Crossing design with Kabbalah

Design, Design Instrumentalism, Enworldment, Exnihilism, Kabbalah

I’m meditating on design-related expressions I have coined. These ideas orbit a central concern, which makes the difference between a project that is for me and one that is not.

  • Practical fantasy — The idea that our favorite tools project a world around us — a potential story-field — and within it, ourselves as protagonist. Within a practical fantasy tool use is an enworldment creating/sustaining ritual.
  • Precision inspiration — The intentional pursuit of epiphanic re-enworldment through design research. In precision inspiration a new possibility of enworldment is found through productive conflict among existing enworldments — those researched and those doing the research. What results opens radically new possibilities for designed artifacts and the enworldments they seed and project. A key point to precision inspiration is that it inevitably involves traversing the aporic liminal void between enworldments and suffering the dread intrinsic to such traversals.
  • Pluricentrism — I was calling this polycentrism, but I am now using polycentrism only to describe the emergent being of a dynamic interaction among multiple agential centers as viewed from the third-person perspective as a system. But each agent within a polycentric system still experiences and acts within the system from its own center, and this is what pluricentric means. A designer who seeks to cultivate a living polycentric system must consider it pluricentrically, so each center experiences particilation as worthwhile and chooses to participate in a way that makes the polycentric system flourish as a whole and for each and every participant. Any system approached from within from multiple points is approached pluricentrically. Service design is designed pluricentrically and engineered polycentrically.
  • Enworldment — This is the projection / crystallization of reality as given to a soul in some particular faith-state, which is a stable dynamic set of enceptive capacities. Think of enworldment as the consequence of lived faith — the pragmatic maxim concretely lived out.
  • Instaurationalism — This is the name for design reasoning — a reason that knows and practically accommodates the reality that reality exceeds truth, but that truth can expand its capacities if it follows reality beyond its current limits of comprehension. It is a half-joking but fully serious portmanteau of instauration (discover-creation) and rationalism.
  • Synetic design — This comes from the phenomenon of synesis — or understanding as togethering. A phenomenon is spontaneously taken as together (con- + -ceived) as a gestalt, together in common with other understanders, united by common understanding.
  • Bullshit-chickenshit. — This is the antithesis of practical fantasy. Bullshit is impracticable fantasy posing as an attainable possibility. Chickenshit is practice without any desirable, meaningful outcome. Most of what happens in corporations is “bullshit-coated chickenshit”. This is what is meant by the pejorative “corporate”.

Service design should, theoretically, be the greatest opportunity to do the kind of work at the heart of all these ideas.

Unfortunately, in practice, the kind of organization that needs and can afford service design is usually in crisis precisely because it misconceives its business in ways that make such work impossible. The aporic void is impassible because powerful people use power to suppress aporia and the anxiety it induces.

For the last couple of years, and especially the last year, I have been connecting these design concepts to Kabbalah.

Kabbalah gives them my design-informed ideas stability and coherence. Design experiences and the concepts and vocabulary I have developed to cope with the uncanny, unnerving and harrowing aspects of design (as well articulating the inspiring, ecstatic, fulfilling rewards of design success) provide me experience-nearness and concrete cases to substantiate otherwise abstract Kabbalistic ideas.

The enworded, enworlding artifacts are what are given in Assiyah.

The enworlding synesis happens in Yetzirah. Corporate bullshit and chickenshit happen in Yetzirah, too, when a feeble, dying Yetziratic collective (corporate) being lacks the courage to give up the ghost, and cranks out lifeless objectivity that nobody can care about or believe in. Precision inspiration is the sokution, but it is not for the faint of heart.

Polycentrism is the manifestation in Assiyah (third person) of pluricentric being (first person) in Yetzirah.

Precision inspiration transpires against the background of oblivion — from which inspiration irrupts ex nihilo in epiphanic moments of creative revelation or revelatory creativity, in other words, instauration. Radical design effects instauration ex nihilo.

The orbital center: Keter d’Beriah.

Haloed dread.

The faith in the pregnant oblivion, the everpossible miraculous birth, the heart of the exnihilist soul.

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Olamot

Enworldment, Exnihilism, Kabbalah, Metaphysics, Phenomenology, Philosophy

I understand the Olamot (the four worlds) topologically.

