Story Is Real

Reality Is a Story of Value, Rooted in First Principles and First Values: Only a New Story of Value Can Respond to Existential and Catastrophic Risk (One Mountain, Many Paths: Oral Essays, Book 31)

By: Marc Gafni

Narrated by: Dr. Marc Gafni, Barbara Marx Hubbard, David Cicerchi

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. And Reality is not just an ordinary story—Reality is a love story. Eros itself is not merely the mechanics of Reality; it is the value of Reality. Eros is value and value is filled with Eros. Reality is animated by the music of ErosValue.

The failure to recognize ourselves as living within a Story of ErosValue has led to the meaning crisis that is the hallmark of our contemporary human experience. This vacuum of ErosValue has been filled in modernity and postmodernity by the pseudo-erotic story, the success story. The success story is defined by rivalrous conflict governed by win/lose metrics.
This success story in which we live today is one of the primary generator functions for the meta-crisis. As such it is entirely accurate to diagnose the meta-crisis as the failure to recognize that we live within a “Story of Value that is the very fabric of the Real.” It is only the articulation of a new Story of Value rooted in First Principles and First Values that has the ability to respond to the meta-crisis of existential and catastrophic risks we face today.

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