Value and Anti-Value: The Silence That Thickens Into Divinity or Evil

About the podcast: These are unscripted, early David J. Temple conversations where Dr. Marc Gafni and Dr. Zak Stein are unfolding the inner workings of CosmoErotic Humanism in real time. Formal statements and propositions will be published in forthcoming volumes by the World Philosophy and Religion Press. Listen on your favorite podcast player About this episode: In this dialogue, Dr. Marc Gafni and Dr. Zak Stein enter a series of conversations on the Tree of Life, exploring value and anti-value. This first dialogue focuses on Keter, the crown, and on how silence can either deepen into divinity or thicken into evil. They examine how this happens and scenarios where silence arises from a loss of voice, where individuals become numb to suffering, manifesting anti-value. If you deploy any material from David J. Temple in this episode, please cite directly using the following reference: Temple, David J., Conversations with David J. Temple,World Philosophy and Religion Press, September 2026, Episode: 'Value and Anti-Value: The Silence That Thickens Into Divinity or Evil' Get the book: First Principles and First Valuesis the tip of the spear in the fight for a humane future. Establishing frameworks for a new school of thought called CosmoErotic Humanism, the book is built around forty-two propositions that provide new source code for the future of planetary culture. Like Europe in the early Renaissance, humanity is in a time between worlds, at a time between stories. First Principles and First Values contains blueprints for the bridge needed to cross from this world to the next. 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. The Center for World Philosophy and Religion is a reader-supported publication. Consider becoming a paid subscriber and get instant access to a7-day self-study coursewith Dr. Marc Gafni valued in $297, for only $9/month. Subscribe now 0:00 — Introduction 0:34 — Context Setting: Exploring Value and Anti-Value by Understanding Anti-Sefirot in the Tree of Life 2:07 — Where the Tree of Life Is Located: The 10 Sefirot Are 10 Divine Stories that Are Numbers 5:58 — Keter Is the Ultimate Silence of Presence 10:02 — The Value Within Keter: It Isn't just About Silence; It's About not Speaking 13:28 — About First Principles and First Values 14:15 — The Value Within Keter: It Isn't just About Silence; It's About not Speaking (continued) 15:16 — The Anti-Value of Silence Isn't The Silence of Fear, It's the Silence of Having Lost Voice 17:51 — Three Ways to Lose Your Voice: The Story You Live In, Early Trauma and the Digital Disruption of Speech 22:55 — There's An Anti-Value Evil in the Bureaucracy:I'm Participatory in the System Because I Don't See Any Way Out 25:45 — Evil Is Coming from the Parts of You that You Have Silenced Within 28:46 — A Certain Kind of Silence Thickens Into Divinity; Another, Into Evil 29:32 — About Who We Must Become End — Mentioned Sources End — Mentioned People Listen on your favorite podcast player Zak:David isn't here again, and he's in a kind of dark mood. He left us a note about evil. It's a topic he's brought up before, but this note was interesting. It was cryptic, in the lineage, something about the anti-Sefirot. Marc:Yes. It's funny, I looked at it, you sent me a copy of the note by text. It's always good to see his handwriting. And it's a big topic. So let's do this: apparently, if I understand, he wants us to spend some real time talking about this topic that we might call value and anti-value. That'll be our frame. His suggestion is to talk about it through the prism of the Solomon Lineage. We'll use that prism, and particularly through a particular prism within the Solomon Lineage: the Tree of Life. We're just going to get started today, but in the next two or three conversations, let's really focus on it. I've been thinking about this, obviously, for a long time. I remember when David first sent us a note about this a couple of years ago, we began this conversation then. We began it, I think, on the porch here, in this great state that we're in. So let's try to frame it in a broader sense for a second. Let's see if we can locate the Tree of Life, and then enter into its details. Marc:When we say the Tree of Life, we're talking about a particular structure within the Solomon Lineage. For anyone who hasn't caught David before: the Solomon Lineage's major document, in the thirteenth century, is theZohar,the Book of Radiance. TheZoharis