CosmoErotic Humanism is a philosophical movement aimed at reconstructing the collapse of value at the core of global culture. This movement emerges in response to the meta-crisis, understanding existential and catastrophic risks as rooted not only in failures of economics, politics, and technology, but in failed worldviews.

By First Principles and First Values, we refer to a tentative list of principles and values embedded in the Cosmos itself, and that show up in different forms all the way down and all the way up the evolutionary chain. We will more fully explore what this notion of cosmic or cosmological value means below. [Chapter 5]

we need a breakthrough in individual and collective “being” but a breakthrough here is hard as it requires a consensus on foundational values and views including belief in the possibility of transformation [hope] and the nature and primacy of being.

These are not conclusions of philosophical argument subject to refutation, but rather metaphysical and ontological premises. They are the axioms that live across the great traditions of human value, truths that are Anthro-Ontologically (a term we will return to below) accessible to everyone, fundamentally both eternal and evolving.

What are the foundational views and values, and, separately and relatedly a big vision, and how do we bring forth a culture based on these foundations within our lifetime and the next six generations that is a) radically better than today in its capacity to generate flourishing communities and individuals, both within that culture and also more broadly in society; b) engaging in powerful, practical action on collective challenges; and c) pragmatically utopian in its commitment both to being wise itself and in causing a wiser and weller world for everyone.

"The first is the success story that dominates global culture in both open and closed societies, albeit in different forms: zero-sum rivalrous conflict governed by win/lose metrics." (chapter 8 opening)

CosmoErotic Humanism is a philosophical movement aimed at reconstructing the collapse of value at the core of global culture. This movement emerges in response to the meta-crisis, understanding existential and catastrophic risks as rooted not only in failures of economics, politics, and technology, but in failed worldviews. The core of CosmoErotic Humanism offers a system of First Principles and First Values that recasts cosmic evolution as a Story of Value in which humanity plays a unique role. These First Principles and First Values ground a comprehensive set of theories, including self and psychology, epistemology, scientific metaphysics, education, theology, mysticism, sexuality, and value. CosmoErotic Humanism thereby responds to the three great questions: Where? Who? and What? It offers a new Universe story (Where am I?), a new narrative of identity (Who am I?), and new vision of ethics (What ought I/we do?). These are some of the first words on the possibilities of a world philosophy adequate to our time of civilization transformation. What is offered by CosmoErotic Humanism is a new story of eternal yet evolving value that can serve as a context for our diversity, finally allowing us to speak of humanity as part of a shared story of evolving cosmic value.

The material collected here is from the internal writings of the Center for World Philosophy and Religion. The Center is cofounded and led by Marc Gafni and Zak Stein. Together with Ken Wilber—also a cofounder of the Center—and an international team, they execute the Center’s mission: to evolve culture as needed in response to the looming threat of existential and catastrophic risk. This movement in culture has become referred to as CosmoErotic Humanism.

The world is not what it was when the great wisdom traditions first began to (re)connect (“religion” is from the Latin religare, meaning to bind or tie) the human to the Cosmos through the identification of a field of value in which all life participates. The last century has seen more change in the conditions of human existence than any other period in known history. Technologies and societal evolutions have moved the center of culture outside the field of value. Humanity has become untethered from reality, and more specifically, divorced from the reality of value. And so there is an urgent need for new forms of religion, philosophy, and culture that reconstruct value and reconnect humanity with nature and reality.

Much of our core infrastructure has become inherently fragile, and it’s seemingly only a matter of time before one or several catastrophic risk scenarios are realized. This started to become visible, to a limited extent, during the energy crises of the 1970s, as well as a dozen or so other less-noticed but equally important recent events. Lately it has become unmistakable, with the widespread eruption of climate catastrophes, electrical grid outages, wildfires, superstorms—and, of course, the first of the long-predicted planetary pandemics.

Some risks are catastrophic, wherein large populations perish; others are existential, meaning that nothing human survives. The realization of this possibility is precisely what we have called “the second shock of existence,” which has also been recognized by dozens of thinkers who track global trends. Existential risk, or the second shock of existence, means not the death of the individual human being, but awareness of the potential death of humanity.

