Introduction
We Must Become Wounded Healers, Not Wounded Haters
This essay is a formal statement from the Center for World Philosophy and Religion as part of our ongoing responsibility to respond appropriately to the decades long online smear campaign against Dr. Marc Gafni. It is issued by the Center to reaffirm the facts, reassert the record, and guide sincere seekers of truth and justice in navigating the broken ecology of internet culture.
We respond in particular to false characterizations, outright falsehoods, and distortions that followed Aubrey Marcus’s podcast with his wife Vylana and their partner Alana, in which Marc participated as their friend and teacher. The attack on Aubrey and on Vylana and Alana was vicious and brutal, a disclosure of the human capacity to distort and cruelly demonize. There was a predictable spill-over effect in the comment thread with a few posts and then several podcasts directed to Gafni.
There are good reasons not to respond to this kind of energy at all. For the most part, we have refrained from doing so. There is nothing new to say that has not been said dozens of times over the last twenty years. We have an authentic desire to honor and be protective of people’s private space and dignity. Every truth has its temple, and it is not the way of Outrageous Love—even when provoked—to meet attack with attack. We have no desire to demonize.
However, there are times when a line is crossed, and a full response becomes not only necessary but unavoidable. The attacks bypass conversation, decency, fact-checking, and the integrity of honest communication and reciprocal exchange, often weaponizing a false and distorted interpretation of one’s own story. They are characterized by self-infantilization, the denial of one’s own agency and power, and distortion of the facts either directly or by omission, both maliciously and unconsciously.
This essay serves both as a factual refutation of what are not only false but in fact absurd claims, and as a deeper cultural analysis of how the dynamics of cancel-culture emerge and persist. This material in reply is not an attack, although it has at times been characterized as such. It is an evidence-based response to very specific and public claims that were made about Dr. Gafni, addressed through documented correspondence and factual records, clearly refuting these claims.
For a super quick sense of Dr. Gafni and a refutation of the often recirculated claims, this link offers immediate clarity and factual correction.
Quick Access Link:
For those of you who know us, this kind of response is unnecessary. For the kind of readers who populate comment threads with ugly trolling, in which standards of discourse, fact-checking, and simple core decency are non-existent, you are either not reading this or it will have no salutary effect. We understand.
We’re Writing for the Future
So who are we writing for? We’re writing for the future. Really, to set the record straight for future generations, for whom the new Story of Value that we are telling at the Center might inspire them to be better and deeper beloveds, kinder and more caring parents and friends, and even visionaries and activists who stand for the most true, good, and beautiful vision of the world that we all know is possible.
Part of our commitment to creating a better world is not only to provide a brief refutation of absurd claims—meaning just taking care of just ourselves—but to try to take care of the larger fabric of the culture and consciousness in which we live, by looking at how this broader pattern of online demonization and vitriol plays out in the digital space that we all inhale every day.
In other words, we care not only about setting the record straight in this particular case, but we also see this as part of our larger responsibility: to evolve public culture. That means evolving the way we engage in discourse, how we have conversations, how we hold complexity, and how we seek truth—not through demonization or distortion, but through rigorous fact-checking and genuine conversation.
Life is filled with conflict. There is no love without conflict. There is no pleasure without pain. Our deepest conflict comes from engagement with people we love the most, and our deepest pain comes from those who have given us, and can potentially continue to give us, our deepest pleasure. Parents and children, beloveds, close friends, partners—these are the people we betray when we step out of the conversation. Indeed that is what betrayal means, to refuse to open to conversation, to refuse deep exchange. We no longer call our beloveds by name, they become “that man, that woman, those people.” The complex “I-thou”—the experience of intimate communion when we feel each other, recognize each other, and share our hearts—has been degraded to an “I-it,” as we nurse our insulted selves.
It is time to turn the insults into the wounds of love, to stop crying victimhood and abuse when that is not truly the case, and to focus our energy in standing for true victims of abuse.
Some of the leading women at the center are themselves leading clinical and activist voices in the healing of sexual abuse. Everything we stand for is about standing for the oppressed and against victimizers. And part of that commitment is also about standing against online abuse that is rooted in self-infantalization, demonization, and a host of other hidden motives disguised under the fig-leaf of ostensible victim advocacy.
