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.

Some concepts just seem too… intangible. How can you determine if you are achieving goals related to ideas like engagement, belonging, or transparency if you are not sure how to define—let alone measure them? Do you exclude them from your conversations because those concepts are just too hard—or seemingly impossible—to measure?

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.

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.

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.

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 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.

In this book, Dr Marc Gafni and Barbara Marx Hubbard present a new story of humanity, a new understanding of our intimate relationship to evolution, as well as our intimacies with ourselves and with our circle of beloveds.

This volume captures the transformative vision of a new humanity emerging through the evolution of love. Beginning with a memorial to Barbara Marx Hubbard, co-founder with Marc Gafni of Evolutionary Church, it honors her profound teaching that "I am evolution in person" and her pioneering work on conscious evolution. At its heart is a radical proposition: evolution itself is the evolution of intimacy. Marc Gafni and Barbara articulate a new story of Reality as a love story-not ordinary romantic love, but Outrageous Love capable of meeting our global crisis.

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.

We live in a time between worlds and a time between stories. The demand, obligation, and joy of this time is to cross over. This is what we have called The Crossing. At the core of the crossing is the evolutionary journey from Homo sapiens to Homo amor. This is not a fanciful conjecture but an authentic evolutionary potential. The root of the meta-crisis is not a crisis of resources; it is a crisis of imagination. We need to reimagine our identity and in doing so reimagine the future. We address anew the three great questions of life: Where am I, where are we? Who am I, who are we?

We live in a world drenched in shame. Shame is the core belief not that I did something wrong, but that I am wrong. It severs us from the inherent goodness of our desire, our body, our Eros. This split disconnects us from the beauty of our Unique Selves and fuels many of today's personal and cultural pathologies. Wilhelm Reich called it "the murder of Eros"-and it is not metaphorical, but civilizational.

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.