We live in an Amorous Cosmos and the Amorous Cosmos lives in us. It’s a Cosmos filled with desire and allurement.

This book is an homage to the deep love and Whole Mate relationship between Barbara Marx Hubbard and Marc Gafni, with all its depth, beauty and challenges. It tells the story of how they both deepened their intimacy through sometimes fierce contestation while modelling how to have evolutionary conversations as Homo amor. They were allured to each other in their shared desire to tell a new Story of Value—the new story that had the depth and power to activate the emergence of a new human and new humanity with the capacity to respond to existential risk.

This shared desire gave rise to co-evolving many new emergent ideas as well as fiercely challenging and clarifying other issues like the potential—and danger—of transhumanism, which could become the seedbed of totalitarianism if these were divorced from a shared Story of inherent Value, rooted in First Principles and First Values.

In this volume we celebrate Barbara both on her birthday and on her day of passing into the next world. We are reminded that every death is a night between two days, the darkness before the next birth. We are reminded that the continuity of consciousness is real.

Experiencing the reality of death presses us into life: to be fully here, to be fully committed, to be the change, to be living in the world that is already perfected. We keep coming back to the core truth of the realization: Reality is an Outrageous Love Story. Your story, each of our stories, is a unique chapter and verse in the larger Universe Story.

This knowing is the ultimate dignity of every human life.