388 — Towards the Post-Tragic Hero, Part 1
I cannot be welcome in the Universe unless I am a hero
Summary: To be a hero means something new — not the old version of hero, correctly problematized by postmodernity. Postmodernity is the great destruction of the hero; it identifies heroes with fundamentalist suicide bombers. Shervin, a real hero who stood up against the premodern version of the hero with his song Baraye, was just sentenced to several years in prison. We honor him by listening to this song.
Hero is a fundamental category of Reality: I am not I unless I am a hero. You cannot feel welcome in the Universe unless you are a hero. We need to see one another as heroes, for to love is to see with God’s eyes. Even as we need critique and feedback, they should never undermine your capacity to be a hero. Homo amor, the New Human and the New Humanity, is the post-tragic hero. Homo amor is the democratization of the hero: it is not the destiny of a select few, but of each of us (all). To become a hero is to cross to the other side; to cross to the other side is to begin experiencing yourself as a hero needed by Her Majesty Queen of the Universe to save the day.
To experience yourself as a hero is to experience your true nature — not being separate from the Whole, but being inseparable from the field of wholeness — the Field of Eros; participation in the larger whole, which makes it more whole. This is what you experience when you are aroused, because all desire is non-local: even if unconsciously, you experience the whole moving through you, pulsing in you, trembling in your body.
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You know and I know that you are a hero, that your life matters, that you are intended, LoveAdored, and needed by All-That-Is.
This is a very, very, very important week — in this time between worlds, in this time between stories. We are going to talk about the hero today (we are using the word hero to refer to both male and female hero, in the same way as we use the word poet). It’s one of our most important weeks. We’re going to talk about the hero this week and next week, and be the hero, and become the hero, because there is no way to respond to the meta-crisis without the emergence of a New Story of Value.
A New Story of Value answers three questions.
- Where? — Where am I?
- Who? — Who am I?
- What? — What ought to be done?
We call these the three great questions of CosmoErotic Humanism, the New Story of Value in response to the meta-crisis.
We are here to be heroes for Her Majesty, Queen of the Universe.
Do you remember the three musketeers? One for all, and all for one, and all for France. To be a hero for Her Majesty Queen of the Universe — Malchut, the Majesty of the Queen of the Universe. An old friend of mine likes to talk about being secret agents for Her Majesty, the Queen of the Universe. It’s beautiful. It’s beautiful.
To do that, we need to begin to understand what it means to be the hero — because to be the hero means something new. It’s not the old version of the hero. To be a hero for Her Majesty Queen of the Universe — King of the Universe, king, queen, hieros gamos, line and circle — we need to participate in royalty.
We are not only the hero for the sake of royalty — for the sake of the vision. We become the vision. We become the royalty. I actually become the queen, I become the king.
We want to talk about how to evolve the source code and elicit the new hero.
I cannot be welcome in the universe unless I am a hero.
It’s okay, and sometimes beautiful and necessary to critique each other. Sometimes we critique each other — but we can never critique each other in a way that undermines our ability to evoke the hero in you. I want you to get this distinction. It’s so precise and so beautiful.
There is a certain kind of critique that we can hold: You are giving me some important critique to help me be better.
But there is another critique that has a withering effect. It’s the silent assassin of the anti-hero. “There are no heroes. You’re not a hero. I’m not a hero. There is no Her Majesty. There is no Field of Eros.” And I critique you in a way which is withering — undermining — your capacity to be a hero. Sometimes friends do that to each other. Sometimes parents do that to their children. Sometimes children do it to their parents. Sometimes a teacher does it to students, or students do it to a teacher. All of that is off limits. None of that is okay.
Any critique has to be in the context of welcoming you — and I can only welcome you if I can see you, if I can love you madly.
To love is to see with God’s eyes.
To be a lover is to see with God’s eyes.
