Note Details
- Stage: soil ✨
- Type: book
- Author: Marc Gafni, Zachary Stein
- Topics: cosmoerotic humanism, emergentism, liminal, philosophy
A philosophical overview proposing CosmoErotic Humanism as an emergent intellectual movement for navigating the current time between worlds.
CosmoErotic Humanism - Philosophy in a Time Between Worlds
By Dr. Marc Gafni & Dr. Zachary Stein
This brief paper represents an overview of the project of CosmoErotic Humanism, which is a philosophical orientation conceived here as an emergent aspect of the historical moment. We view this moment as a kind of Da Vinci moment, when new syntheses and sciences become possible, when new worldviews can emerge. We are poised between potential dystopia and utopia, a position rooted in global intimacy disorder (who are we?) and a consequent global action paralysis or confusion (what should we do?), which itself is sourced in a foundational collapse of narrative frameworks including a shared universe story and its derivative narratives of identity, community, sexuality, purpose, and power (what is the nature of reality?). When looking at the world situation, our first reaction is to ask about what, who, and how? What has happened? Who has gotten our civilization into this? How can it be helped or changed for the better? These questions are essential, and we encourage people to ask them. However, there is a more important question that is asked less often, which is: when is it? Which is to say: when are we? Or more basically: what time is it? It is time for a change. We live in a time between worlds; a time of almost unbearable intensity, potential, and change.
Two epochs represent a convergence of metahistorical trends marking major transformations and can thus be characterized as “time between worlds.”
The Greeks had a word (an archetype, really) for this kind of time, Kairos, which means in Homeric Greek, “a penetrable opening,” a chance opening in the flow of time, which allows for something truly new. It is a potent time of meaning and transformation. This is contrasted with Chronos, which is linear time, duration, and clock time. Understanding that we have stepped outside of “normal time” is important because the meaning of what transpires is reframed.
We are presenting CosmoErotic Humanism as an intellectual movement, not as a theory, and it is understood as part of a broader trajectory of intellectual currents that are coming into focus and climax during the current historical juncture. Da Vinci and his cohorts in Venice during the Renaissance stood on the brink of a time between worlds, and their synoptic and innovative humanism would be shepherded through a period of tremendous turmoil and transformation through Europe, until the modern revolutions began in earnest during the 17th Century.
We have named the movement CosmoErotic Humanism as the term captures the core of the emergent universe story, which is a vision of an Intimate Universe, what we often call a CosmoErotic Universe. CosmoErotic Humanism is a normative project of reconstructive philosophy, which serves both as a metatheoretical engine (articulating, organizing, and norming theories and metatheories) but also as an intermediary between the special languages of theory (sciences) and the everyday languages of the lifeworld (religions, cultural worldviews).
Core Metatheories
The highest order metatheories organized by CosmoErotic Humanism include:
- Integral Theory (Wilber)
- Unique Self Theory (Gafni)
- Conscious Evolution (Hubbard)
- Anthro-Ontology (Gafni, Stein)
- The Phenomenology of Eros (Gafni, Stein, Kincaid, Anwar)
- Metapsychology (Stein)
- The Homo Amor Hypothesis (Gafni, Stein, Hubbard, Laszlo, Bloom)
- Self-organizing System Theory (Laszlo)
The Great Library
The core work being done at The Center for Integral Wisdom involves writing and disseminating The Great Library — a collection of interrelated volumes constituting the intellectual foundation of CosmoErotic Humanism. Key works include The Universe: A Love Story, The Intimate Universe, CosmoErotic Humanism: Towards the New Human and the New Humanity: Homo Amor, and the twelve-volume Phenomenology of Eros.