Course: Unique Self 2.0 – Portal 2: Beyond Maslow: A New Hierarchy of Needs
(with DR. Marc Gafni)
Begins Sunday, March 9th 2025
Unique self 2.0
This course serves as the second step in the larger long-term journey into the evolving landscape of your unique self, offering practices, insights, and community support to help you live your unique self in a deeper, more connected way.
This is a multi-part, multi-year transformational journey, which you can join at any point. The Unique Self framework is designed to guide participants through personal evolution while contributing to the greater whole. Since the publication of Your Unique Self in 2011, the teachings have evolved significantly, reflecting the dynamic interplay between personal transformation and the unfolding of reality itself.
Each portal, or three-week course, dives deeply into a key aspect of your unique self story, offering practical insights and profound practices that help you live your unique self.
Our Schedule
3 Two-hour Zoom Classes/ 3 Digital Campfires
Begins Sunday, March 9th 2025
Times: Sunday 11am PST (Los Angeles), 2pm EST (New York), 8pm CET (Paris)
Class 1: March 9•
Class 2: March 16•
Class 3: March 23 •
Campfires: Saturdays following the course (see below)
Price: €260/200€/100€ Tiers
*Tickets include a free month membership to the online community “One Mountain/Many Paths”
Course Description:
Portal 2: Beyond Maslow: A New Hierarchy of Needs
What is the relationship between need and desire? What do I truly need? What do I truly desire? Are they the same, or are they different? What is the relationship between love and need? What is the relationship between love and desire?
Each of these questions is deeply personal and intimate, calling us to explore our own inner landscapes. At the same time, they are relational questions, living between us and our beloveds. They are economic questions, shaping the principles of micro and macro economies. They are spiritual questions about the core nature of enlightenment. And they are collective political questions, linked to the essential political order of reality itself.
Over the course of three weeks, we will explore together the new hierarchy of needs: the eight core Eros needs, or what we call the eight core unique self needs.
This new model responds directly to the widespread presentations of Maslow's hierarchy, which has become central to developmental and organizational teachings in the Western world. Together, we will delve into the depths of our desires—facing not only our longings but also our fears and aversions. We will differentiate between surface desires and clarified desires, dancing between need and desire, and ultimately arrive at a vision that integrates the two.
This journey is the great human path of joy and transformation. It offers unimaginable pleasure, depth, and joy, as well as the full spectrum of agony and ecstasy—not just for every individual and every community, but also for God, the infinite and intimate herself.
COURSE CONTENT
Class I: The New Hierarchy of Needs
Lecture and Q&A: Sunday, March 9, 11 am PST (Los Angeles), 2 pm EST (New York), 8 pm CET (Paris)
Digital Campfire: Saturday, March 15, 11 am PST (Los Angeles), 2 pm EST (New York), 8 pm CET (Paris)
Description:
We begin with an introduction to the 8 core Unique Self needs. This session will show how the Unique Self framework redefines personal growth and fulfilment, moving beyond Maslow’s hierarchy of needs.
Key Themes:
The Eight Core Unique Self Needs as a new developmental model.
The interplay of need and desire in personal and relational contexts.
How this model informs spiritual, political, and economic principles.
Practices:
Reflective exercises to identify your deepest needs and desires.
Mapping the Eight Core Needs in your life.
Class II: Love, Need, and Desire
Lecture and Q&A: Sunday, March 16, 11 am PST (Los Angeles), 2 pm EST (New York), 8 pm CET (Paris)
Digital Campfire: Saturday, March 22, 11 am PST (Los Angeles), 2 pm EST (New York), 8 pm CET (Paris)
Description:
This session explores the intimate connection between love, need, and desire. We’ll distinguish surface desires from clarified desires and examine how fear, revulsion, and longing live within the dance of these forces.
Key Themes:
The relationship of love to need and desire.
How clarified desire transforms relationships and intimacy.
Exploring the agony and ecstasy of human eros and desire
Practices:
Practice clarification of needs and desires.
Partner exercises to deepen this process.
Class III – Joy, Transformation, and the Economics of Eros
Lecture and Q&A: Sunday, March 23, 11 am PST (Los Angeles), 2 pm EST (New York), 8 pm CET (Paris)
Digital Campfire: Saturday, March 29, 11 am PST (Los Angeles), 2 pm EST (New York), 8 pm CET (Paris)
Description:
This session emphasizes the personal and collective dimensions of transformation, exploring how clarified desire fuels unimaginable joy, creativity, and the building of economies of Eros.
Key Themes:
How can clarified needs and desires lead to personal and collective transformation?
The economic, political, and spiritual dimensions of need and desire.
How do clarified desires shape a life of joy, depth, and purpose?
Practices:
Crafting your personal hierarchy of clarified needs.
Group dialogue: Building economies of Eros in community
About your Teacher
Dr. Marc Gafni
Dr. Marc is a visionary thinker, social activist, and passionate philosopher. He is known for his “source code teachings,” including Unique Self theory, Non-Dual Humanism, Evolving Perennialism, the Intimate Universe, and Digital Intimacy. He is author of over twenty-five books, including A Return to Eros and the award-winning Your Unique Self: The Radical Path to Personal Enlightenment. He holds a doctorate in philosophy from Oxford University, as well as Orthodox rabbinic ordination. He teaches both publically and in long term mentorship’s with leading students, with the aim of participating in the articulation of what Dr. Gafni together with Dr. Zak Stein, Barbara Marx Hubbard, Ken Wilber and colleagues are calling CosmoErotic Humanism. At the core of CosmoErotic Humanism is what Dr. Gafni and Dr. Stein are calling ‘First Principles and First Values,’ Anthro-Ontology and a “Universal Grammar of Value” which can then serve as the matrix for a global ethos for a global civilization. Dr. Gafni is the Co-Founder and Co-President of the Office for the Future, the Center for World Religion and Philosophy and the Foundation for Conscious Evolution. At the core of their shared missions is the articulation and delivery into culture of a Great Library - in multiple forms - which participates in evolving the source code of consciousness and culture in response to the Meta Crisis.