To all of us: Let’s break the cycle, the never-ending loop. Let’s have a conversation, face-to-face or in a mediated context if that feels better, and transform. Let’s let go of the old narratives that you have constructed for whatever your set of reasons are and stand for goodness and transformation and possibility.
If those of us committed to building a better world can’t find a way to talk to each other, love each other, and let go of the old narratives and tell better love stories, then the world is lost.
“Evil comes in through the wound” is a core teaching of the new Story of Value, in CosmoErotic Humanism. We are wounded, all of us are wounded, but we must become wounded healers and not wounded haters.
With that being said, let’s dive in.
The Sacred Obligation to Set the Record Straight
The Broader Issue: The Vicious Weaponizing of Social Media
Although painful, the recent wave of online invective that Dr. Gafni and the Center encountered is not unexpected. All of the players know and support each other, though they often deny this. Most have been at it for many years— the key figures, quite literally, for decades.
Thus, as tragic as this kind of thing is, it is not unexpected. At some point, we lose the right to be surprised by this sort of thing.
What Dr. Gafni faces is a pattern well known to those living in public view.
Public leaders who dare to stand for something real often become targets of distortion, projection, and slander—especially in times of cultural breakdown.
As we will see below in examples from public figures from Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to Michelle Obama, from J.K. Rowling to Jimmy Kimmel, such attacks are sadly part of the cost of leadership in the digital age.
What is so often shocking is the viciousness of the attacks.
Public Figures Under Demonizing Fire: The New Normal of Online Abuse and Targeted Character Assassination
Let us illustrate this with a few recent examples of public attacks—directed not at obscure individuals, but at high-profile public figures who dared to speak, to care, or simply to be visible.
Take Jimmy Kimmel, one of the most recognized late-night hosts in America. Kimmel described the quality of hate to which he is subjected online as follows:
“The outpouring of venom was disgusting. Stupid too, but mostly disgusting… Some of these lunatics have the audacity to use the word Christian in their bios, but that didn’t stop them from wishing death on me, on my family, on my son. Some of them said they hope my son dies; they threatened my wife. There were hundreds of horrible, hateful, sometimes violent Twitter and Facebook posts… ”
— Jimmy Kimmel, in Vanity Fair, 2020
Or consider J.K. Rowling, the author of Harry Potter, who in response to the intense backlash following her public comments on gender and sex, offered a clear articulation of the personal toll of being demonized for expressing dissenting views. She acknowledged that she had remained silent in the face of fabricated tweets, threats of violence, doxxing, and the loss of a professional world she once cherished. Yet, she drew a firm line when it came to the silencing of others: “I’ve ignored fake tweets attributed to me and retweeted widely. I’ve ignored porn tweeted at children on a thread about their art. I’ve ignored death and rape threats. I’m not going to ignore this. When you lie about what I believe about mental health medication and when you misrepresent the views of a trans woman for whom I feel nothing but admiration and solidarity, you cross a line.” (J.K. Rowling on X, 2020)
Regardless of one’s position on the content of her views, her statement reflects a deeper concern—the troubling dynamic in which legitimate human conflict is met not with debate, but with dehumanization. It names a pattern that demands reflection: when instead of resolving conflict one resorts to public vilification, we must ask what kind of people we have become and what kind of world we are building.
Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has been the subject of some of the most vicious and sustained personal attacks in modern American politics, denounced with a barrage of extreme insults and character slurs.
He has been labeled everything from narcissistic, racist, anti-Semite, and lunatic to predator, hypocrite, sexual deviant, and gaslighter. Some have called him a very disturbed individual, a liar, a con man, a dangerous man, and an idiot. Others have simply dismissed him as pathological or hostile.
These characterizations—from family members, public officials, mainstream media, and online communities—represent some of the harshest and most sustained personal attacks directed at any modern political figure. They reflect a pattern of intense vilification that goes beyond policy critique to question Kennedy’s fundamental character and moral integrity.
RFK Jr. has repeatedly pointed out that the attacks against him are not isolated criticisms, but part of a coordinated effort to discredit his character—driven by political motives and a desire to silence his voice.