the major influence on Luria, in a particular line of understanding: Lurianic Kabbalah. So theZoharis thirteenth century; Lurianic Kabbalah is approximately Renaissance time. What's so interesting—and we have talked about this before, Z—is the influence of the mystery schools of the Renaissance: • Particulary the Florentine Platonic Academy, which has in it Marsilio Ficino and Pico della Mirandola. • It was funded by Cosimo de' Medici. • We have talked about Plethon, as a big influence on Cosimo. And we hae also talked between us, that: • The teachers of Pico are Yohanan Alemanno and Elia Delmedigo. Many people have talked about this—when I say many people I mean, within a very small group, there's an awareness that this is the case. We mentioned before that Moshe Idel, in his bookKabbalah in Italy, traces some of these filaments. So the point is: this Tree of Life—the Solomon Lineage—appears in many places. Let's locate ourselves in theZohar, the Book of Radiance. The Book of Radiance shapes Luria; the Tree of Life is a primary structure that Luria developed extensively. And then this Tree of Life enters the Renaissance in many ways. I just want to locate it. Already in theZohar, in volume two, there's a passage, maybe in one of our conversations we'll actually read it, but it's pretty cryptic. It's heavy Aramaic, which doesn't make it cryptic; it just makes it Aramaic. The allusions aren't actually clear, but what he's doing is looking at this Tree of Life, which is: • 10 luminations. • 10sefirot. • 10 divine qualities. • 10sefirah—mispar, number; the wordmispar, number, like cipher in English. • 10sipurim— 10 stories. So: 10 numbers that are stories. Or 10 divine qualities. Usually it's translated in English as 10 attributes, which doesn't get you far. It's 10 divine stories that are numbers. It just occurs to me now, this way, the gap between the stemcellsand the humanities just disappears. Number and story are thought to be one—mathematics and story are thought to be one. So there are these 10 core story-numbers, essential logos structures of Reality. That's the Tree of Life. And the relationship between the 10, and the nature of each of the 10, is critical. So what we're going to do—I think this is what David's wanting us to do—is, you and I, way back in the day, looked at the 10. Zak:Yeah. Totally. Marc:Now we're going to go through each of these 10, following theZohar, which does this explicitly, although what theZoharmeans is actually completely unclear. Marc:We're going to start with the top of the Tree of Life, which is Keter, the crown. Our friend and colleague Art Green actually wrote the primary scholarly work on Keter, Princeton University Press. An irrelevant piece of information, I agree. Keter is the crown. If you read lineage sources carefully, Keter is often identified with silence. Shtika, silence. For example: when Akiva, who's the transition between the Temple and the oral law, the Temple and the study hall—is being killed by the Romans, in Tractate Menachot 29a, there's a description of Moses saying to God:he's the master of Torah,zu Torah, zu sekharah,and this is his reward. And God says:shtok—be silent—kach ala b'machshaba,so it ascends in My thought. When the Solomon Lineage mystics read it, they say:shtok, shtika, silence—the quality of Keter. Keter, that top quality, which is silence, that is the path to Me. So they read it, instead of the classical Talmudic reading, which is:shut the fuck up, don't ask questions, this is divine providence.No. Actually, divinity is saying that when you confront the void, this apparent evil, this master who's being tortured, there's actually a way through the void, which isshtika, which is silence. There's actually a way through the void, which is shtika, which is silence. And the person who reads it this way is Nachman. In Torah 64, he says:oh, no. There's a way through the void: silence. Sosilence is this silence of presence,where you have this experience—let's cross-fertilize traditions—ofshunyata. Of this living, breathing meaningfulness, even if you can't formulate it as theology, even if you can't formulate it as laws of ethics. I remember you describing to me, a couple of years ago—I'll pass it to you—we'll talk first on the positive side, a particularly beautiful meditative experience with our friend at the monastery in Vermont, with our friend Soryu. You were meditating there, and you had this very deep experience of this very deepshunyata.This very deep silence, where you're in