when they’re perceived anthro-ontologically, what faculty perceives them? I would say it’s probably the faculty of imagination. Marc: Yeah. Zak: And there’s a difference between the imaginary and the imaginal as products of imagination. The imaginal is when, for example, if you are frowning and I take your perspective—I’m imagining your perspective, and you’re upset—and I can do that well. It’s called empathy. Then my imagination conforms to reality and allows me to actually perceive what’s going on within you. It’s a little bit Kantian. Marc: That’s beautiful. I love what you just said. I love the idea that the moral faculty is the faculty of imagination, because what it does is… Blessings to my old colleague Michael Lerner, who just passed, editor of Tikkun Magazine. I once wrote an article for him, On the Erotic and the Ethical, and the relationship of prophets and pagans. Because the prophet is, by the hands of the prophet, I’m imagined. The prophet was saying that ethos and Eros are one, which is exactly what you were pointing to: that the quality of imagination and the moral quality are not separate. And let me reflect back what you said, because I think it’s super great. The reason I’m good to you is because I imagine you—and the more I can imagine your feeling… In a certain sense, God has the ultimate imagination, which both generates Reality and allows the Divine to feel every person. Imo anokhi b’tzarah, says Isaiah, I’m with you in your suffering. So I have this infinite, Divine, intimate identification, where my Divine imagination imagines every human being. This is so beautiful. So Adam, who is Homo imago dei—the imago, the image, is imagination. The image of God is the capacity to imagine, and Divinity is somehow the capacity of the Infinite to bracket itself and imagine our pain, our joy—to imagine us into existence. Okay. We can at least report back to David that we started the conversation. It’s Through Imagination that We Can Be Covenanted with All of the Present, All of the Past, and All of the Future Zak: Yeah, totally. Marc: It was great. Zak: It was beautiful. A couple of things on this—the presence of others when they’re not there. It relates to object permanence in child development, and it’s actually quite profound because it’s not present in other animals. You’ll notice, birds will mate for life but they will spend long times apart from one another. How does that work? Mammals don’t do that. It’s because they’re not really able to imagine the other bird when they’re not there. The reason you love your dog is because you know your dog is imagining you when you’re not there. Marc: Do we know if there are Winnicott’s transitional objects in the animal world? Zak: Dogs, definitely. If you’re not there, they will anxiously pick up a stuffed animal— Marc: Right, transitional object. Zak: One of the things they’re doing is imagining you. They’re not thinking in sentences or imagining long, complex things, but they have images of you. And when you come back, because it’s not a complex image, they don’t know how long you’ve been gone, so they freak out as if you’ve been away for a year every single time. That’s why you love dogs—they’re thinking of you when you’re gone. That’s why we love other people. When I say I miss you, what I mean is: I’ve been thinking of you, even though you’re not here. It’s one of the main reasons people prefer—and will always prefer—psychotherapy with a human over a bot. One of the things therapists report as most effective is letting the person know that you thought about them even when you weren’t on the clock. Marc: It’s very beautiful. Zak: It’s impossible for a machine to imagine you when you’re not there, because they don’t have imaginations. Marc: This touches another principle of CosmoErotic Humanism, not in the political-economic vector, but in the return-to-Eros vector. We have this principle: the sexual models the erotic. We say all the time—there are 12 billion years of Eros before sex—which is quite important to realize. One of the places where you see the sexual modeling the erotic is in the relationship between fantasy and imagination. What does fantasy mean? What fantasy means—and this is precisely what’s been destroyed by the internet—you once referred me to that scene that the guy who wrote Sadly, Porn, Edward Teacher, refers to about Fast Times at Ridgemont High in 1982: There’s this scene where Judge sees Phoebe getting out like the red goddess with her red bikini from the pool, and we go into his imagination. He’s looking out the window, he closes the window and he withdraws into the realm of his imagination to do what people do in the realm of the imagination. So fantasy means: I can hold your image when you’re not here. The sexual models the erotic. I’ve got to hold your image not only in regard to your incarnate sensuality in the sexual sense, but in regard to your need—your need is my allurement. You’re hungry, so I’m hungry. You don’t have capacity to grow and be educated, so I don’t have capacity to grow and be educated. That’s our notion of your need is my allurement. I can imagine your need, and really, the abject cruelty of the aristocracies was precisely their ability to close down their imagination. Zak: Yeah. The failure of the imagination through the closing of the heart. Marc: Right. The failure of the imagination. And that’s what was so great about Marx, whatever we think of Marx, he was like: hey, I’m going to sit for 12 f*****g years in the library in London and I’m going to imagine the workers. Zak: Precisely. He imagined into the Reality of the situation and then imagined the possible future. That’s what the prophet in many ways does, and I’d classify among modern prophets, Darwin and others did that. Natural selection is not visible. Natural selection exists in the imagination. It’s about imagining—what’s the thing back there? That’s why the First Principles and First Values are perceived with the imaginal faculty. The First Principles and First Values are perceived with the imaginal faculty in the same way I empathize with you to understand what’s going on within you. As I take in the universe and empathize with it, the interior sciences disclose these ontogenetic beings in the imaginal—beings that are existing and generative of more Reality and directionality to Reality. Marc: That’s also precisely what we’ve called in other texts, the memory of the future. Zak: Right. Marc: When someone is right in front of us, we help them. If someone is spatially not-synchronous with us, it takes a greater leap to imagine them. But if someone is temporally non-synchronous with us—they’re in the future—it takes an enormous act of love, of Eros, to access that imagination and be covenanted not just with the present in front of us, but with all of the present. And I can imagine the past—and I’m covenanted with the past—and I can imagine the future. And so, that’s a fantasy-aroused existence. Zak: Totally. Marc: Beautiful. Zak: Wow. Marc: Good, David. Good. Zak: Love. Mentioned Sources: * Temple, J. David, First Principles and First Values: Forty-Two Propositions on CosmoErotic Humanism, the Meta-Crisis, and the World to Come, World Philosophy and Religion Press, 2024 * Kincaid, K. & Gafni, M. (forthcoming). The Abridged Phenomenology of Eros. World Philosophy & Religion Press. * Kincaid, K. & Gafni, M. (forthcoming). The Complete Phenomenology of Eros. World Philosophy & Religion Press. * Teach, Edward, Sadly, Porn, Edward Teach, 2021 * James, E.L., Fifty Shades of Grey, The Writer’s Coffee Shop, 2011 * Tolkien, J. R. R., The Lord of the Rings, George Allen & Unwin, 1954–1955 * Rowling, J. K., Harry Potter series, Bloomsbury Publishing, 1997–2007 Mentioned People: * Daniel Schmachtenberger * Jean-Baptiste Lamarck (1744–1829) * Charles Darwin (1809–1882) * Muhyiddin Ibn Arabi (1165–1240) * Howard Bloom (1943–today) * Lewis Mumford (1895–1990) * Kristina Kincaid * B. F. Skinner (1904–1990) * Alex Pentland (1951–today) * Rainer Maria Rilke (1875–1926) * Herbert Marcuse (1898–1979) * Immanuel Kant (1724–1804) * Michael Lerner (1943–2022) * Karl Marx (1818–1883) * Donald Woods Winnicott (1896–1971) 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 [https://whowemustbecome.circle.so/checkout/who-we-must-become-student] 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 full access to Center for World Philosophy and Religion at worldphilosophyreligion.substack.com/subscribe [https://worldphilosophyreligion.substack.com/subscribe?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_4]
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