Pre‑Tragic, Tragic, and Post‑Tragic
Transforming Wound into Wonder
w. Dr Marc Gafni
Course begins Sunday, Sunday, January 25, 2026
The Wounded Angel - Hugo Simberg
Unique Self 2.0 Year 2
Portal 3
Course Orientation
The core inquiry of this three-week immersion is the nature of wounding and the precise stations of consciousness through which wound, desire, power, intimacy, and love unfold. Rather than approaching wounding as pathology to be fixed or bypassed, the course offers a living, embodied map for moving through wound into post-tragic clarity, eros, and value. The emphasis is not on resolving experience, but on understanding how it reorganizes.
At the heart of the course is a single orienting framework:
Pre-Tragic → Tragic → Post-Tragic
These are not developmental stages or psychological levels. They are stations—existential positions we move through repeatedly across every domain of life: love, sexing, power, God, desire, suffering, creativity, ethics, and meaning. Each station has its own quality of clarity, confusion, and integration, and each becomes distorted when mistaken for an endpoint.
Learning to recognize these stations—and to move consciously between them—is described in the teaching as a pivot that changes everything.
The course includes three recorded lectures with Q&A and three Digital Campfire sessions. Practices and inquiries are introduced throughout the course to support engagement with the material. The lectures present the main ideas, and the campfires offer a space to reflect on them and hear from others as the course unfolds.
Time and Location
Start date: Sunday, January 25
Time: 8:00pm CET (Paris) · 2:00pm EST (New York) · 11:00am PST (Los Angeles)
Price: €300 / €100 Tiers
3 Weekly Live Zoom Classes (2 hours each)
3 Weekly Digital Campfires (1.5 hours each) - see dates below
The Three Stations
“There are three stations that everything moves through. Not stages of development, not levels of consciousness, but stations—existential positions that we pass through again and again in love, in power, in desire, in intimacy, in our relationship to God, to suffering, to meaning itself.
The first station is what I call pre-tragic. Pre-tragic is clarity. It’s the sense that life is obvious. We know what we’re doing. We’re all the way in. We fall in love and there’s no question. Desire flows cleanly. Power feels natural. Intimacy is simple. There’s a kind of innocence here, and it’s real—but it’s fragile.
Then clarity breaks. And that’s the second station: tragic. Now it’s not clear anymore. Desire becomes conflicted. Power becomes distorted. Intimacy becomes struggle. We don’t know what to trust. There are contradictions, competing signals, confusion. This is the station of wounding, shadow, disillusionment, and suffering. And everyone enters it. The tragedy is not entering the tragic station—the tragedy is getting stuck there, or trying to bypass it.
The third station is post-tragic. And this is everything. Post-tragic is not a return to innocence. It’s a second clarity—more subtle, more spacious, more ethical, more erotic. It can hold uncertainty without collapsing. It includes ambiguity, paradox, and depth. It’s where desire becomes trustworthy again, where power aligns with the good, where intimacy matures, where eros is restored.
This isn’t a cognitive map. You don’t just understand it. You live it. It’s embodied in your body, heart, mind, and awareness. When you can recognize these stations and move between them, you stop being dragged by life and you begin to ride it. You wake up. You show up. And when you come to the end of your life, you can say: we did this well. We were alive. We were awake.”
- Dr. Marc Gafni
COURSE CONTENT
Class 1 – Pre-Tragic: Innocence, Clarity, and the Three Stations
Lecture and Q&A: Sunday, January 25, 11 am PST (Los Angeles), 2 pm EST (New York), 8 pm CET (Paris)
Digital Campfire: Saturday, January 31, 11 am PST (Los Angeles), 2 pm EST (New York), 8 pm CET (Paris)
Focus: Understanding pre-tragic innocence and clarity, and learning to recognize pre-tragic, tragic, and post-tragic as living stations rather than abstract concepts.
Key inquiries:
Where do I locate myself across these stations in love, meaning, and desire?
Where do I experience innocence, immediacy, or unexamined clarity?
Where do I assume things are settled or obvious before rupture?
Practices:
Reflective journaling: mapping where I experience pre-tragic innocence and clarity in love, meaning, and desire
Guided inquiry: where do I sense clarity, immediacy, or unexamined innocence in my body and lived experience?
Campfire sharing: naming where life has felt obvious, settled, or unquestioned before rupture
Class 2 – Tragic: Wounding, Desire, and Power
Lecture and Q&A: Sunday, February 1, 11 am PST (Los Angeles), 2 pm EST (New York), 8 pm CET (Paris)
Digital Campfire: Saturday, February 7, 11 am PST (Los Angeles), 2 pm EST (New York), 8 pm CET (Paris)
Focus: How wounding disrupts innocence and shapes desire, power, intimacy, and ethics when clarity breaks and contradiction enters.
Key inquiries:
How does unintegrated wound distort power, desire, and intimacy?
Where am I stuck in the tragic station?
Where do I attempt premature transcendence rather than staying with the wound?
Practices:
Reflective journaling: tracing a moment where clarity broke and wounding distorted desire, power, or intimacy
Guided inquiry: where do I feel confusion, contraction, or distortion in my body when I stay with the wound?
Campfire sharing: speaking the experience of being stuck in the tragic station without bypass or resolution
Week 3 – Post-Tragic: Second Innocence and Post-Tragic Eros
Lecture and Q&A:
Sunday, February 8, 11 am PST (Los Angeles), 2 pm EST (New York), 8 pm CET (Paris)
Digital Campfire:
Saturday, February 14, 11 am PST (Los Angeles), 2 pm EST (New York), 8 pm CET (Paris)
Focus: Moving through corruption and rupture into second innocence, reclaiming eros, hunger, and power at a post-tragic level.
Key inquiries:
What does it mean to re-virginate consciousness?
How does post-tragic eros differ from naïve innocence?
Why is post-tragic power essential for the good, the true, and the beautiful?
How does this station become the fabric of a life well lived?
Culmination:
The course culminates in an integrated vision of post-tragic living—where desire, power, intimacy, and love are restored without denial of suffering.
Practices:
Reflective journaling: narrating the movement from rupture into second innocence and integrated desire
Guided inquiry: where do I feel post-tragic eros, potency, and openness in my body and relational field?
Campfire sharing: witnessing how post-tragic clarity is becoming the fabric of a life well lived
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.