Beyond Maslow: A New Hierarchy of Needs – with Dr. Marc Gafni
New Parallax Academy course begins Sunday, March 9th 2025
An invitation:
Friends. It's wildly exciting to be getting together for Part 2 of the great response to the question of Who am I? Without responding to the question of Who am I? we can't even begin to breathe. We can't walk, we can't create. We can't create love. We can't create politics; we can't create economics. Nothing.
So, answering the question of Who am I? Who are you? Who are we? is the source code out of which everything emerges. It's the inescapable framework from which we generate all of reality. Now, of course, you can't answer Who am I? Who are we? without also answering Where am I? Where are we? And out of the where and who questions comes the what question: What should I do? What ought I do? What ought we do?
We are at a moment in time where all of the past and all of the future hang in the balance. We need to create the future. We need to be able to see around the corner and generate society. The old visions of society—closed or open societies—are breaking down from within. The natural movements of techno-totalitarian power are rising. And this multinational, trans-global oligarchy of power, driven by unimaginable profit for an unimaginably small number of people, is actually spreading through the planet as a kind of techno-feudalism emerges.
The only response to this must come from this bottom-up, self-organising sense of: No. No, that’s not who we are. No, that’s not who I am. No, that’s not the intention of the cosmos. And what ought we do? We ought to come together, reject that vision, and create a different world—a world that needs to be, that desperately wants to be born, and that will be born out of a history of a world of Eros, a world of love, a world of love evolving towards its full possibility. It will emerge out of a world of personhood, moving toward self-realisation. It will be a world in which human needs and human desires are dignified, in which the irreducible uniqueness of every human being is recognised, and in which we enact a Unique Self Symphony.
So, stay close for a second. What we’re doing is a series—every three months—a deep-dive into what we understand to be the most advanced study we have today on the planet today, which addresses the question of Who are you? We call it Homo Amor or Unique Self Theory, or The Four Selves, or Cosmorotic Humanism, or The Intimate Universe. It goes by multiple names, but essentially, it is a meta-theory of meta-theories that integrates the interior sciences across space and time with the exterior sciences across space and time, weaving them together into a new synergy, which is this is the new story of value, rooted in a shared grammar of value—the ground of civilisation, the ground of economics, of politics, relationships, sexing, creativity, kindness—the ground of everything.
What we are inviting you into is a revolution. A revolution grounded in vision and a vision grounded in the field of value. Paradoxically, today—on both the far right and the far left, whether in France, Germany, across the European Union, Asia, the United States, or Japan—the major creative alternatives are not rooted in the field of value. Isn't that wild?
The far right consists of committed ideologues—figures like Curtis Yarvin in the U.S., a wildly creative far-right thinker who says value is not real. On the other hand, a more World Economic Forum-aligned left thinker like Yuval Harari also argues that value is not real. Or take Sam Harris, alongside his friend Maria Popova, both creative thinkers and students of Derek Parfit from Oxford—moral realists, yet saying that value itself is not real, that we contrive it, that we create it. Meanwhile, various religious fundamentalists claim only my story of value is real—whether about Israel or any other subject. So, we have two fundamentalisms: a dogmatic left fundamentalism, a dogmatic right fundamentalism, and a dogmatic religious fundamentalism. All essentially claim that value is not real.
But meaning and value are real. There is a universal field of value in which we all participate, which lives in us, which we can recognise, and out of which we can create a shared society which is rooted in eternal objects or realities that are always evolving. Without this, we have no chance—no chance to create a world that works for everyone, a world that is beautiful and stunning.
So, we are going to come together. We are going to go crazy deep into texts, into thought structures, into feeling structures. But this is not just casual exploration—this is a revolutionary act filled with passion, purpose, direction, inquiry, and integrity.
This is a big invitation, not a small one. If you’re looking just to fill up your time with some easy-listening station, you’re in the wrong place. But if you are ready to step in and actually inhale and breathe in a different fragrance of what’s possible, if you are ready to contribute your stunningly unique voice in the most personal way, if you want to take your seat at the table of history, if you want to experience your transformation as being the transformation of the whole, then let’s do this. It will be a crazy honer, privilege and joy to have you there!
Dr. Marc Gafni