One Mountain Oral Essays

Existential Risk and the Evolution of Love offers a transformative philosophical vision for addressing the crises currently threatening humanity’s survival. At the core of this work is the concept of Existential Risk—a term encompassing the social, environmental, and technological challenges we face today. Marc Gafni proposes a bold response: the creation of a new Story of Value that sparks a Planetary Awakening in Love through the collective power of Unique Self Symphonies.

Reality is not merely a fact; Reality is a story. Reality is not an ordinary story; Reality is a love story. Reality is not an ordinary love story; Reality is an Evolutionary Love story. The plotline of the story is the Evolution of Love. This plotline follows a pattern. This pattern is not dialectical (two) but trialectical (three). The pattern is the Three Stations of Eros. The Three Stations of Eros is the core pattern of Reality. In Solomon lineage of Hebrew mysticism these Three Stations are called submission, separation and sweetening.

We stand at a time between worlds, a time between stories—poised between dystopia and utopia. How we respond will have consequences and reverberations for many generations. First Principles and First Values offers both the most compelling diagnosis and the most effective and indeed joyful response to the looming threat of existential and catastrophic risk.

In this time between worlds and time between stories, we stand poised between a potential dystopia and an unimaginably beautiful future. Only a new Story of Value as a context for our diversity can change the vector of history towards a possible utopia. Movies are often the channel through which the voice of culture discloses itself. Hidden in the public texts of culture is a movement towards a new human and a new humanity. Understanding the hidden text of She—woven into the fabric of our public stories—is a key part of this new Story of Value.

This audiobook is a call to reclaim value as real—because the future of the world depends on it. We live in a time between worlds and a time between stories, as the very existence of humanity is threatened by a meta-crisis. The meta-crisis is a series of interlocking social, political, educational, climate and technological crises, that we can all see and feel in our lives.

This audiobook explores the dangers of a broken sensemaking and information ecology in a time between worlds and time between stories. We are faced with two bad alternatives: to blindly dismiss all conspiracy theories or to blindly buy into all their claims. Both are wrong choices.

In this book, we point towards the ontologies of story and value. Story is real. And value is real. That is the reality consideration that we engage in this book. Along the way we engage Yuval Harari’s rejection of the ontology of both Story and Value. Harari is perhaps the most popular parrot of the postmodern zeitgeist at this moment in time. Harari’s key idea is that we need a new story around which open societies can cohere in order to respond to the meta crisis.

We live in a world of outrageous pain. Postmodernity—with its correct critique of pre-modernity's often fundamentalist and dogmatic stories about value—has deconstructed value and said value is not real. At the same time, regressive religious fundamentalism is on the rise all through the world. Fundamentalism, like post-modernism, says there is no universal Field of Value. Instead, it claims that value is mediated only through its particular prism of revelation. Outrageous pain is caused when we fail to recognize that we are all in a shared Field of Value.

Democracy is a monumental achievement in the evolution of consciousness. It is in this time between worlds and time between stories that evolutionary achievement is challenged to evolve once more—for today, democracy is broken in a number of key ways.

This book introduces a new grammar of value grounded in First Principles and First Values as the interior structure of the Universe. To live aligned with these principles is to become a post-tragic hero—not the old hero of conquest, but a new, tender, fierce lover of value. The hero is the one who stands for value and is willing to even die for value. The premodern hero is pre-tragic. For him, value is clear. There are no conflicts, there is only one version of value that is right. That version is sourced in direct revelation which takes place only within his native or chosen religion.