When explorers discovered the New World and began mapping it and sending back to Europe sketches of the people, animals, plants and landscapes they saw there, the images were strange and divergent. If one had never seen in-person the realities depicted in these images it would take significant imagination to constitute a common source. Imagine the exponential difficulty had the New World not been merely a remote variation on Europe, but in fact a different stratum of being for which explicit, descriptive, objective language were inadequate. The varying accounts might have been taken as pure fantasy. Or, worse, imagine if the nature of this reality had been what Charles Stein calls “configurative”, instaurated (revealed-created) between the explorer and explored, subject and object, different for each witness, the furthest thing from arbitrary, yet eluding common sense. What then?

Having grown up in a thoroughly secular left-liberal Unitarian-Universalist household on solid ground of technoscientistic rationalism under a heaven of roll-your-own spirituality… living the postmodernized PMC lifestyle mediated by screens, teleporting into this virtual reality or that, corporate, ideological, the personal-political, the personal brand — things default to Derridean. If we do not actively resist living simulated lives, we drift into an inescapable text-trap, with nothing outside it.

When studying Kabbalah and its history, in conditions of mass solipsism, it is all-too-easy to succumb to a semiconscious attitude that takes mystical schools of thought as thought and only thought, forgetting that these were inspired attempts to articulate realities that transcend and defy thought and text. We lapse into charting traditional strands and tracing influences from mystic to mystic, and lose sight of the divine referent, the whole point of it all.