As he put it:
“There’s a way to censor people through targeted character assassination—you use vile accusations to marginalize them, and that is the kind of censorship I’m now dealing with.” (The Guardian, July 26, 2023)
And consider Michelle Obama, perhaps one of the most dignified public voices in modern politics. She has consistently refused to engage with the toxicity of comment threads, knowing what awaits her there.
“I don’t think I have ever once looked at a comment section… Period. At all, ever.”
— Michelle Obama, Vanity Fair
She offers this wisdom to others as well:
“A great way to not get pissed off by social media… is to make an effort to opt out… The strength and the power comes when you can harness that … you have an obligation not to spread hate and bitterness.”
— Michelle Obama, Vanity Fair
Her now-iconic phrase, “When they go low, we go high,” wasn’t a branding slogan—it was a survival strategy in the face of relentless, often dehumanizing attacks.
These are not isolated incidents. They are windows into a much deeper crisis—one where the digital public square has become a battleground of projection, distortion, and weaponized speech.
A few citations clarify the extent of the phenomenon.
“Social media has put us all in the middle of a Roman coliseum, and many in the audience want to see conflict and blood.”
— Jonathan Haidt, social psychologist
“I was possibly the first person whose global humiliation was driven by the Internet.” “Public humiliation as a blood sport has to stop. We need to return to a long-held value of compassion and empathy.”
— Monica Lewinsky“But the stuff which was really the most hurtful was just the mean-spirited cruelty, which is rampant and is really a part of our culture right now.”
— Brené Brown“Social media pushes people into being their most asshole-ish self. Roasting people, dunking on them, that’s how you get the likes, that’s how you get the retweets. It’s how you have ‘fun.’ It’s how you get to be part of the group. And the platforms want you to spend all your time on them, so they send you stuff to outrage you.”
— Trevor Noah
Extensive Scientific Research Confirms the Toxic Design of Online Discourse
In response to this rising hostility, there has been an explosion of scientific research examining what appears to be pathological aggression in the digital era—particularly the dynamics of cyberbullying, online harassment, and the collapse of integrity and accountability for context, fact, and complex truth in YouTube posts and comment threads.
Once there is an aggressive post that demonizes and attacks, especially when it feeds into a prior culture meme of an attack on a particular person, then the comment threads quickly go ugly.
This is one part of what psychologist John Suler famously called the online disinhibition effect that enables individuals to act out without fear of consequences, bypassing empathy and social restraint required in actual direct or mediated conversation between people who care about each other.
Similarly, a groundbreaking 2014 paper by Buckels, Trapnell, and Paulhus found that:
“Online trolls are prototypical everyday sadists. Both trolls and sadists feel sadistic glee at the distress of others. Sadists just want to have fun … and the Internet is their playground!”
— Buckels, E. E., et al. (2014)
This is just a small selection out of thousands of studies that all point to the same reality: the structure of the digital world—especially algorithm-driven comment spaces—amplifies cruelty, distorts truth, and makes projection and public attack not only easy, but socially contagious.
Where There Is Smoke, There Is Fire vs. Where There Is Smoke, There Is a Smoke Bomb
It is sometimes said, “Where there’s smoke, there’s fire.” But in digital culture, where there is smoke, there may well be a smoke bomb that is designed to obscure and inflame.
In Dr. Gafni’s case, a false meme was seeded in 2004 and then re-weaponized in 2011, 2015, and 2025. Each time, it was re-energized by a mix of old originators and new recruits, each with their own motives: professional fear, unintegrated hurt, or opportunism.
The most egregious false claim is that Dr. Gafni slept with a 14-year-old girl. The way the story is told it appears as though a 50-year Dr. Gafni was sexually engaged with a 14-year-old. The truth of the story, as validated by polygraph, is that it involved fully mutual waist-up necking, forty-five years ago, between a teenage Marc Gafni and a teenage girl. The woman who made this claim over the last decades, like the others involved, is closely associated with the group of disgruntled associates who have driven the smear campaigns in the past. She is now in her almost sixty. The oft quoted sentence that is attributed to Marc in response to this story, “She was 14 going on 35 and I never forced her” is, a gross and heinous distortion which he has disavows for decades.
As noted above, the claims circulating against Dr. Gafni are either blatantly false or grossly distorted beyond recognition. Still, it may be helpful to illuminate how such dynamics unfold—particularly in our contemporary cultural context.