To see with God’s eyes is to see that my significant other — whoever that significant other is — as a hero. My beloved — whoever that beloved is in my circle of intimacy — is a hero. When someone sees me as a hero — not in a bypass way, not in a superficial way, no, no, actually: you are a hero — I am actually being seen with God’s eyes.
Very few people know how to see us as a hero.
Democratization of the hero
“I took a New Age seminar, and I studied Joseph Campbell, and I’m on the hero’s journey.” It’s gotten overused. It has stopped meaning anything.
Hero is the fundamental category of Reality itself. I am not I, unless I am a hero.
Does that make sense? There is no I without being a hero. Who I am, in the most fundamental way, is a hero. The emergence of the New Human and the New Humanity, this New Story of Value, which emerges in response to the meta-crisis — that’s Homo amor. Homo amor —
- the human being who incarnates uniquely the Eros of the universe,
- and who is giving unique gifts, and living a unique presence, which itself becomes a gift as an expression — an irreducibly unique expression — of the Field of ErosValue.
That’s a hero.
Homo amor is about the democratization of the hero. It used to be that there were only a few heroes in service of Her Majesty Queen of the Universe. A few 007s, private heroes, and some Walter Scott public heroes and some musketeers, mixture of public and private (the musketeers, in Dumas’ novel). But in order to respond to the meta-crisis, we have to do the only thing that ever responds and changes history — we have to tell a New Story of Value, in which each one of us is a hero, and we have different roles. We have different instruments to play in the Unique Self Symphony — and we are all heroes, and then we form together the Unique Self Symphony, which is the ultimate hero.
We have a name for the Unique Self Symphony. We have named the hero. We have named the hero David J Temple. There is a book by David J Temple. It’s a new book. David J Temple is a pseudo-anonymous name, and it’s the Unique Self Symphony itself, the hero.
I am only welcome in the universe if I am a hero.
I love feedback. Feedback is important. One of the things I’ve actually said in the Unique Self Symphony is that — and I function in many roles, but one of them is a teacher role — I want feedback always. But there is a distinction between two different kinds of feedback. I give feedback, and sometimes sharp feedback. And I always want to hold that distinction on my side as well, which is I always want to give feedback that makes you more of a hero. We recognize each other as heroes.
The glimmerings of the hero
Let me share with you how you can be more of a hero.
I cannot be welcome in the universe unless I experience Reality profoundly needing me. I am needed to save the day.
Sometimes, I am actually a secret agent. 007 never gets disclosed. 007 is always operating behind the scenes. Sometimes I am in the 007 mode. James Bond or Jane Bond — James’s sister, Jane Bond. She doesn’t just have to be James’s love interest. She can be Jane Bond. We like her.
And sometimes my job is to be the three musketeers. And sometimes my job is to be a public hero, it depends what part of the incarnation, and which incarnation. But it’s about being a hero.
Fundamentally, the people that love me know that I’m a hero. Now I’ve got to actually be that. That’s what it means to become Homo amor.
We’re going to be doing an event in a few weeks called The Crossing. I named it The Crossing after a hero named Ibrahim, Abraham. Abraham crosses over to the other side. He becomes the ultimate antecedent founder of Islam, Christianity, Hebrew wisdom. He moves to the east also. He is a hero because he crosses to the other side.
Let’s cross to the other side. The way I cross the other side is: I begin to experience myself as a hero. Can we hold that? It’s so crazy deep. Let’s go deep into the hero, but the beginning is: it is a re-visioning of self, but it’s not an intellectual, cognitive restructuring. It is about how I actually experience myself: I experience myself as a hero.
I want you to notice the reaction to that. Our first reaction to that — even if we love each other, and I’m home, and I hope you love me, and I love you, and we love each other — nonetheless, our first reaction to that is psychological. “Huh! I wish he could do some psychological work to deal with that grandiosity.” Otto Rank talks about this, one of the inner players in Freud’s inner circle. No! No! Wrong! Wrong! Wrong! And wrong again! Don’t reduce the grandness of the hero to a superficial, reductive materialist grandiosity.
