The Path Of The Wounded Hero - Becoming Homo Amor - with Dr. Marc Gafni
Course begins Sunday, September 28th, 2025
Unique Self 2.0 Year 2
Portal 1
Course Description: the paradox of the wound
At the heart of every great story, every myth, and every human life is the wound. The wound is not an accident or a detour—it is the very portal to depth, heroism, and love. In this groundbreaking course, Dr. Marc Gafni will guide us into the mystery of the wounded hero: the one who does not bypass pain or hide from heartbreak, but alchemizes it into wonder, joy, and service.
Together, we will explore:
The difference between trauma and heartbreak, and why heartbreak is one of the most profound openings to love.
How evil arises from the untransformed wound—and how we can transmute it.
The great archetypes and myths of the wounded hero, from Hagar, to Moses, and Jacob; The Fisher King, Lord of the Rings, and the Marvel universe.
The birth of Homo Amor
This course goes beyond psychotherapy and traditional religious models, and is grounded in principles of a philosophy known as Cosmoerotic Humanism. It offers a vision of the hero, whose wound is the gateway to love, purpose, and transformation.
Join us in this exploration of the wounded hero and the evolutionary possibility of becoming Homo Amor.
Our Schedule
3 Two-hour Zoom Classes/ 3 Digital Campfires
Begins Sunday, September 28th, 2025
Times: Sunday 11am PST (Los Angeles), 2pm EST (New York), 8pm CET (Paris)
Class 1: September 28• Evil comes in the wound
Class 2: October 5th• Trauma and Heartbreak
Class 3: October 12 • The Wounded hero
Campfires: Saturdays following the course (see below)
Price: €300€/150€ Tiers
The Path of the wounded Hero
“If we bypass the world of the wound, or enter it from the wrong angle, we get suicide, anxiety, depression—clinical and non-clinical. We get meanness. We get evil. Evil comes in the wound. And let me say it plainly: the world is filled with evil. That’s important to recognize. Of course, the world is also filled with good. I’m excited to be alive, grateful every day, moved and dazzled by the beauty of the world. And yet the world is filled with evil. At the very core, the essence of the metacrisis is that evil people with a great desire for leadership, for power and centrality, rise to the top as apex predators. The world, in some sense, is controlled by 10,000 evil people. That’s an exaggeration, but not inaccurate. And where does evil come from? Two sources: the pleasure of evil, and the untransformed wound. Evil comes in the wound.
Because we’re all wounded, we either become the wounded villain or the wounded hero—my demonic self or my heroic self, my unique self. At a certain point, we step into a particular path. Those points of divergence are deeply connected to wounding. How I engage my wound is who I am. The divergence between unique self and demon always occurs at the nexus point, at the synapse, in how I engage my wound. And when people rise to positions of extreme power, it’s often because of one of two things: either their wound festers and becomes perverse and evil, or they find pleasure in anti-value, in evil itself. Often those two come together.
We need to engage policy, yes. But we can only engage it through a powerful sense of being a hero. When we’re wounded, we step away from heroism—either into ordinariness because we feel we don’t deserve to be a hero, or into villainy because we cover the wound with pseudo-eros that becomes anti-eros. The alternative path is to become wounded heroes. Not just wounded healers—that’s more of a personal, psychoanalytic frame. We need something larger. The wounded hero engages the wound, transforms it into wonder. To be unique self, to be Homo Amore, the new human, is to realize ontologically: I am the universe, a love story in person. The amorous cosmos in person. And Homo Amore must be a wounded hero. The hero feels the whole. The hero sacrifices for the sake of the whole.”
It’s not just that I’m wounded. I have a unique wound. That’s not the same as my unique shadow. My shadow is my pathology, the way I act out my wound. My unique wound is the particular hurt I carry. For one person, it’s: I feel disrespected. For another: I’m not alluring. For another: I’m too much. Those are completely different wounds. And I can’t become my unique self, the hero of my life and of the whole, unless I engage that unique wound.”