What is given in Assiyah, the world of formation is anything that can be perceived, conceived and contained within the grasp of comprehension. This includes objective abstractions and all content of imagination. All content is Assiyah.

What is given in Yetzirah is all acts of formation — perception, conception or comprehension. Whatever subject contains objective content — however it does the containing — is Yetzirah. Yetzirah is active concavity: capacity for forming.

What is given in Beriah is the ground of differing formations. Between containments, objectivities, ontologies — between revelations of radically different enworldments — is inconceivable nonworldment, which we experience as dreadful void — abyss — from which ex nihilo revelation and creation irrupt.

What is given in Atzilut is the infinitely meaning of the absolute One, whose light floods in through whatever accepts its place within it, whatever no longer envies it and has shed its apotheotic ambitions.

Kabbalah is the practice of receiving all that is given.

Assiyah is objective, and that includes not only material objectivity (Malchut d’Assiyah) but all intentional objects, every possible object of any possible subjective operation. Only Assiyah can be thought about objectively — that is, in terms of definable objects of thought.

Yetzirah is subjective, and that includes not only (or primarily!) personal subject but all scales of subjective formation. Yetzirah is always and essentially participatory, and that participation enworlds and forms within an enworldment. Yetzirah is participatory enworlding.

Beriyah is what is given through sheer absence between enworldments. It is the ground of all enworlding and the truth of that ground, the truth that every objective world is enworlded. At its highest is the truth that between enworldment and enworldment lies dreadful, inconceivable nothingness from which enworldment proceeds ex nihilo, that something entirely beyond enworldment (enworldments, subjects and objects) is the condition of enworldment. It is, for us, the ex nihilo from which all revelation irrupts, by which we intuit creation ex nihilo.

Atzilut is the mystery beyond and behind Beriyah that transmits itself through the three lower worlds and gives worlds life and purpose and infinitude of possibility within absolute One.

Anti-Logos

Ethics

Yes, it is true that language and logic can imprison us in wordworlds, and alienate us from intuited reality beyond the reach of cognition and from our own inarticulate selves. Only what can be said and argued and objectively proven is real, and everything else is phantasm.

The problem here, though, is not with articulate reason. The problem is treating articulate reason as the sole arbiter of truth.

If we conclude that the problem is, in fact, with word and reason and decide to reject it or subjugate it, or if we claim that articulate reason knows nothing of any importance, or that it is articulate reason that generates logical and linguistic phantasms — and crown intuition and feeling as sole arbiter of truth — we only commit the same sin of excess, but in the opposite direction.

Now, we suffer another alienation — alienation from community. Without words or reason, we cannot communicate and share reality with others. We cannot make appeals or hear appeals or honor appeals. We can only fight or flee or fuck, but never love.

And in a state of anti-Logos, the community-making sacrament of communion stops being a sacrament, and becomes ritual sorcery. The “communicant” sits alone in a ritualizing crowd, performing magical motions — sitting, standing, genuflecting, self-crossing, muttering little prayers, summoning mental images and ecstasies and intimacies, and attempts to transcend the neighbor, to make direct contact with God.

No, it is not only the theorizing, theologizing, philosophizing mind that “is its own place, and in itself / Can make a Heav’n of Hell, a Hell of Heav’n.”

The intuiting, feeling, imagining mind is just as capable of the same kind of solipsism, when it rejects Logos.

An ethic of the mean finds the ideal in balanced moderation.

What is virtue in balance becomes vice in extreme.

Extremists believe some things are essentially good and other things are essentially evil.

Any trace of an essentially evil thing is a slippery slope to excess. Therefore, it should be opposed with excessive essential good. Every evil microaggression should be confronted by good macroaggression. The sins of secular atheism should be overcome with fundamentalist or traditionalist fanaticism. The infuriating imperfections of liberalism are capital crimes. And so on.

But! …Extreme moderation is also extreme.

There are no preexisting, eternal rules to follow.

And no method can guarantee success.

There is no solid truth holding us up. We all walk on water together. We sink alone.

Each application of the Golden Rule must itself be guided by the Golden Rule, and the guiding Golden Rule, in turn must itself also be guided. Ah, sahib, it is Golden Rule all the way up.