The artist experiences his or herself as a hero: I’ve got to paint this canvas, I’ve got to write this verse — wherever the tapestry of my artistry might be and whatever form it might be. When I experience myself as an artist, I experience myself as a hero.
I experience the urgency of my creativity.
I experience that it’s ultimately valuable, that it matters, that I stand for it with everything that I have, that I lay down for it my heart, body, and soul — and I have this sense of this ecstatic urgency.
The artist is the hero. The hero is the foreshadowing of Homo amor. It’s one of the reasons why in modernity and late modernity, and then in postmodernity, when the human being thought that he and she were stepping out of the Field of Value, they continued to revere art — not just love art, revere art — because the artist is still the hero.
Or we revere the sports figures. And then we did Marvel Comics. We started with Superman with a bunch of kids from the lineage of Solomon, doing the Superman thing in Cleveland, Ohio, in the 30s (that was still modernity, but then even as postmodernity explodes in the mid-90s, it is still there). Ah! There is this glimmering of the hero.
See, when you step out of the Field of Value, you go to destroy the hero. That’s why postmodernity said there are no heroes. Postmodernity is the great destruction of the hero. Postmodernity problematized — in many ways correctly — the premodern and modern hero, and then said, there are no heroes. Heroism is a problem. It’s fundamentalists blowing themselves up as suicide bombers. Yes, yes, of course there is a problematized hero. Of course we need to move from the pre-tragic hero to the tragic, and recognize the potential tragic in the hero, but then we move to the post-tragic and we reclaim the hero.
That’s Homo amor.
That’s the democratization of the hero. And literally the first spiritual practice before any other spiritual practice, number one — it’s not two, it’s not three, it’s not four, it’s number one — the very first and primary spiritual practice is: I have to experience myself, accurately, as a hero.
I commit to being a hero. That’s The Crossing. That’s the crossing to the other side. I’m a hero. Not a grandiose hero, but a hero, a grand hero. And it’s only in the true grandness, which is the truest index of my real situation, that I begin to feel welcome in the universe.
Evolutionary Love Code
There is no way to be filled with joy unless you are a hero. Heroes are real.
Postmodernity problematized the hero. Postmodernity mocked the hero. Postmodernity said the hero is dangerous, let’s do away with the hero.
Postmodernity was not entirely wrong. Heroes were dying for the wrong things. Heroes were covering up their vulnerability, which was far greater than mere kryptonite.
We needed to complexify the hero. But now that we’ve complexified the hero, we have to reclaim the hero. In CosmoErotic Humanism, we call this the post-tragic hero.
Homo amor is the post-tragic hero.
Baraye — for the sake of the whole
Do you remember, everyone, when we talked about Shervin?
Shervin wrote a song called Baraye, a very, very beautiful song. He just got sentenced to several years in prison for that song.
It was in response to the terrible murder of a wonderful young woman, Mahsa Amini, in Iran, which set off this explosion of brutality, in which young boys and many young girls (meaning high-school age) were taken out, beaten, killed, abused for opposing the fundamentalist version of the hero, the premodern hero —
- who was the hero that had to deny their essential nature,
- who had to deny their participation in the Field of Value,
- who was the hero because they submitted to a larger field that wasn’t truly a larger field.
It was a larger field that contradicted the language of their body, and the language of the heart, and the language of their soul. But in submission to that, they were thought to be a hero. It’s a desecration of the hero.
And so, Shervin writes a song. We are going to play the original version of the song with his words. He is going to prison. I want to really just honor him, and be with him. And I want to find a way to actually make contact with him. He is a gorgeous man, and he is a hero. He is going to prison for standing against the old version of the hero. He actually incarnates the hero.
I want to just take a moment to honor the hero together, and just hear that song. And see the words. And feel it together.
He is going to jail for that song for several years. May he be able to leave jail alive, and whole, and healthy — which is not obvious.
