Audio Series Intro: The New Universe Story
The Greatest Story Ever Told: Audio series with Barbara Marx Hubbard & Marc Gafni
Dr. Marc Gafni:
The greatest story ever told … This is Marc Gafni, I’m here with Barbara Marx Hubbard and we are gathered around the campfire of culture in order to unpack the new universe story: The new vision of the patterns that connect… the inescapable framework, in which we live, which tells us about who we are… why we’re here… where we came from, and where we’re going…
There’s no human being who doesn’t live in a framework. And having the best framework, having the most accurate framework, most accurate worldview, the prism through which we see, is what lets us out of prison. It’s only a new worldview that changes the story… that changes reality.
There have been – we’re gonna kind of talk about it in rough meta terms – three great world views. The first, pre-modernity, the traditional period, added a particular worldview of the nature of reality, its origin of God, and man, and woman. And that pre-modern worldview had many gifts, all of the great religion, meditation, prayer, deep ethical insight, gathering of great community. Great wonder and goodness came to us from that pre-modern period, as well as rampant shadow, and oppression, and dehumanization of those who weren’t upper echelons of society, and so much of the world left out of the circle of the good, the true, and the beautiful.
And along came modernity. Modernity [inaudible 00:01:31] the important parts of the modern world. [inaudible 00:01:33] Because pre-modernity had [inaudible 00:01:42].
The modern era says, “Remember the cruelty.” And modernity emerges. At the center of modernity is the human being, the individual human being, who is a separate monad with irreversible dignity, and rights. And human rights become the new buzz word of modernity, and with that placing of the human being at the center, slavery gets abolished in every country in the world. Feminism rises, and the emergence of woman happens. The scientific method is unleashed. The population is exponentialized beyond imagination from a billion to seven billion. In a few short years technology takes off, and affords human dignity beyond imagination, and yet, modernity is filled with its own angst.
More people suffer in modernity than any other period because there’s more people on earth. You’ve got two, three billion people left out, that’s a lot of suffering. We lose a sense of our identity, of who we are. Are we just separate selves, we get lost in angst? We’re not sure what the narrative is. Many are still marginalized across the globe. And we lose our sense of connection to ultimate issues, to ultimate purpose, and ultimate eros. But modernity offers a new vision. Like pre-modernity did, just like the traditional period had a great and inspired vision, modernity had a great inspired vision of progress, and reason, and universal rights. Then along comes postmodernity, my friends.
Postmodernity that we were all raised on. That influenced all of us. That seeped into the academy. That came from the early existentialists, and got adopted by all the academic deconstructionists, and all of a sudden there was no narrative, and there was no truth. The post truth era was born in post modernism, which says no truth is better than any other truth, all truths are contextual, and there’s nothing that we really know, and there are no ultimate values. All interiors are not quite real, it picks up from modernity. So, loyalty and the deep sense of inspiration, and ultimate, ultimate ethics, all of those disappear.
Whatever was left of them in modernity gets desiccated by postmodernity. The only problem is, postmodernity forgot to do one thing. It didn’t give us an alternative vision. It didn’t give us a new story. It didn’t weave together the new strands of knowledge into a new great, inspired vision for humanity. That is to say evolution stalls. When evolution stalls it moves backwards. And so, what we’re doing in this set of podcasts is we are jump starting evolution together again, in telling this great story. That’s what we’re here for.
This is the greatest story ever told, and it’s desperately necessary, and it’s vitally necessary for us to actually take the next step. Stop meandering, and to stop regressing and to be once again inspired by a great vision of what’s possible. What could be a great vision of man, a great vision of woman, a great vision of spirit, a great vision of a universe which is filled with telos, with purpose and which is filled with eros, which is filled with aliveness. So welcome, and be with us for the greatest story ever told. Marc Gafni and Barbara Marx Hubbard. We are delighted to be with you here around the campfire of culture. Thank you for joining us.
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