Each iteration upward ripples downward. … the infinite recursive, nonlinear, radically ordered, radically unpredictable. Under the anarchic order of chaos, futures swerve, lurch and bubble. The stirring of a butterfly wing can whirl a hurricane. Here truth is known only in the moment of disclosure.

It is from this, that we are suspended, always in suspense.

Golden mid.

Thunder perfect Lou

Chord

Lou Salome on the integration of contradiction in a perfect female soul:

Just as motherhood is the only thing that offers the full experience, in its totality, of a human relationship, and, for this very reason, that can be ceaselessly renewed, woman receives from life the gift of new beginnings, in a way that man could never imitate. And the truer this is of her, the more of a woman she is, the more she attains her greatness in these renewals of life-and the more she is able to capture vast possibilities, robust energies, to incorporate them organically into the totality of her being, however remote they may have been from her female nature, or however opposed to it. There is no particular trait or any special tendency, even when by their content they are proclaimed specifically “female,” in which she ever differs from the essence of masculinity; the only difference lies in this manner of harmonizing them all in order to bring them into relation with the very core of her life.

Hence, no doubt, the futility of the interminable discussions which, with largely equal reason on both sides, sometimes emphasize the complete opposition between women and men, and sometimes, precisely, celebrate the progress that consists in having gone beyond it; in which woman is alternately credited with or denied almost all possible and imaginable qualities, being represented, always more or less accurately, under the species of levity and seriousness, of folly and cold realism, of agitation and harmony, of caprice and profundity, of wisdom and stupidity, of delicacy and brutality, as chthonic demon or angel. For, in fact, without looking very far, the concept “woman,” broken down into particular traits, covers the most irreconcilable qualities: the woman is always contradiction incarnate, provided that, in accordance with her creative vocation, she carries life itself working within her.

In the margin, next to “interminable discussions which, with largely equal reason on both sides, sometimes emphasize the complete opposition between women and men, and sometimes, precisely, celebrate the progress that consists in having gone beyond it; in which woman is alternately credited with or denied almost all possible and imaginable qualities, being represented, always more or less accurately…” I wrote “Like Jews!” All totalizing understandings need an alterity concept, against which it may define itself.

“The Thunder Perfect Mind”

I was sent forth from the power,

and I have come to those who reflect upon me,
and I have been found among those who seek after me.
Look upon me, you who reflect upon me,

and you hearers, hear me.
You who are waiting for me, take me to yourselves.
And do not banish me from your sight.
And do not make your voice hate me, nor your hearing.

Do not be ignorant of me anywhere or any time. Be on your guard!
Do not be ignorant of me.
For I am the first and the last.
I am the honored one and the scorned one.
I am the whore and the holy one.
I am the wife and the virgin.
I am the mother and the daughter.
I am the members of my mother.
I am the barren one

and many are her sons.
I am she whose wedding is great,

and I have not taken a husband.
I am the midwife and she who does not bear.
I am the solace of my labor pains.
I am the bride and the bridegroom,

and it is my husband who begot me.
I am the mother of my father

and the sister of my husband
and he is my offspring.
I am the slave of him who prepared me.
I am the ruler of my offspring.

But he is the one who begot me before the time on a birthday.
And he is my offspring in due time,
and my power is from him.
I am the staff of his power in his youth,

and he is the rod of my old age.
And whatever he wills happens to me.
I am the silence that is incomprehensible

and the idea whose remembrance is frequent.
I am the voice whose sound is manifold

and the word whose appearance is multiple.
I am the utterance of my name.
Why, you who hate me, do you love me,

and hate those who love me?
You who deny me, confess me,

and you who confess me, deny me.
You who tell the truth about me, lie about me,

and you who have lied about me, tell the truth about me.
You who know me, be ignorant of me,

and those who have not known me, let them know me.
For I am knowledge and ignorance.
I am shame and boldness.
I am shameless; I am ashamed.
I am strength and I am fear.
I am war and peace.
Give heed to me.
I am the one who is disgraced and the great one.
Give heed to my poverty and my wealth.
Do not be arrogant to me when I am cast out upon the earth,

and you will find me in those that are to come.
And do not look upon me on the dung-heap

nor go and leave me cast out,
and you will find me in the kingdoms.
And do not look upon me when I am cast out among those who

are disgraced and in the least places,
nor laugh at me.
And do not cast me out among those who are slain in violence.
But I, I am compassionate and I am cruel.
Be on your guard!
Do not hate my obedience

and do not love my self-control.
In my weakness, do not forsake me,

and do not be afraid of my power.
For why do you despise my fear

and curse my pride?
But I am she who exists in all fears

and strength in trembling.
I am she who is weak,

and I am well in a pleasant place.
I am senseless and I am wise.
Why have you hated me in your counsels?
For I shall be silent among those who are silent,

and I shall appear and speak,
Why then have you hated me, you Greeks?