We have addressed this phenomenon in multiple articles: how, in the age of social media and internet culture, it becomes remarkably easy to gather—through online posts—a group of the angry, the offended, and the disgruntled.
By the law of numbers, it is inevitable that in a digital context that promotes attack and negativity—and that reaches tens of thousands of people over multiple decades—such patterns will emerge.
- If one is teaching a body of work that requires profound engagement…
- If that work edges toward expansion and invites one to meet their shadow…
- If the practitioner, whether teacher or leader, has any kind of significant public presence…
It is to be expected that, over the span of decades, a group of disaffected individuals will form.
This is especially likely when the kind of people who come to do deep work are, by nature, self-selected both for their depth and goodness—but also, in some cases, for a degree of instability.
Add to this: when false memes are orchestrated by bad actors behind the scenes—and when these events play out entirely online, as happened with Dr. Gafni in 2006—those memes tend to persist.
Once such a meme spreads through social media threads and comment sections, a particular coalescence occurs. A group of disgruntled individuals—often socially connected, and often finding one another in chat threads and online posts—forms. These groups are frequently organized by original bad actors operating behind the scenes.
The memes are recycled and replayed by the same originating group, often joined by new participants motivated by confusion, hidden personal motivations both conscious and unconscious, old wounding, hurt that becomes inflated and coupled with a refusal to engage mediation or conversation or transformation, politics, power, primal jealousy, the desire for attention, professional fear, or misguided and superficial egoic self-righteousness—as occurred again in 2011 and 2015.
In a word: it is not difficult to crowdsource a witch hunt on the internet.
What matters is not how loudly something is repeated, but whether it is true. We call on all serious readers to look at the facts presented below.
Opportunistically Re-Circulated Attacks Plugging into the Turbocharged Aubrey Marcus Algorithm for Attention and Views
On May 14, 2025, a podcast episode featuring Aubrey Marcus, Vylana Marcus, and Alana Beale together with Dr. Marc Gafni was released. The conversation received widespread attention, generating deep resonance and, as anticipated, critique. Both support and critique are naturally valid responses to a podcast.
What is striking is the vile and vicious character of some of the chat threads, as well as an entire cottage industry of opportunistic podcasts—all with Aubrey’s name in the title—made about the aforementioned podcast. The level of vile opprobrium to which Aubrey and the two women, Vylana and Alana, were utterly, absurdly subjected is almost unimaginable.
The following is Aubrey Marcus’s comment in this regard, from a newsletter published multiple weeks after the podcast.
The only truly disappointing aspect of the dialogue that the podcast sparked, are the people who have decided to stop being in the conversation. The ones who have come to a conclusion of certainty, putting a label like “Spiritual Narcissist” in place of the living and breathing nuance of a real human being. I might as well make myself into an action figure, so people can really voodoo some needles into the caricatured effigy I have become.
This of course wouldn’t be enough for some, like the dozens of messages from people we received who are actively praying for some kind of judgment from God. For others who aren’t quite as enraged, perhaps if I checked myself into some kind of Narcissist’s Anonymous rehab center, they could eke out a condescending forgiveness……
You always have to double check that what you are projecting onto others isn’t hiding in your own shadow where you can’t see it. Everyone thinks they are the virtuous one when they are in a mob that is all shouting the same thing (Marcus, The Afterglow of Judgment Day, 2025).
The Strategy: Algorithmic Opportunism
Following this podcast with Aubrey, Vylana, and Alana — and the opportunistic creation of dozens of podcasts and over a hundred Substack posts vilifying Aubrey for no substantive reason, a familiar pattern of the internet—we also witnessed a parallel pattern. This was the recycling of long-discredited claims against Gafni by some of these podcasters, who had long demonized Gafni in the past. They did so either in the public space, or by affiliation and support of the demonizers, or by posts demonizing and accusing not in a manner designed to seek truth and wholeness, but to capitalize on the attention-seeking dynamics of the internet.
One particularly egregious example was a person who has attacked Gafni consistently for many years, claiming that he had plagiarized her work. The claim is not only false but absurd. The Center issued a statement in response to the claim, which can be found here.