the meaning field. In some sense, you're in it. That's classical Keter. It's what I callthe ultimate silence of presence. Keter is beyond meaning structures, and yet it's an ultimate meaning structure.It's the link between the world of manifestation and the ultimate world. But those two worlds are not unrelated, those worlds bleed into each other. They're actually one world. It's actually an omni-coherent Cosmos. So Keter would be the silence that discloses ultimate meaning and Value, even when I can't see how it plays, even when I can't put it into concepts. That's Keter. I actually just got a deeper realization of Keter in sharing this with you. I wasn't just sharing information. That's the nature of true study. I had, in a certain sense, missed that Nachman is citing this verse, this Talmudic text, and I didn't realize it until I was sharing it with you. I didn't get what he was doing until I said it out loud:this silence is ultimate Value presence, even in the face of brutality.Which is going to be very important in terms of the anti-value. Zak:That's the frame here: we're trying to see the anti-value, which means clarifying what's at stake. What's the actual value there? We have talked before about the common sense sacred axioms, and silence, moments of silence, which are one of the last remaining vestiges of reverence for that sacred silence, which is incontestably part of every tradition. The Keter comparison with theshunyatais a long-standing part of the dialogue between Buddhism and Hebrew mysticism. It's that point where they meet, which is utter silence: absence of division, distinction, membrane, boundary. That kind of thing. I remember Kurt Fischer, who was my teacher, a Piagetian, a psychologist, a psychoanalyst. He was talking about defense mechanisms of withdrawal, among other things. When someone raised their hand and said, 'But what about all the Buddhist monks who go away and never talk to anyone? Isn't that a good thing, to be withdrawn?' Kurt said, 'Maybe.' He said: 'We can't rule out the fact that you could get some weird ass stuff going on in monasteries, and people are avoiding life by doing all that stuff.' So he was seeing what we're going to point to with the anti-value: that hidden in the silence, there are… • Different kinds of silence. • Different motivations for not being around noise. • Different motivations for not making noise. And speech, in particular, as opposed to screams and guttural things, would be the way that a human breaks silence. It isn't just about silence; it's actually about not speaking. That's what's meant there. And then, of course, 'in the beginning was the word'. Before creation is this silence: presumably not even just noiselessness, but no speech, no order. So again, in the silence, there's either the thing before order, or there's actually disorder. One of the reasons people don't speak, if they're overwhelmed, is because they don't know what to say, as opposed to knowing very well what's going on, knowing exactly what to say, and not saying anything. As Akiva would obviously say: 'You guys are wrong'—it's obvious what needs to be said to the Romans torturing him, but he says nothing, notoriously. Whereas the silence that comes from confusion, delusion, overwhelm—those kinds of things—is still silent, still sitting there, still not clear how to read the reaction of silence. So yeah, it's a deep issue. One more thing: the hidden and revealed First Principle and First Value, which is deep within theFirst Principles and First Valuesbook. That's tied up in that dynamic of silence and speech, and revelation requiring some preamble of silence. First Principles and First Valuesis the tip of the spear in the fight for a humane future. Establishing frameworks for a new school of thought called CosmoErotic Humanism, the book is built around forty-two propositions that provide new source code for the future of planetary culture. Like Europe in the early Renaissance, humanity is in a time between worlds, at a time between stories.First Principles and First Valuescontains blueprints for the bridge needed to cross from this world to the next. Join us in articulating a new, shared vision that can act as a bridge to enable global coherence and coordination. Get the book Marc:Beautiful. Just one small thing, I don't want to go down this rabbit hole, though it's an important one—in the Moses story, where Moses sees Akiva being tortured by the Romans, the Talmud has the divine voice say to Moses: 'Be silent.' Akiva