Because I am a barbarian among the barbarians?
For I am the wisdom of the Greeks

and the knowledge of the barbarians.
I am the judgement of the Greeks and of the barbarians.
I am the one whose image is great in Egypt

and the one who has no image among the barbarians.
I am the one who has been hated everywhere

and who has been loved everywhere.
I am the one whom they call Life,

and you have called Death.
I am the one whom they call Law,

and you have called Lawlessness.
I am the one whom you have pursued,

and I am the one whom you have seized.
I am the one whom you have scattered,

and you have gathered me together.
I am the one before whom you have been ashamed,

and you have been shameless to me.
I am she who does not keep festival,

and I am she whose festivals are many.
I, I am godless,

and I am the one whose God is great.
I am the one whom you have reflected upon,

and you have scorned me.
I am unlearned,

and they learn from me.
I am the one that you have despised,

and you reflect upon me.
I am the one whom you have hidden from,

and you appear to me.
But whenever you hide yourselves,

I myself will appear.
For whenever you appear,

I myself will hide from you.
Those who have […] to it […] senselessly […].
Take me [… understanding] from grief.

and take me to yourselves from understanding and grief.
And take me to yourselves from places that are ugly and in ruin,

and rob from those which are good even though in ugliness.
Out of shame, take me to yourselves shamelessly;

and out of shamelessness and shame,
upbraid my members in yourselves.
And come forward to me, you who know me

and you who know my members,
and establish the great ones among the small first creatures.
Come forward to childhood,

and do not despise it because it is small and it is little.
And do not turn away greatnesses in some parts from the smallnesses,

for the smallnesses are known from the greatnesses.
Why do you curse me and honor me?
You have wounded and you have had mercy.
Do not separate me from the first ones whom you have known.
And do not cast anyone out nor turn anyone away

[…] turn you away and [… know] him not.
[…].
What is mine […].
I know the first ones and those after them know me.
But I am the mind of […] and the rest of […].
I am the knowledge of my inquiry,

and the finding of those who seek after me,
and the command of those who ask of me,
and the power of the powers in my knowledge
of the angels, who have been sent at my word,
and of gods in their seasons by my counsel,
and of spirits of every man who exists with me,
and of women who dwell within me.
I am the one who is honored, and who is praised,

and who is despised scornfully.
I am peace,

and war has come because of me.
And I am an alien and a citizen.
I am the substance and the one who has no substance.
Those who are without association with me are ignorant of me,

and those who are in my substance are the ones who know me.
Those who are close to me have been ignorant of me,

and those who are far away from me are the ones who have known me.
On the day when I am close to you, you are far away from me,
and on the day when I am far away from you, I am close to you.
[I am …] within.
[I am …] of the natures.
I am […] of the creation of the spirits.
[…] request of the souls.
I am control and the uncontrollable.
I am the union and the dissolution.
I am the abiding and I am the dissolution.
I am the one below,

and they come up to me.
I am the judgment and the acquittal.
I, I am sinless,

and the root of sin derives from me.
I am lust in (outward) appearance,

and interior self-control exists within me.
I am the hearing which is attainable to everyone

and the speech which cannot be grasped.
I am a mute who does not speak,
and great is my multitude of words.
Hear me in gentleness, and learn of me in roughness.
I am she who cries out,

and I am cast forth upon the face of the earth.
I prepare the bread and my mind within.
I am the knowledge of my name.
I am the one who cries out,

and I listen.
I appear and […] walk in […] seal of my […].
I am […] the defense […].
I am the one who is called Truth

and iniquity […].
You honor me […] and you whisper against me.
You who are vanquished, judge them (who vanquish you)

before they give judgment against you,
because the judge and partiality exist in you.
If you are condemned by this one, who will acquit you?