In modernity, existential risk is disclosed as a scientific reality, a world-centric challenge—not a prophetic intuition, but a genuine potential playing out in the immediacy of the present. But the second shock of existence can either result in the fulfillment of a dystopian vision, or it can provoke the emergence of a New Human and New Humanity—which we discuss below as the evolution of Homo sapiens into Homo amor. We are in a new moment in history because, as discerning eyes can see, plausible paths to dystopia—leading to the genuine death of civilization—are very real. However, the path to a planetary civilization able to exist in perpetuity within planetary boundaries can also be seen, although walking that path is considerably more difficult.

By First Principles and First Values, we refer to a tentative list of principles and values embedded in the Cosmos itself, and that show up in different forms all the way down and all the way up the evolutionary chain. We will more fully explore what this notion of cosmic or cosmological value means below.

Finally, we speak not only of First Principles and First Values but say they are necessarily embedded in a Story of Value. Again, this is not a literary device but adds something vital to the formulation. First Principles and First Values themselves neither generate coherence nor arouse our moral and political will to action. Provoking this will requires story, a narrative arc to engage us, and not only because humans are specifically storytelling animals, although we most certainly are. More profoundly, story itself is a core First Principle and First Value of Cosmos, all the way up and all the way down the evolutionary chain.

These are not conclusions of philosophical argument subject to refutation, but rather metaphysical and ontological premises. They are the axioms that live across the great traditions of human value, truths that are Anthro-Ontologically (a term we will return to below) accessible to everyone, fundamentally both eternal and evolving.

1. There is no global coherence or global coordination without a universal grammar of value

Every single catastrophic and existential risk we face in the meta-crisis requires global coherence and coordination in response. Local responses to global issues will ultimately fail. All the local expressions of risk must be addressed at the global level to enact any form of potent response. Local solutions to global problems are not effective for planetary issues.

Global coordination requires a genuine sense of global coherence at the level of superstructure, and only through such global coherence can we avert major suffering and transform our reality.

There is no global coherence without shared, universal First Principles and First Values embedded in a Story of Value. …

Aside on terminology

i think by superstructure they mean culture and value.

Nearly all the catastrophic and existential risks we face are global challenges—from climate change to AI to pandemics to systems collapse to arms races with exponential weaponized technologies. Nearly all these factors are driven by tragedies of the commons, multipolar traps, and races to the bottom—all of which are expressions of the rivalrous-conflict meta-architecture that generates fragile systems subject to multiple forms of collapse, be they gradual or sudden.

2. There is no shared sense-making without minimal agreement on First Principles and First Values.

There is no future for human culture if it remains stuck in the pre-tragic or tragic view of the meta-crisis. The second shock of existence must be metabolized by human culture, and especially by those in the wisdom lineages of religious and philosophical thought. The meta-crisis is a demand for a mature and wise world philosophy that can help shift human culture into a post-tragic view on essential existential questions.

The first is the success story that dominates global culture in both open and closed societies, albeit in different forms: zero-sum rivalrous conflict governed by win/lose metrics. This story of human identity and worth generates an extraction-based economic model where the planet itself is commodified and all of reality is “used up” through the dynamics of economic competition. As a result, in roughly a century, humanity has nearly exhausted the resources that took hundreds of billions of years to develop on Earth. We are now governed by unlimited exponential growth curves that cannot be maintained, which leads to conflict, polarization, fundamentalist/globalist perspectives, widespread alienation, multipolar traps, tragedies of the commons, arms races that exponentially produce ever more dangerous weaponized technology, gain-of-function research, and so much more.

This is the second basic generator function we highlight here: complicated systems are fragile systems, whereas complex systems are anti-fragile. There is a fundamental disassociation among the parts of the highly entangled hyper-object we call global civilization, a disassociation that makes the overall system complicated but not complex, fragile rather than robust. To describe it as complicated is to say that the many parts do not relate to each other—they cannot feel each other, nor can they heal or self-assemble.

Complex systems, like the human body or a rainforest, are composed of parts that organically self-organize and are thus capable of self-repair, exhibiting a state known as “anti-fragility.” Complicated systems, like airplanes or financial instruments, have no such capacities.