Because we don’t have language for heartbreak, we translate it into trauma. We turn the tremor of heartbreak into the terror of trauma. That’s a mistake. Heartbreak is one of the most magnificent and important experiences of being alive. The essential act of divine creativity is when the Infinite Intimate—the name we use for God in Cosmoerotic Humanism—initiates creation. And divinity can only create through being wounded. Reality is not created by a heroic God alone, but by a God who contracts, steps back, and in that contraction is wounded. Creation emerges from the space of divine wounding.”
We’re too glib with language. People casually say, ‘I am God,’ but if we don’t tremble in ecstasy and terror when we say ‘the wounded God,’ we don’t know what we’re saying. What does it mean, in my body, to be a wounded hero called to heal the wounded God? In the Fisher King myth, Parsifal is supposed to ask: do you serve the Grail? He fails. Can the Fisher King become the wounded hero who becomes the wounded healer of the wounded God? That’s the depth of the myth.”
All wounds are insults we fail to transform into wounds of love. Think of a small misunderstanding—someone feels unseen or disrespected. That exchange can devolve into armor, cycles of anger, demonization. Or, if shared vulnerably—‘this is how I felt’—it can become alchemy. The paradox: after the wound is lived and exchanged, we love each other more than before. The wound becomes the opening to deeper trust. The great loves of our life are not those who never wound us, but those with whom we continually alchemize the wound into love. That’s where trust is born. We trust we can walk through the wound together. That’s where the body relaxes, the heart opens. That’s the beginning of the heroic path.”
- Dr. Marc Gafni
COURSE CONTENT
Class I: Evil comes in the wound
Lecture and Q&A: Sunday, September 28, 11 am PST (Los Angeles), 2 pm EST (New York), 8 pm CET (Paris)
Digital Campfire: Saturday, October 4, 11 am PST (Los Angeles), 2 pm EST (New York), 8 pm CET (Paris)
Description: In this opening session, we explore how wounds, left unattended, devolve into despair, breakdown, and eventual evil — and how the same wounds, engaged properly, can become the birthplace of heroism, love, and transformation.
Key Themes:
The origin of evil in wounding
Understanding the wound
The demonic self vs the daimonic self
Practices:
Inquiry into the nature of evil and the wound
Campfire discussions
Class II: Trauma and Heartbreak
Lecture and Q&A: Sunday, October 5, 11 am PST (Los Angeles), 2 pm EST (New York), 8 pm CET (Paris)
Digital Campfire: Saturday, October 11, 11 am PST (Los Angeles), 2 pm EST (New York), 8 pm CET (Paris)
Description:
We often confuse trauma with the wound. Trauma contracts us, freezes us, and poisons our experience. The wound — or heartbreak — when fully felt, opens us to depth, tenderness, and transformation. In this session, we reclaim heartbreak as one of the most profound and necessary experiences of being alive, and learn to distinguish it from trauma.
Key Themes:
Trauma and Heartbreak
Exploring limitations of the psychological model
Alchemizing the wound
Practices:
Inquiry into Trauma and Heartbreak
Inquiry into the original wound
Campfire discussions
Class III – The wounded hero
Lecture and Q&A: Sunday, October 12, 11 am PST (Los Angeles), 2 pm EST (New York), 8 pm CET (Paris)
Digital Campfire: Saturday, October 18, 11 am PST (Los Angeles), 2 pm EST (New York), 8 pm CET (Paris)
Description: To be Homo Amor is to embrace the wound as the very source of our unique gift, our unique self, and our capacity for outrageous love and heroicism.
Key Themes:
The hero is the early adopter of Homo Amor
Why we need not just the wounded healer, but the wounded hero
The heroic path: alchemizing the wound into trust, service, and love
Practices:
Inquiry into the highest possibility of our unique wound and unique heroism
Inquiry into the major myths of the wounded hero
Campfire discussions
About your Teacher
Dr. Marc Gafni
Dr. Marc Gafni is a visionary thinker, social activist, and passionate philosopher. He is known for his ‘source code teachings,’ including Unique Self theory, the Five Selves, the Amorous Cosmos, A Politics of Evolutionary Love, A Return to Eros and Digital Intimacy. He is author of over twenty-five books, including 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 on the cutting edge of philosophy and spirit in the West, with the aim of participating in the articulation of what Dr. Gafni, together with Dr. Zak Stein 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.’ This shared story rooted in First Principles and First Values 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.