actually speaks. Akiva cries out this statement of meaning, of faith. He cries out: 'Hear, O Israel, the Lord our God, the Lord is One'—and dies as he saysechad, one. As he saysechad, the Talmud says, 'yatz'ta nishmato b'echad.'His soul left his body as he saidechad,as he said one. So there's this distinction in the Talmud between the one who's actually experiencing the suffering and the one who's watching the suffering. That distinction is, of course, deep and profound and heart-rending, but let's bracket that for a second. I just wanted to clarify that. Marc:Let's go deep here. When we talked about this earlier today, we just began this conversation, and it's so subtle and deep. So: silence. What is the anti-value of silence? Let's construct a couple of scenarios: • I'm a Hamas person, and I go and I massacre. Or I hear, I witness, a massacre, and I'm silenced. In other words, I hear about it, but I don't protest. I don't even think to protest, because I'm not actually screaming out in protest in the face of evil, because I have been silenced. And I've been silenced because my capacity to actually feel what's happening has been taken away from me. I have been down-regulated, downgraded as a human being. In this case, I've been downgraded. Or, • I'm a Christian crusader killing Muslims at a particular moment, outside Jerusalem. • I'm a Khmer Rouge soldier, involved in that slaughter. • I'm involved in the slaughter between Hutus and Tutsis. In other words, whenever there's a slaughter which people stand by and are silent in response to, they can be silent because they're afraid. That's true, let me bracket that for a second. That's a different kind—that's actually not the anti-value, that's fear. And that's tragic. But it's fear. There's a different kind of silence where I'm actually silenced. Zak:Yeah. Marc:I'm actually silent because there's no cry that's coming out. And I have lost voice. It's not that I have voice, but I'm afraid—I have voice, I'm speaking it to myself, but I'm in dead fear, so I make this human move to protect myself, which is very hard too, it's tragic, and the world needs heroes, but that's not what we're talking about. We're talking about—I'm going to give a couple of instances of it—where actually I have lost voice. I'm silent in this essential way. I have lost the essential quality and power of voice. Marc:There are at least three ways I can lose it. 1) One is what we just described, wherethe story I live in is so broken that I don't actually experience this person to be worthy of my voice, of my empathy. So I'm silenced. But I'm silenced in a way where I can literally see brutality in front of me and not be moved by it. 2) A second version of that would be when somehow—either early on, early trauma, early tragedy—evil comes through the woundis one of the doctrines, kind of, or one of the realizations of CosmoErotic Humanism. Somehow I have been wounded early, traumatized, and frozen in a way that I have lost access to my voice, and then I see suffering and I'm silent, not because I'm in an ethnocentric story, but because I'm silent. But then it goes even further. Just like in the ethnocentric story, I then become brutal. That silence turns into evil — that silence, of the crusader or of the Hamas person, turns into evil. It actually becomes anti-value. I have been so silenced it becomes anti-value, in the same way the orcs, in Tolkien'sLord of the Rings, were once elves. In Tolkien's imagery, they were of Elvine descent. Elvine descent was noble. Zak:They speak though. They yell at each other. Marc:No, no, they speak, but they're silent in the sense that… Zak:They don't protest the inhumanity. Marc:That's right, they have no voice. Zak:Exactly. Marc:Their speech is not speech. Zak:That's what I meant by grunt. They grunt and do things, but they don't have speech. And so, to bring this conversation to, let's say, the end ofExit the Silicon Maze, where you're talking aboutthe digital disruption of the ability to use speech—which isn't the digital disruption of the ability to make noises. 