Or, if you are acquitted by him, who will be able to detain you?
For what is inside of you is what is outside of you,
and the one who fashions you on the outside
is the one who shaped the inside of you.
And what you see outside of you, you see inside of you;
it is visible and it is your garment.
Hear me, you hearers

and learn of my words, you who know me.
I am the hearing that is attainable to everything;

I am the speech that cannot be grasped.
I am the name of the sound

and the sound of the name.
I am the sign of the letter

and the designation of the division.
And I […].
(3 lines missing)
[…] light […].
[…] hearers […] to you
[…] the great power.
And […] will not move the name.
[…] to the one who created me.

And I will speak his name.
Look then at his words

and all the writings which have been completed.
Give heed then, you hearers

and you also, the angels and those who have been sent,
and you spirits who have arisen from the dead.
For I am the one who alone exists,

and I have no one who will judge me.
For many are the pleasant forms which exist in numerous sins,

and incontinencies,
and disgraceful passions,
and fleeting pleasures,
which (men) embrace until they become sober
and go up to their resting place.
And they will find me there,

and they will live,
and they will not die again.

Karl Schwab, monopolarchist

Metaphysics, Politics

I just listened to Yascha Mounk’s abortive interview with Klaus Schwab, and it dovetailed with eery ease with the line of thought I have been pursuing this morning, which, of course, means I’m insane.

I have two comments, the first cynical and the other bizarre.

First, anyone who has been a stakeholder in “stakeholder capitalist” corporation will instantly recognize what Schwab expects of citizens in his political order.

Our role is to “buy in.”

We are to go along with what our leaders have already decided it’s going to happen, and pretend with them that we have a choice in the matter.

Schwab wants the entire world to be one massive multinational corporation and for all its citizens to be its employees. Except that we cannot quit and work for a different corporation, because WEF is the Corporation of corporations — the only meta-employer on earth. You can change jobs all you want, but you’ll always work for the Boss of bosses.

Schwab, though, is innocently, pristinely naive. His faith in his entitlement is total. He doesn’t know he is a totalitarian. He thinks technocratic rule by business elites is the natural order.

Schwab is a monopolarchist. And most “leftists” I know are just like him, except they are not on the top floor of this order.

We are to buy into the rule of our elitest elites. We are to buy into their version of history and truth. We are to buy into their value priorities. We are to buy into their selectively attentive, selectively evasive and blatantly contorted version of what is happening today, aka the news. We are to buy into the politics that naturalizes their dominance, through the management of their “selfless”, self aware deputies, the professional-managerial class.

Except a growing number of people no longer buy in.

And confrontation with this refusal to buy in makes folks like Schwab melt down: Does not compute! He genuinely perplexed and seized in anxiety. It has been decades since anyone has been in a position to make him justify himself from any position, other than the one he naively assumes is the only one. The very notion of elites negotiating power and truth with dirty, ignorant, superstitious, backwards underclass bigots? Inconceivable!

And this brings me to my second point — the bizarre one. Klaus Schwab and his zombie army of stakeholders believe that they are secular. Most of them are either atheists or “believers” whose faith serves the same ideal as Schwab’s global secularism. They think they are the vanguard of a post-religious humanity. They think they are among the first who have outgrown the religious compulsion to worship. They are deeply, deeply mistaken.

Against altruism

Ethics, Judaism

Wikipedia:

The word altruism was popularised (and possibly coined) by the French philosopher Auguste Comte (1798-1857) c.?1830 in French, as altruisme, as an antonym of egoism. He derived it from the Italian altrui, which in turn was derived from Latin alteri, meaning “other people” or “somebody else”. Altruism may be considered a synonym of selflessness, the opposite of self-centeredness.

My current inadequately informed — (as always, I reserve the right to revise) — hypothesis is that the concept of altruism was coined by a quantlocked positivist, stuck in a wordworld of defined objects, composed of nothing but objects, comprised by nothing real. In this objective world one can only act selfishly or selflessly for the sake of exterior others, with no enveloping being among or beyond.

Hineini void

Judaism, Politics, Star

The irresponsible cannot be held responsible for anything but they are guilty of every neglected call to respond.