We are here not in wisdo-tainment, not in entertainment. We are coming together as Unique Self Symphony. In order to bring down this next chapter in the Story of Value, we want to become the hero. We want to become the hero.
I want to invite — you want to invite, we want to invite together — to actually, in this moment — not later, not tomorrow, not in 20 minutes from now, but just literally now — to make the transition. And the transition is: I am a hero.
When I am aroused, I am the hero: Reality is making love
Imagine what that means, to actually be a hero — then everything changes, doesn’t it?
Everything changes — how I hold my anxiety, and how I hold my pain. Isn’t that true? This is The Crossing. The Crossing is right now. We are crossing to the other side. I am going to change the fundamental experience of who I am — not to a diluted grandiosity, but to an accurate grandeur, to knowing my true nature.
My true nature is I am not merely separate from the whole. The experience of being separate from the whole is an optical delusion of consciousness. Albert Einstein, he got that one right. I am actually inseparable from the Field. The Field of the Whole is seamless. Everything is connected to everything. There is no separate self. There is nothing that’s separate.
But that Field is not merely a field of awareness. It’s a Field of wholeness. Can you feel that? Read David Bohm’s later writings on Wholeness that Reality moves towards. One of the core qualities of Eros is the yearning for wholeness. The field is not merely a field of awareness. Awareness is but one predicate of the field, but the field is actually a field of wholeness. It’s a Field of Eros.
One of the four core qualities of Eros, its primary quality, is wholeness — nothing separate from anything. But it’s a quivering, trembling, infinite, tender wholeness of which I am an irreducibly unique, gorgeous expression.
- I am a part of the whole that makes the whole more whole.
- I am a whole emergent from the whole that makes the whole more whole.
- I am a whole who is part of the larger whole.
- I participate in a larger whole.
- In realizing my own irreducibly unique wholeness, the Field of the Whole becomes more whole.
That’s a hero. That’s Homo amor!
Baraye means for the sake of. Isn’t that gorgeous? For the sake of. I am a hero. I experience myself as the hero — and then my wholeness makes it all more whole.
The original lineage word for hero is gibbor. It has two meanings: it means hero and it also means arousal. It is a particular quality. It is the line quality of arousal that lives in all men and all women. This line quality of arousal — because when I am aroused, I am the hero.
It’s why lovemaking means arousal — whether you are kissing your partner’s shoulder, or just looking in their eyes across the room, or it’s a friend or… There are many ways to make love. We’ve exiled lovemaking to a very narrow field.
Reality is making love.
When I am making love, I am aroused — and when I am aroused, I am a hero. I actually get that what I am doing is ultimately significant. I could be making love as I paint, and as I write, and as I search for a document, as I organize a piece, as I am writing an outrageously beautiful note to the milkman. I am telling them I am going to be away for four days, don’t leave milk. But I add something to that note that makes it an Outrageous Love Letter — and the person feels recognized and seen. It is an Outrageous Love Letter.
The experience of being aroused: I am aroused. And when I am aroused, I am in the field.
See, there is no local arousal. There is no local desire. It doesn’t exist. All desire is non-local. I am participating in the Field of Desire. Even if it’s completely unconscious, I am experiencing the whole moving through me. And I experience the ultimate significance of my action, of my engagement.
Do you know why people kill each other and destroy each other — for the sake of passion, for the sake of relationships made and relationships broken?
Because they are disconnected and alienated from the field of the whole.
Because they don’t feel like they are heroes any place in their lives.
The only place where they feel a glimmering of the aliveness of being a hero is in that one relationship — and if you don’t relate to me in the way I want to relate to you forever, and then I feel that I’ve lost access to the Field and to being a hero, I am going to kill you to cover up the emptiness. I am going to explode murderously to murder your Eros because I’ve lost access to mine.
No, no, no, no, no. The word hero and the word arousal are the same because the hero is omniconsiderate for the sake of the whole. The whole lives in the hero. Baraye — for the sake of the whole.