It is important to understand the context in which these recycled claims emerge. These allegations are not new. There is no new substantive information that somehow urgently demands public attention at this time, or that is being brought forth by authentically concerned citizens raising the alarm. That is utter nonsense.
These claims have been raised many times over the course of decades, and they have been addressed by Dr. Gafni and the Center—clearly, transparently, and in depth—through dozens of detailed responses, essays, and publicly available videos. These resources remain accessible, and we encourage anyone sincerely seeking truth to review them directly.
What we are now seeing is an opportunistic effort to exploit what we might call an algorithmic moment.
The recent podcast has garnered widespread attention. This attention has generated an algorithmic surge online. Predictably, a handful of individuals are now attempting to ride that wave, using it as a vehicle to resurface already-answered accusations, thereby increasing traffic to their own platforms.
One tactic has been to cast the friendship between Dr. Gafni and Aubrey Marcus as exotic, or guru-like and hierarchical.
Aubrey has addressed this:
Finally as a last note, I’ve already addressed the historic controversy surrounding our lineage teacher Dr. Marc Gafni in a podcast that I did with his life partner Kristina Kincaid. I’ve read the published letters of analysis, and spoken to people who have known him for decades. I trust his goodness and his greatness. But more important than any of that, is what I feel in my own body after the hundreds of hours we have spent together with him and his partner. Whether that is grieving together for ten days after the death of my father, grinding out sets with a barbell, or raising cups of wine with a bellowing “CHAAAAAAA.” He’s my teacher but he’s not my guru. Marc has been unwaveringly loving and fair to each of us individually in this relationship process, seeking only to serve our individual highest sovereign will (Marcus, The Afterglow of Judgment Day, 2025).
In truth, Aubrey and Vylana are dear friends, partners, and collaborators of Marc and his partner, Dr. Kristina Kincaid. Alana is likewise a dear friend and also a dedicated student of Marc’s work. All of them have studied deeply with Marc within the Solomon lineage of sacred text and practice.
Not only do these posts intentionally seek to undermine deep friendship and partnership, they also display a contemptuous dismissiveness toward three individuals—Aubrey, Vylana, and Alana—who are making a profound and sincere offering to their communities, vulnerably and courageously sharing from within their own profound lived experience.
Their relationships are rooted in mutual respect, great love, constraint, growth and transformation, ever-deepening reciprocal learning, and deep integrity. Misrepresenting them to manufacture a narrative of power abuse is both inaccurate and disingenuous.
The deeper motivation behind these new posts is clear: to “plug in” to the current wave of visibility by dressing up old, disproven claims as though they are breaking news. They are not. They are not grounded in fact. Again, they have been addressed thoroughly, repeatedly, and with integrity.
That’s the context for the particular spate of particularly vicious internet claims that happened in the last several weeks.
Insane Comparisons to Charles Manson and the Sith Lord Palpatine (If It Weren’t So Sad, It’d Be Hilarious)
Obama was not wrong when she wrote, “they go low.” The related group of invective-filled posts against Marc Gafni included a couple of YouTube attacks, chat threads, and podcast posts. The same pattern of vile accusation that we outlined above played itself out in this regard.
Dr. Gafni was referred to as Palpatine, the Sith Lord who is the evil villain who fights the Jedi in Star Wars. Palpatine, remember, is the symbol of profound evil, responsible for the brutal torture and slaughter of hundreds of millions of beings.
In another jaw-dropping moment of public character assassination, Dr. Gafni was compared to Charles Manson—a cult leader and one of the most brutal and pathological murderers of the twentieth century. Gafni was also compared to the leaders of Scientology. And he was, as we addressed earlier in the example of Robert Kennedy, called a narcissist, sociopath, and cult leader, accused of personality disorder, and described as a dangerous man.
To say this is an outrageous attack would be trite. It is, however, worth noting that this kind of degraded phenomenon accurately mirrors the escalating tone of social media smear culture, where projection, aggression, and demonization replace any trace of truth or responsibility.
Self-Infantalizing Narrative:
These insane characterizations are not as random as they may seem. When the person in question is in any way compelling—particularly someone with the capacity to positively influence or transform students—it becomes easy, as is the case here, to project onto them magical or even occult powers. These projections are then used to absurdly inflate Gafni’s power to occult levels, while simultaneously infantilizing those who engage with him as powerless. This kind of exaggerated distortion and demonization of Gafni’s power—paired with a self-infantilizing narrative—defines the tone and content of these weaponized posts.
