Mountain Philosophy

Come along with David Hinton on a series of walks through the wild beauty of Hunger Mountain, near his home in Vermont—excursions informed by the worldview he’s imbibed from his many years translating the classics of Chinese poetry and philosophy. His broad-ranging discussion offers insight on everything from the mountain landscape to the origins of consciousness and the Cosmos, from geology to Chinese landscape painting, from parenting to pictographic oracle-bone script, to a family chutney recipe.

Brought to you by Penguin. Lama Yeshe didn't see a car until he was 15-years-old. In his quiet village, he and other children ran in fields with yaks and mastiffs. The rhythm of life was anchored by the pastoral cycles. Food was carefully apportioned and eaten together, everyone was family. The...

Please note: This is a summary and analysis of the book and not the original book. In The Second Mountain, political commentator and author David Brooks explains how individuals and societies can transition from selfish individualism to a focus on community. He believes that to achieve solidarity, wholeness and true happiness, we must shift our character from the hyper-individualistic first mountain to the more relational second mountain.

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.

We live at a moment of global action paralysis, which is rooted in a global intimacy disorder. We have exiled intimacy to only human relationships and sexuality. But intimacy is the fabric of Reality itself. The exile of intimacy has left us feeling disconnected from each other and from the evolutionary impulse itself. This book is an invitation to reclaim intimacy as a core structure of Reality. We live in an Intimate Universe. The story of evolution is not random—it is driven by Evolutionary Eros. Reality is not a fact; it’s a Story, and it’s going somewhere—it has direction.

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.

This book is an homage to the deep love and Whole Mate relationship between Barbara Marx Hubbard and Marc Gafni, with all its depth, beauty and challenges. It tells the story of how they both deepened their intimacy through sometimes fierce contestation while modelling how to have evolutionary conversations as Homo amor. They were allured to each other in their shared desire to tell a new Story of Value—the new story that had the depth and power to activate the emergence of a new human and new humanity with the capacity to respond to existential risk.

In Evolutionary Church we not reclaiming a religion of love. We are for the first time in history claiming love as a religion. We are the One World Church, telling the new Universe Story through a new Gospel. The Gospel of Love.

In this book, we respond to that question by reclaiming the truth of our identity as Evolution in Person—not as a contrivance or social construction but rather rooted in the best integration of the great interior and exterior sciences. We are not separate selves, but Unique Selves—irreducibly unique expressions of the LoveIntelligence and LoveBeauty that is the initiating and animating Eros of Cosmos, living in us, as us, and through us. An essential part of reclaiming our larger identity is the question of gender identity.

The Path of Outrageous Love invites listeners to awaken to a ground-breaking vision of Reality, one where the very fabric of existence is Eros itself—a dynamic, living force of love. In this transformative work, Marc Gafni calls us to recognize that Reality is not merely a fact, but an Outrageous Love Story.

We’re in a time between worlds and a time between stories. We are in a postmodern era characterized by the deconstruction of intrinsic value and the deconstruction of the Story of Value. But story is not merely a human construct that is useful for cohering society (as the postmodern zeitgeist suggests). Story is an ontology of Cosmos. Story is a First Principle and First Value of Cosmos. The deepest readings of interior and exterior sciences now demonstrate that Reality is a Story.

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.

World Religion as a Context for Our Diversity is a collection of “oral essays” by Dr. Marc Gafni that offers a new “Story of Value” in response to the collapse of a shared global ethos. In many ways, we must reclaim religion as part of this story—not a return to traditional forms of religion but a shared Story of Value as a context for our diversity. At the core of world religion is a universal grammar of value. This grammar of value writes the chapters of a new Story of Value, not as mere conjecture or a constructed narrative, but as a story rooted in the value structure of Reality itself.

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.

In this time between worlds and time between stories, we cross over together. In response to the meta-crisis and the potential death of humanity or the death of our humanity, we must cross over from Homo sapiens to Homo amor. This audiobook is compiled from lightly edited transcriptions from The Crossing, an event originally initiated and taught by Dr. Gafni, and organized and facilitated by James Bampfield. The Crossing took place in Holland in 2024. The larger context for the Crossing was a series of more than thirty Wisdom School and Mystery School events led by Dr.

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.

The Infinity of Intimacy explores “Evolution: The Love Story of the Universe,” which is understood as the evolution of intimacy itself. One example of this evolution of intimacy is the movement from biological family to a deeper, “evolutionary intimacy” that includes but also transcends traditional forms of relationships. Marc Gafni discloses how we can include and transcend the bonds of biology into a greater “evolutionary family”—a space where irreducible Unique Selves recognize one another as part of a larger, cosmic symphony.

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.

In this critical time between worlds, technology is shaping the future of our lives, both as individual human beings and collectively as a species. Technology has brought great blessings in multiple vectors, and those benefits are regularly sung in the public sphere. However, the notion that technology is value-neutral is simply not true. All technology is encoded with value, pseudo-value—or tragically, with anti-value. So technology also threatens us with risks to our very existence on this planet.

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.