3)It's the removal of voice through the capture and distortion of language and relationship. This is a version of the death of humanity, which follows from being rendered silent. Even though we're talking, there's no voice. Marc:I think that's very, very, very important. I think that's a different stage, though. I think that's going to be closer to the anti-value understanding of Binah, the third sefirah. There's this deconstruction of all meaning structures, that in the end becomes part of the anti-value structure. I think that's absolutely true. The digital rendering is this gradual thing where you basically deconstruct all the pieces. Zak:For example, if you think about trying to say something on social media. It's like when you're in a dream and you're shouting, but there's no effect from the shout. This is how social media feels to most people. It's so much energy expended in giving voice, in a context where they've actually been removed from having a voice. This is different from being unable to understand reality. It's actually sometimes watching reality, seeing things, and then trying to say something, and not being allowed to. And so the incapacitation. This is why people are afraid of the loss of the public sphere, or the town square, where you could go and be a crier and break the silence with your voice. Marc:Right. Let's go slow for a second. I get the distinction. Totally received. When we're looking for anti-value, what we're saying is that it actually has become anti-value. There's a fabric in culture of anti-value, and a fabric in the personal of anti-value. Just like thesefirah: value plays out in the fabric ofcommunitas, or its collapse, and it plays out in the fabric of the personal. This notion of silence in culture, the silencing in culture is what you're describing, you could be describing the anti-value of Keter asthe creation of a space in which no sound can be made—because there's so much sound that no sound can be made. And so every scream becomes Edvard Munch's silent scream. There's a silencing that takes place because there's so much noise. Zak:Exactly. Marc:But then what that does is… I want to take it the next step to anti-value, we'll stay with just this first one, with Keter. Marc:When you read the transcript of the Hamas terrorist who calls home, this kid who calls home to his parents and says, 'Mom, mom, I just killed 10 Jews.' I have two threads that I look at on my phone. One is from Al Jazeera, which is essentially a Hamas propaganda outlet. But I go there to see, I want to see the faces on both sides. I see the faces of some of the worst Hamas, brutal terrorists, and their faces are angelic. Meaning, you see that they're distorted, but they don't look like they have horns. They look like these young men who were killed. What happened to them? They lost access to their own voice. They still need amphetamines, as you pointed out before, to jack themselves up in order to downregulate their empathy, but nonetheless, they become evil because their voice has been silenced. And there's also an anti-value evil which is a collective evil—and social media is one expression of it—but there's also the expression where I'm, kind of, in the bureaucracy. Let's say, the Vietnam War is happening. Scott Peck describes this in one of his early books, I think it wasPeople of the Lie, though it might have been in his famous book,The Road Less Traveled. He describes:the Vietnam War is happening, I'm working in the system in Washington, andI'm actually participatory in the system because I don't see any way out. In other words, that's the collective structure of social media, or of this maze-like bureaucracy where there's no voice. So if I become part of the evil. It's not just that I'm sad. Zak:Yeah. Totally. Hannah Arendt, her notion of the banal nature of most evil. It is just the meager, not even overwhelming, fear: just a kind of avoidance of major life disruption as a result of giving voice to something that's obviously bad. And sothe bureaucratic disabling of heroic speech, because there's no place for it. Marc:That then becomes silence.I just want to trace it—that then becomes evil. Zak:That then becomes evil. It gets absorbed into the actual evil act. Marc:So we have identified three dimensions of this: 1. I'm in a story that mediates my voice through that story, like an ethnocentric, narrow, fundamentalist story. Therefore I go silent, and I do evil. 2. Or I'm in a traumatized story, which destroys me. Evil comes through the wound that then numbs me to my own voice, and I become an instrument of evil. 3. Various forms of Molochian structures, collective structures, that are either digital-systemic or bureaucratic-systemic, in which the voice is destroyed, silenced.The vocal cords are ripped out, but then I don't go neutral.I participate in a bureaucracy of evil. So when Goldhagen writes his book at Harvard,Hitler's Willing Executioners,it's about that, what