“Where are you?” . . . Nowhere, never, nobody.

Non-present.

“What? You search? You would multiply yourself by ten, by a hundred? You seek followers? — Seek zeros! –”

Quantlocked

Exnihilism, Kabbalah

Altruism without intuition of transcendence is sentimental idolatry.

An intuition of transcendence requires consciousness of being conceived, comprehended, enveloped, embraced by layer upon layer of interlapping, ever-magnifying magnanimity approaching one soul of infinite magnitude, at once both absolutely one and infinitely plural. Chokhmah and Binah proceed from the principle of immanence the possibility of One within an infinite absoluteness with nothing beside it to give number meaning.

Without two, one is meaningless. Lurianic Kabbalah solved the riddle of One without two, by positing a prenumeric duality of infinity and nothingness, which makes a miraculous duality out of nonquantity: Ztimtzum.

Poor, lucky humans! Thrown into a world peopled with numerable objects, we know nothing (literally) of the truer everted word from which we emerged — our omniscience everted to the purest ignorance!

So when we hear “infinity”, we cannot help but hear it as a quantity of limitless addition — more heaped upon more, across time, moment heaped upon moment. Infinity, however is a quality preceding quantity, which contains within itself one possibility, which for us, is our sole actuality: quantity.

And when we hear “nothing”, we cannot help but hear it as the absence of a quantity — zero. But nothingness is not an absence of something, it is only the divine innovation of relative absence of infinity — the possibility of finitude, manifested first as obliviousness. It is a patch of shade in infinite light in which all is pre-articulately infinite, and finitude is latent possibility. To understate this, almost-but-not-quite-infinitely (“myriadically”) it is as articulate a “thing” as a ripple across a spark of a flame in the heart of a zillion overlaid suns. (Indians have thousands of years head start on any of us, attempting to indicate qualitative infinity to finitely-bound human minds.)

With infinity and nothingness, we now have two. And from two the quantity one can be derived.

Qualitatively, we pre-count, Infinite, Void, Two, One, Zero and now the quantities one, two, three and onward to myriad (the indeterminately large, incorrectly called infinity by quantlocked minds), and backwards through negation, starting with zero, to negative one through negative myriad.

Zero is a shadow cast by a shadow. Zero is the shadow of nothingness, and nothingness is the shadow of infinity.

Our best access to nothingness is witnessing ex nihilo revelation, against which infinity is dimly intimated.

I was winding up to say something, but I cannot remember now…

…

Oh.

Altruism is the false transcendence of the quantlocked soul.

It knows something important is out there, but its faith can acknowledge only what its stubby mental fingers can grasp and cognize. We grab a garden by a berry, cram it in our pie hole, and strut around like little gods, like we created that garden by consuming it.

Its world is objects, comprising littler objects, composing larger ones. Itty-bitty subatomic objects heap up to make, vast, vast supergalactic objects.

Ah, sahib, it is objects all the way down and objects all the way up. Is the very tallest heap — taller even than the famous tower of Babel — is the megaultraobject named “God”. Do you believe or disbelieve in the megaultraobject? Such is the debate endlessly rehearsed by quantlocked theologians vs quantlocked atheists.

Ah sahib, until we learn to evert infinity and nothingness, and both together, and both apart, it is religious category mistakes all the way down and all the way up.

Altruism grasps Eden by the fruit and bestows upon it all kind of divine benevolence, without inhabiting the transcendent enveloping relationship that gives such benevolence meaning. The fig-leaf of moral vanity, the strutting about of “I am good, selfless person” gives it away. It is godless aping of divinity. Meaningless charade of ethic in vacuous ethos.

The only altruism that matter is magnanimity, the serving of ever greater scales of selfhoods, who are themselves ever greater scales of selfhoods, across whom is transmitted an unbearably bright trickle of divine light from the heart of Ein Sof.

This is my current intuition of Kabbalah — a spark of inspiration I have received as a gift via Am Yisrael, to whom every Westerner and anti-Westerner owes gratitude, whether or we acknowledge or refuse to acknowledge it.

And those who seek redemption from gratitude through murder — by cross, by sword, by theological contortion or atheological politicization — only compound their debt with criminality.