One recent claim said: “I spoke to him once, but he was using energetic magic tricks, occult powers, and I couldn’t hold my center.”
This was said by a wealthy, powerful, public individual with full agency. When we make claims like this, it is a way to side-step responsibility and cast oneself as helpless, while painting the others as all-powerful villains. It is, to borrow a metaphor, the Harry Potter–Voldemort move: invoking the language of mystical manipulation or dark magic in order to avoid one’s own accountability. .
Another person declared online: “Watch the video with Aubrey and Marc carefully—you’ll see he’s Palpatine.”
The tragic absurdity of this reveals a deeper cultural sickness.
The real danger is not Palpatine. It is polarization. It is the breakdown of shared reality. It is the refusal to talk. And it is driven not by truth-seeking, but by projection, shadow, and disowned hurt.
That is why we have invited every single actor in this story—multiple times, over years—to mediated conversation, in a safe and documented format.
Again, to date, all such invitations have been ignored—and thus refused.
Center personnel have consistently invited these persons—and all of the persons who have run this multi-decade smear campaign—to meet directly in a mediated context, clarify facts and motivations, have mutual opportunity to challenge old falsehoods or distortions that have been incessantly repeated, own shadow, and create healing and transformation. Of course, there are different sets of conscious and unconscious motivations behind that refusal. What they share is a refusal to engage in conversation that requires an open heart, accountability, and space for fact-checking and validation in a safe and fair context—one whose intention is not punitive, but restorative.
Instead of being in conversation, they preferred to make social media posts, comment on their posts’ threads, and take frivolous action whose expressed intent was to cancel Dr. Gafni and the dozens of us doing good work here at the Center.
Unraveling Our Public Culture: Social Media Posts and Comment Threads vs. Conversation
The viciousness of comment threads on the internet is no longer an isolated problem—it is a crisis of our public culture.
We return to the core theme with which we opened.
In the world before the digital age, when conflict arose, the best-case response was conversation. People would talk to each other—exchanging information, sharing emotion, and reaching for deeper understanding. This capacity to engage in real dialogue, to test the authenticity of counterclaims, to feel the presence and sincerity of the other—this is a core expression of what it means to be human.
Yes, sometimes those conversations required mediation. But for people of integrity conversation itself was non-negotiable. It demanded accountability—for our speech, for our tone, for the quality and tenor of our words.
But the internet—especially in its shadow forms—has eroded this basic human capacity. The attentiveness, integrity, and even love that once lived at the heart of conversation have been degraded, even destroyed. Social media comment threads have become infamous: black holes of cruelty, distortion, and dehumanization. The level of debasement found there is not just personal—it is systemic. It’s not about one person or one dynamic. It is about the collapse of the structures that hold conversation, mutual recognition, and cultural coherence together.
The Tragedy of Sitra Achra: Ending Conversation by Demonizing the Other
Dr. Marc Gafni has taught extensively on a profound concept from the lineage of Solomon known as Sitra Achra—literally, “the other side.” In CosmoErotic Humanism, we refer to this as anti-eros or anti-value. Our friend Aubrey calls it anti-you, which is an important phrase. It points to a breakdown in mutuality, when conversation is no longer possible because we demonize the other.
Sitra Achra means we’re not actually engaged in mutual conversation. We’re not actually looking at each other face-to-face. We’re not actually examining information. We’re not checking for a deeper, more embracing truth. We’re not searching to create the most good, true, and beautiful possibility. We have actually stopped the conversation.
This is what we are seeing now.
Three Litmus Tests to Discern Truth
To discern the integrity of an accusation, we should ask:
- Is there a refusal to engage in conversation? Is the attack characterized by intense polarization or does it embrace the capacity to hold complexity and contradiction until they become paradox.
- Is the same core narrative recycled over decades—without evolution, without openness, and without any sincere desire for healing, transformation, or resolution?
- Is the tone one of demonization—using metaphors of monsters, cults, and mass murder?
If all three are present, what is driving this is not the search for healing or justice, but something else. In that case, you have a pretty good sense that goodness, healing, and transformation are not driving the story.