you were describing. They become Hitler's Willing Executioners. It's not that I go neutral. It's that I'm actually participatory as anti-value evil of the worst fucking kind. Not a minor kind. I'm participating in the fucking Nazi machine. It's not minor. Zak:No. And this has to have to do with the suppression of the voice of the inner part. I don't want to pass over the point you made about parts theory, in terms ofevil coming from the part of you that you have silenced.That part is like, hanging out in the basement, making plans that you're not paying attention to because you've silenced it. So, psychoanalytically: the dream, dream work—which is the transformation of the repressed thing into something you can see vaguely in a dream—the work of the dream is to try to give voice to this thing that you cannot hear, that will eventually become evil if you ignore it. The work of the dream is to try to give voice to this thing that you cannot hear, that will eventually become evil if you ignore it. It's trying to show you, in the dream: 'Hey, I'm here.' [Laughs] That's what the Gestalt therapist means by that practice,talk to the things in your dream. Even if they're weird things, talk to them, see what they say. Because you're trying to get the voices that are part of you, that you don't listen to, that are within you. That's the most obvious source of neurosis, and then that deepens into things that become quite bad. Marc:You're adding something very important here, which is:when I don't give voice to my split off parts, they hijack myself. Zak:Exactly. That's almost like, your classic summation of psychoanalytic theory. Marc:Yeah, it's crazy important. Zak:That's why people don't want to meditate and do other things. Because you just sit there in silence and you're going to start to hear all the things that are going on in your mind, that you're too busy to ignore. Marc:So what we're saying across these four, is that silence thickens into evil. Silence thickens into anti-value. That's what happens. Zak:Yes. And what we said at the outset was that: Another kind of silence thickens into divinity. Marc:That's right. Exactly. One kind of silence thickens, shtok—be silent—and that's the path.Kach—that's how—ala—you actually ascend into b'machshaba,into the Divine mind. Another kind of silence thickens into evil. Wow. Thank you, brother. Zak:Beautiful. Yeah. The Zohar, c. 13th century; various editions Idel, Moshe,Kabbalah in Italy, 1280–1510: A Survey, Yale University Press, 2011 Green, Arthur,Keter: The Crown of God in Early Jewish Mysticism, Princeton University Press, 1997 Nachman of Breslov,Likutei Moharan, Torah 64, Breslov Research Institute, 1808 Temple, J. David,First Principles and First Values: Forty-Two Propositions on CosmoErotic Humanism, the Meta-Crisis, and the World to Come, World Philosophy and Religion Press, 2024 The Talmud, various editions, c. 200–500 CE Tolkien, J. R. R.,The Lord of the Rings, George Allen & Unwin, 1954–1955 Temple, J. David,Exit the Silicon Maze, World Philosophy and Religion Press, Forthcoming Peck, M. Scott,People of the Lie: The Hope for Healing Human Evil, Simon and Schuster, 1983 Peck, M. Scott,The Road Less Traveled: A New Psychology of Love, Traditional Values, and Spiritual Growth, Simon and Schuster, 1978 Goldhagen, Daniel Jonah,Hitler's Willing Executioners: Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust, Alfred A. Knopf, 1996 Isaac Luria (1534-1572) Marsilio Ficino (1433-1499) Pico della Mirandola (1463-1494) Cosimo de' Medici (1389-1464) Plethon (c. 1355/1360-1452) Yohanan Alemanno (c. 1435-after 1504) Elia Delmedigo (c. 1458-c. 1493) Moshe Idel (1947-) Arthur Green (1941-) Rabbi Akiva (c. 50-c. 135) Nachman of Breslov (1772-1810) Soryu Forall Kurt Fischer (1943-2020) Jean Piaget (1896-1980) Moses J. R. R. Tolkien (1892-1973) Edvard Munch (1863-1944) Scott Peck (1936-2005) Hannah Arendt (1906-1975) Daniel Goldhagen (1959-) If you're enjoying these deep dive conversations with Dr. Marc Gafni and Dr. Zak Stein, then we have an epic opportunity for you to come closer and dive even deeper on your learning journey. Join us at theWho We Must Becomecommunity, the band of Outrageous Lovers reclaiming meaning, value and purpose at the center of culture, in response to this great moment of metacrisis. With daily practice, weekly study sessions and a plethora of new courses, come learn together and meet the ones who are already committed to this path towards personal and planetary transformation. Join Now