Rome’s murder — blamed on Jews, with despicable cowardice — was redemptive only in its own decaying collective imagination.

No convexity — whether statue, book, man, ghost or concept — is a permissible object of worship — by virtue of its form.

Materialized magic

Design, Esoterism, Kabbalah, Metaphysics, Polycentrism

A service is a collective, intelligent being.

A service exists polycentrically as a being with multiple agential centers whose interactions generate a new agential center who cannot be reduced to any one of its constituent centers.

Yet, at the same time, each of the constituent agential centers continues to experience and participate in the service, from its respective center. So services are also pluricentric.

The pluricentric experience motivates and directs various forms of participation in the service, which affects the polycentric being of the service as a whole, and ripples through the pluricentric experiences and responses of each participant.

A simple example to demonstrate how these terms complement: A marriage, like a service, is a polycentric collective being. The marriage has its own being, irreducible to the being of either spouse. However, the marriage is also pluricentrically given to each spouse. (And if the couple has a baby, the polycentric being of the family shifts its center to embrace its newest agential center, and this shift is experienced pluricentrically by each spouse. The marriage itself has changed, and effort is required to maintain its continuity.)

All people have experiences of polycentric and pluricentric being, but very few people can conceptualize it or navigate it as the kind of being it is. Many of us use vague romantic terms like vibes or spirit or feel or mood or culture to indicate an ethereal presence within a group, organization or region.

?Esoteric types believe they can interact directly with this kind of ethereal presence, bypassing its materiality. ? I believe this has drastically limited the effectiveness of the esoteric arts. But ignoring supraindividual polycentric being has also drastically limited the effectiveness of subject-blind social engineering — or at least its effectiveness in producing anything fit for human participation.?

I need to wrap up, so I will conclude with Kabbalistic abbreviation:

A good service lives across worlds:

Assiyah makes a service materially actual and effective.

Yetzirah makes a service alive and meaningful.

Beriah makes a service serve good.

Topology of mystery

Everso, Exnihilism, Kabbalah, Metaphysics, Philosophy

Metaphor: A human mind has both armspan and handspan. The armspan embraces reality itself in an all-embracing, enworlding faith. Within this faith, a handspan grips givens in an ontology and corresponding objectivity of objective truths.

Absolute truth is, with respect to human minds, concave. It is the truth surrounding and surprising the total comprehension of every enworlding faith and all perceptually, conceptual, comprehensible givens within it.

We sense this concavity most at the limits of objectivity, where the reach of mind exceeds its grasp, where comprehension fails. Apprehensive intuitions of incomprehensible givens mark the boundary.

But this concavity also permeates the comprehensible. In truth, it is the very essence of comprehension, and it is this concavity which molds the convexity of each given within whatever objectivity a particular ontology embraces in understanding.

The human mind knows objective truth, not because reality is objective, but because our minds are objective, and when we try to know, we grasp mental objects by their defined outer edges.

The objective mind embraces and grasps. We comprehend only the convex givens our mind can comprise and hold together in its all-embracing, all-gripping mind. Whatever embraces and grasps the mind itself is by nature and structure, incomprehensible.

And when we try and fail to comprehend some comprehensive given beyond the enworlding arm-span, we encounter mystery.

The theological category mistake treats subject as existent object. It cannot help but misconceive mystery as heavenly objects hidden behind a veil. It projects object where the given is not object-form.

Psychology carries theistic category mistakes into atheism, attempting to sate the human need for mystery, without fulfilling it. Psychology misconceives mystery as unconscious ideas submerged beneath the surface of consciousness. But there is no object “there”.

Mystery needs a new topology. Mystery is what we experience when we try to comprehend as convexity what comprehends us within a transcendent concavity.

Mystery hides itself in plain sight, in seeing, and intimates its presence inaudibly, in the silence of hearing. Mystery conceals itself in the pervasive oblivion of ex nihilo creation-revelation, fermenting, sparkling everywhere all at once, always, to all, in perpetual irruptions of minute epiphanies.

Positive metaphysics is objective projection into the incomprehensible comprehending everse of objectivity. Negative metaphysics is awareness of the futility of comprehending the comprehending incomprehensible.

Mystery can be suprehended through everted objectivity — through subjectivity properly understood.

