Value Cracked Open

About this episode:

 What if the story of the Garden of Eden is not just an ancient myth, but a powerful “script of desire” that is still running our lives today?

In this dialogue, Dr. Marc Gafni and Dr. Zak Stein explore this radical idea, revealing how reality itself is a script of desire, and how your personal interpretation of the Eden story can expose your own unconscious programming.

To help you understand your own script, they first take us on a journey through the four major ways humanity has viewed desire—as negative, neutral, positive, or sacred—before introducing a new script, which recognizes Reality itself as “ErosDesire.”

This conversation is a call to action to crack open our own programming, discover which historical script we are unconsciously running, and clarify our unique desire in the love story of the universe.

Note on Source Material and Citation:

Parts of the material covered in this podcast are drawn from the following volumes published by the World Philosophy and Religion Press:

• Gafni, Marc. Codes of Desire: On the Nature of Reality: The Answer to Who, Where, and What. 2025.

• Gafni, Marc. Value Is a Feeling and Artificial Intelligence Doesn’t Feel: Responding to the Existential Risk of A.I. with a New Story of Value: Not the Death of Humanity but the Death of Our Humanity. 2025.

• Kincaid, Kristina, and Marc Gafni. Forthcoming. The Complete Phenomenology of Eros.

If you deploy any material from this episode, please cite directly using the following reference:

Temple, David J., Conversations with David J. Temple, World Philosophy and Religion Press, February 2026, Episode: “Value Cracked Open”

About the Authorial Voice of David J. Temple:

David J. Temple is a pseudonym created for enabling ongoing collaborative authorship between Dr. Marc Gafni, Dr. Zak Stein and Ken Wilber at the Center for World Philosophy and Religion, a leading international think tank whose mission is to address existential risk by articulating a shared universal Story of Value for global intimacy and global coordination. The Center focuses its work on a world philosophy, Cosmo-Erotic Humanism, as the ground for a global vision of value, economics, politics, and spiritual coherence.

Get the book: "First Principles and First Values: Forty-Two Propositions on CosmoErotic Humanism, the Meta-Crisis, and the World to Come" - https://www.amazon.com/First-Principles-Values-Propositions-CosmoErotic-ebook/dp/B0CWYDGFZY

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