Further reflection reveals that there is a deeper root cause which underlies both generator functions, what we call the global intimacy disorder. Intimacy is always rooted in allurement. When there is no allurement between the parts or when the parts are alienated, the result is rivalrous conflict governed by zero-sum win/lose metrics, which then spawns fragile systems—key elements in the exponentially deepening global intimacy disorder.

Let’s note that rivalrous conflict governed by win/lose metrics should not be confused with healthy competition in the larger context of I–Thou relationships.

A third expression of the global intimacy disorder is the disconnection between the humanities and the STEM professions (i.e., science, technology, engineering, and mathematics).

There is in contemporary global society an evident and ever-widening gap between the haves and have-nots—a gap that has historically been a core feature of civilization. It only finally began to close after the Renaissance, a trend that continued through the industrial revolution and throughout much of the twentieth century. As many have pointed out, this increasing parity has stopped, and the pendulum is now swinging wholly in the other direction.

Moreover, at this point, the trend is such that it will soon become far more than a gap in wealth and opportunity. We are moving rapidly toward a new global caste system in which a tiny elite is technologically augmented, in terms of cognition, aesthetics, physical capacity, and even longevity.

Let’s clarify our own narrative thread for a moment. We are not saying that quarks are literally telling stories. Rather, we are saying that story, the narrative arc of reality, is not a contrived human invention but rather a fundamental property of Cosmos. In that sense, story is not entirely dissimilar from time and space as a fundamental constituent of reality. We perceive time and space not because we contrive them but because they are in some sense real. The same is true for story.

Harari attempts to prove this point by pointing out that values always change: they are animated only by the powers that birth them, which weave for humanity what are but figments of our imagination, fictions, and social constructions of reality. For Harari, unconsciously echoing the zeitgeist, there is no essential difference between an English boy who travels to the Middle East to slaughter Muslims in the Crusades and an English boy who travels to the same area seven hundred years later to work with Amnesty International to assist Syrian refugees. Both are products of stories and values—stories of value—that are fictions, social constructs, and figments of our imagination. One is not more significantly evolved than any other.13

For the dominant zeitgeist, there is no Eros or intrinsic value within reality, and there is no evolution of love through levels of consciousness. There is no story, no value, and certainly no inherent plotlines to the evolution of value.

…

The main point is not that Harari is wrong, although he is. The point is that he is parroting the cultural assumptions of the postmodern zeitgeist, with major politicians, leading technologists, and influential mainstream cultural voices around the world endorsing his books. Having an American president promoting the idea that our shared stories of value are ultimately mere fictions would have been unthinkable just one generation ago.

The first trajectory is the movement of existence to higher and higher forms of complexity. The evolutionary flow moves from atom to amoeba (single-celled organisms) to plants to early animals to mammals to early humans walking upright to awake and conscious human beings. But this is only a limited, exterior description of evolution.

What is the interior experience of evolution during this same time sequence? The interior of evolution is a yearning of some kind. If you could feel the inside of evolution throughout history, you would sense forms of yearning going all the way back. These questions and ideas seem absurd to a certain kind of scientific mindset. But they were obvious questions to most of our human ancestors, whom scientists have largely dismissed as “primitive.” Our ancestors believed that nature and the Cosmos were self-evidently purposeful in some way, here for some reason—that the Universe was clearly a value-driven process.

Value itself has been subject to withering critique in modernity and postmodernity. That critique wisely undermined and deconstructed old and outdated notions of value. But the originally valid critique overreached itself and claimed to deconstruct the very reality of intrinsic value itself. As a direct result, most people who participate in civilization today, East and West, do not understand themselves as participating in a universal field of value. A subtle, inarticulate, and pernicious nihilism is pervasive, wherein values are seen, at best, only as social constructions—or worse, as subtle ploys for power.

The meta-crisis, with its various existential and catastrophic possibilities, has clear roots in the underlying crisis of value. The absence of value at the heart of culture is a new phenomenon; there has never before been a civilization that held, at the center of its superstructure and dominant worldview, a basic skepticism toward value. Modernity, as we have shown, had an inchoate, almost unspoken conception of the reality of value, expressed in what we call the “common-sense sacred axioms.” The exhaustion and fragmentation of these as the background assumption of social life is the story of postmodernity, to which we return below.