In the light of subjectivity properly understood, personal subject and an academic subject are subjects in the same sense of the word.

On decadence

Autobiography, Philosophy, Politics, Star

Decadence, etymologically, means state of decay. To decay, to decompose, degenerate, deteriorate, disintegrate.

The overtone in decadence is the dis-integration of subject. And subject is multiscalar.

A person, a family, a community, a nation, an international class or an international order can break down.

One faction is alienated from another, and stops associating or is set against another in conflict.

In an individual, individuum is lost, and becomes multiple individual factions inhabiting a socio-biological dividuum. Each faction does what is pleases in disregard of the others. One faction wants to be healthy and disciplined, but another faction sees a slice of chocolate cake and devours it, health be damned.

A decadent organization, large or small, shatters into mutually alienated and hostile factions that no longer care about the organization as a whole.

A subjective being is decadent when it loses its integrity — its intersubjective integration — and disintegrates into intersubjective anarchy. A We or an I is divided against itself — and often cannot stand other aspects of itself. Self-loathing, other-loathing, convulsive inter-factional alienation and conflict prevail.

A place is decadent when it loses its habitational integrity — its spatial coherence — and is chopped up into dissociated spaces. (Christopher Alexander dedicated his life to repairing places.)

Time is decadent when it is fractured into dissociated instances. Attention is on one thing for a few seconds and then another thing. Momentum is arrested in stop-start motions. Each start lurches in a different direction, in a this-that trajectory. This meeting, then that meeting. This TikTok video, then that video. This topic, then that topic. This election cycle, then that one. This great event, then that one. This mass hysteria, then that hysteria.

There is no evolving flow or development of being through time, across places. Things fall apart. Mere anarch is loosed upon the world, and all that.

There is no time or attention for a long train of thought in a decadent world.

Everything is interrupted mid-thought, mid-sentence.

Only bite-sized bits of information will be eaten. Anything bigger than a bon-bon is too much to chew and bypassed as bad communication.

Only tactic-sized strategies may be followed. The longest long-game is to decide the next move before the problem evaporates into obliviousness.

Perspective is impossible, because each eye spasms toward what is shiniest. Cubist double-vision induces double-think dysunderstandings. A person wants perfect equity and unfettered freedom under theofascist-marxist totalitarian rule… as long as whoever made you feel like something the cat dragged in feels even worse.

A conversation of interrupted sentences is interpersonal decadence.

I am interrupted and interrupted and interrupted by people who increasingly need to not understand the truth.

An insincere exhortation

Ethics, Everso, Philosophy

This is easier to say than to believe, so please allow me to say something true — from the head and not yet from the heart true — with aspirational sincerity:

We should stop exalting individual genius. The epoch of this ideal ended years ago.

The future belongs to a capacity to participate in transcendent supraindividual genius — to consciously play a part in conceiving something inconceivable to any solitary person, and to feel fitting gratitude for all gifts exchanged to bring the possibility to actualization.

Around a seminal spirit is a wombinal soul.

Gratitude is owed, but gratitude will not be collected until it is freely given.

Just justice

Ethics, Politics

Let us not valorize impassioned overcompensation for past injustices.

Justice is not an accounts ledger, and to treat it as such is a catastrophic category mistake.

Overcorrection does not balance the books of justice.

Justice is better seen as a pendulum seeking equilibrium. Judicious action damps, slows and narrows the oscillations making them gentler, subtler and more easily directed.

Overcorrection shoves the pendulum from one extreme to another. It inevitably swings back as a counter-overcorrection, raging back with wrecking ball force.

The remedy for automatically dismissing a group’s claims is not to reverse the attitude and to believe them automatically. Justice abolishes automatic belief and disbelief. Justice listens to all people and judges their claims on the merits of the claim itself, not on who makes it.

The remedy for bigotry is not reversed bigotry. Justice abolishes bigotry.

The remedy for domination is not reversed domination. Justice abolishes domination.

The “settling of accounts” model of justice is justification for revenge. It is false justification and it produces false justice.

Anyone who thinks justice entitles the aggrieved to a proper measure of revenge knows nothing of justice.

And beware the correctors of structural injustice. The restructuring is usually a scale of justice where half the balance weights are the fingers of their own all-comprehending hand.