“When They Go Low, We Go High” – Michelle Obama
As with Obama, our intention and desire is to go high. Our desire is to defend, not to attack. We have therefore responded here in only the most general terms—even as we refer the reader to the relevant material as it appears in multiple forums, including our WorldPhilosophyandReligion.com site, our new WhoIsMarcGafni Substack, our WhoIsMarcGafni.com website, and in the controversy section of the MarcGafni.com website.
Although one of the accusers claims to have created the “Who Is Marc Gafni?” website, it was in fact built and curated by Clint Fuhs and Kerstin Tuschik. The site contains a full archive of refutations, including essays, documents, and video responses. These document the people, motives, and fabrications behind the claims, and are readily available for the public. These materials remain accessible at whoismarcgafni.com.
Dr. Gafni has deployed legal and forensic resources to recover all available forms of past communication, should they be needed in the future to refute certain kinds of public misinformation.
We invite all who genuinely care about integrity, fairness, and the future of public discourse to read deeply and consider the full context. The record is available. The facts speak for themselves.
Forthcoming Volumes of the Center
Not coincidentally this is one of the key topics we’re actively working on right now at the Center. We’re in the midst of finalizing a new set of books on the nature of the internet, and one of the central issues we’re engaging in is exactly this: the collapse of conversation in common threads.
We’re exploring what we’ve called the Conversational Cosmos—the sacred space of shared meaning-making—and how that space has been distorted by the digital architecture of our time.
These reflections will appear in two forthcoming volumes by David J. Temple (a pseudonym created to enable ongoing collaborative authorship between Dr. Marc Gafni, Dr. Zak Stein, and Ken Wilber at the Center for World Philosophy and Religion).
- Reconstructing Value & Preserving Human Freedom in the Age of Artificial Intelligence
Exit the Silicon Maze – Volume 1 - Invisible Architects: Skinner, Pentland & the Hidden Blueprints for Technofeudalism
Exit the Silicon Maze – Volume
Leadership at the Center for World Philosophy and Religion
The Center for World Philosophy and Religion is an activist think tank and a global community of thought leaders, researchers, artists, philosophers, and activists.
The Center’s leadership, staff, and community are proud to be engaged, together with Dr. Marc Gafni, co-founder and co-president of the Center, in responding directly to human suffering.
We are particularly engaged in the writing of a Great Library of Value, which we hope and pray will make a crucial contribution to evolving the source code of culture and consciousness in response to what we refer to as the meta-crisis.
The Center is constituted at its core by dozens of men and women, all powerful adults, profoundly sensitive and committed, making up a truly wonderful community of activism, caring, and commitment.
The assumption made by the accusers that dozens of us have been somehow hoodwinked is absurd. We all work together on a daily basis and have had tens of thousands of interactions with Dr. Gafni over many, many years. We not only find him to be a truly great mind, but we also encounter him as one of the kindest, sensitive, caring, and good human beings that we have ever met. We do not only witness him on stages. We witness him constantly behind the scenes. His kindness, integrity, and willingness to engage in hard conversations, exchange feedback, and grow with us have been unfailing and unflagging.
The Center is a community in which the dignity of every individual is at the very center of our discourse, both within the think tank and in our work. Our model is a Unique Self Symphony, in which we all come together to support the articulation of a new Story of Value, rooted in First Principles and First Values—a shared universal grammar of value, what some might refer to as a world religion, as a context for our diversity.
Feedback, respect, and mutuality are the hallmarks of the Center. The core community has been working together for many years—some people for 7 or 8 years, others for 15 to 20 years, and some key leaders who have been engaged with Dr. Gafni since the early 2000s.
We will not allow falsehood to derail this work. Nor will we respond to every provocation found in broken internet spaces. But when necessary, we will meet distortion with documentation, slander with truth, and malice with clarity.
The Center for World Philosophy and Religion stands committed to evolving culture and articulating a new story of value. We do so in the face of tragedy, polarization, and slander. We stand with all those who walk the path of Outrageous Love, radical truth-telling, and sacred activism.
We bless those who attack us, even as we defend against falsehood. We bless those who curse, even as we protect what is good.
And we move on.
Center for World Philosophy and Religion
August 15, 2025