We are going to play the song again, this time in English, played by Mansour, it’s a woman singing the song, Shervin’s song. Let’s just be in it.
We are in practice. We are in mad, holy practice around the world.
We are the hero. We are coming together. We are linking hands. Heroes for Her Majesty. Shervin is a hero for Her Majesty Queen of the Universe.
Cha! Baraye. Baraye means for, for the sake of. It changes everything. It is not a psychological strategy. It’s Dharma. Dharma means the nature of Reality, the best integration of First Principles and First Values.
You know and I know that you are a hero
We just did the Academy Awards in the United States, in the year 2024, in the month of March. And Ryan Gosling did a rendition of I’m Just Ken, which was the great Ken song in Barbie, which brought the house down at the Oscars. What a tragic moment! And let’s move it to post-tragic because the entire point of the song, I’m Just Ken, is: I am just Ken, I am not really a hero.
When you read the text of the song (which we did,
https://youtu.be/BCVRYLPfLQE?si=7sdX8DAa7pXr6DpB
we did a One Mountain reading the text of this song), you realize that Ken is actually looking for the hero. He looks to his arousal, which is dismissed. He looks to his desire to love, which is dismissed. And then he just falls back into I’m Just Ken, which is understood as a silly song.
Why did this bring the house down? It was of course a beautiful moment. It was done well, aesthetically, artistically, at least from a performance perspective. It was actually a tragic moment because everyone got together around the silliness of it all. I’m Just Ken. I’m Just Ken.
I’m not just Ken. I am a fucking hero — and Barbie is a hero and Ken is a hero.
The universe desperately needs my service.
I am the unique hero of Her Majesty Queen of the Universe.
I am one for all and all for one.
I feel the Whole pulsing in me, trembling in my body, I hear the voices of the trillions of unborn who look to our generation to be heroes.
That’s why we’re doing The Crossing in Europe. That’s why we’re doing the mystery school. That’s why there is a Center. That’s why there is a One Mountain — to be heroes. We are the heroes of the future.
And my friends — friends, Romans, countrymen — lend me your ears just for a moment. We have to get over the fear of our grandiosity in order to be grand. This is the secret. It’s the furtive secret that lurks deep within.
You know and I know that you are a hero. You know and I know that that’s actually your true nature.
You know and I know that your life matters insanely.
You know and I know that you were intended. You were intended. You didn’t just appear, you were intended by all that is. You are completely a radical surprise, and yet you were intended by All-That-Is.
You know and I know that you are the chosen one, that you are the one — that you are Paul Atreides, that you are Messiah, that you are the hero.
You know and I know that you are recognized by All-That-Is — recognized, seen. All of Reality is a stage and you are center stage. You are the hero.
You know and I know that you are madly LoveAdored. You’re not just loved. You’re LoveAdored by all that is.
You know and I know that only a series of explosions of desire could have brought you into existence — unique meetings of desire. You know and I know that you’re both contingent, radical surprise and an expression of the deepest, most stunning design. You are desired by All That Is.
And finally, you know and I know that you are needed by All-That-Is.
And what are you needed for?
You are needed to be your unique transformation. Your transformation, my transformation. When I speak to you, I’m speaking to me and to we. A mirror in front of me, speaking out loud to you. Your trajectory of transformation is heroic and unique — and from that place, you give your unique gift, that’s desperately needed by All-That-Is.
Sometimes you’ll do it as a secret agent of Her Majesty Queen of the Universe. You’re going to be her hero. Sometimes you’ll do it publicly, but sometimes you’ll do it as one of the three musketeers. But that’s who you are. It’s who I am. It’s who we are. We are a league of superheroes.
That’s who we are, but not fancifully, not as an interesting motivational talk. No. The true nature of who we are. The true nature of who we are.
(We Are The People)
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The Post-Tragic Hero — Part 1 | Dr. Marc Gafni #388 (youtube.com)
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