In Aldous Huxley’s summation of the perennial philosophy, fundamental premises like “Spirit is Real” are central. And they can all be validated by immediate experience, yielding direct gnosis. Huxley presents what he calls the minimal working hypothesis, which includes six major dimensions:

• That Spirit is Real. That there is a Godhead, Ground, Brahman, Clear Light, or Void, which is the unmanifest principle of all manifestation.
• That the Ground is at once transcendent [beyond the world] and immanent [of the world]. That it is possible for human beings to love, to know, and to become identical with the divine ground itself.
• That to achieve this unitive knowledge of the Godhead is the final end and purpose of human existence.
• That there is a law or Dharma which must be obeyed—a Tao, a way that must be followed—if men are to achieve their final end. That the more there is of self [contracted egoic identity] the less there is of the Godhead. The Tao is therefore a way of humility and love, the Dharma a living law of self-transcending awareness.

It is noteworthy that four out of the six are about ontological principles and only the last two touch more directly on normative value, ethos, and practical behavior. There is, however, no true split between the first four and the last two of Huxley’s tenets, the latter tenets of action flowing directly from the former. Huxley published The Perennial Philosophy in 1944, a year after C.S. Lewis’s The Abolition of Man, which Huxley undoubtedly read, for they moved in overlapping cultural, social, and intellectual circles. Significantly, both refer to the Tao and to Dharma, terms they use in a somewhat similar manner, referring to the notion of reality as grounded in a larger field of intrinsic value.

Three short education anecdotes amply illustrate the postmodern deconstruction of value. Two of them come from Exeter Academy, the same school that produced Mark Zuckerberg and many other future business and social leaders. The first anecdote: a teacher at Exeter shared the following with the authors: “When I came to Exeter, I knew that my job was to teach about the good, the true, and the beautiful. By the time I retired from Exeter, both the teachers and students assumed that there was no such thing. The good, the true, and the beautiful no longer referred to something that was real.”

The second anecdote: One of us was guest lecturing at Exeter to a large group of engaged students. There were perhaps 150 or so young men and women in the group. The following moral question was our topic: “You are on a deserted island with a person you detest and whom you feel is verbally abusive to you. She is driving you absolutely out of your mind. You know you will never be rescued. She injures herself and does not have the capacity to feed herself. You are a doctor with the capacity to heal her, and you also have full capacity to feed her. Do you have an obligation to heal and feed her? No one in this world will ever know what happens, because you will never be rescued.” The overwhelming majority of the students said emphatically that one could not formulate an ought, any sort of cosmic obligation rooted in any sort of objective moral principle, which demanded that you feed the other person.

Anecdote Three: One of us was giving a guest lecture at the Bronx High School of Science in New York. We asked the students to declare that Hitler is bad and that Mother Teresa is good. The overwhelming majority of them balked, declaring that there is no intrinsic sense of good and bad. Everything is socially constructed and context-bound.

In light of these attacks, it is clear that the common-sense sacred axioms are no longer sufficient to hold a common story of culture. The shared field of eros that suffuses culture expresses itself in value. When value disappears, eros evaporates and all that remains is polarization and rivalrous conflict, the success story of hypermodernity, in all its distressing disguises.

When value disappears .. and all that remains is polarization and rivalrous conflict

This means that First Principles and First Values are derived from the contemplation of our own clarified interiors. The mysteries are first and foremost located within us. First Principles and First Values live in interior space, cross-culturally and cross-temporally—across space and time.

The basic premise of this method, developed over many years, can be found in certain modern philosophers and sociologists, such as Jürgen Habermas, as well as many of the great religious traditions, even if not named as such. The premise is that human body, mind, and language are ultimately the only means by which truths can be known.

What is proposed here is that there are ways to reliably know collective and convergent truths—knowable universal truths triangulated across multiple sciences—that are themselves always evolving. So it is that CosmoErotic Humanism includes theories of Eros, Ethics, Self, Power, and Community, as well as key distinctions around politics, education, and religious/spiritual practices and rituals. The claims made account for the major scientific disciplines and the truths expressed in the great wisdom traditions—ultimately grounded in clarified individual direct knowing, or gnosis.