I have been concerned with the topology of eversion for a long time – long before I began my kabbalah studies, which was relatively recent. I’m old enough now that I experience as recent anything that has happened within the last ten years.

Traditional esoteric thought has viewed the various domains of thought in planar terms, arranged vertically in varying heights, across which beings climb upward or downward. The vocabulary of transcendence is erected upon this topology. Our spiritual understandings – linguistically, conceptually, imaginally – is saturated with height relations.

Eversion works with a related but different set of relations: inner versus outer; from versus toward; inside-out versus outside-in; content (contained) versus container. I consider subject versus object to belong to this same class. And as I deepen further in kabbalah, subjective-objective knowing versus intellection beyond subject-objective form.

Since immersing in the four worlds, I’ve pondered the question of whether or where eversions occur (or become necessary) for understanding changing relations across worlds. For example, in understanding another subject – whether that subject is the subjectivity of another person or that of an academic subject does not much matter – we start with a set of third-person objective data (characteristics, behaviors, utterances, concepts, claims), engage some second-person alter-ego in dialogue, in order to loosen our own subjective objectivity of wherefores and therefores and to learn to hear – for ourselves – a different set of wherefores and therefores, of questions and responses, by which reality may be approached in a new subjective objectivity. In this process subject-object are eversed through the I-Thou aperture – the pinhole in the camera obscura of reality.

But where are the pinholes? There is certainly one between Assiyah and Yetzirah. Any strategic design researcher must cross through this narrow gate several times a year in order to understand our research subjects individually, then collectively, then together with our collaborators. This dialogical passing is synesis.

I referred to another pinhole earlier: “subjective-objective knowing versus intellection beyond subject-objective form.” This is the pinhole between Yetzirah and Beriah.

But, in terms of the sefirot, does any sefirah serve as pinhole? Chokhmah is the obvious candidate, the zero-point from which Binah radiates and refracts.

I am tempted to take Malkhut-Keter as the collected intraworld transcendent light – the Malkhut Therefore of one world becomes the Keter Wherefore of the next.

Another possibility is looking at the topology dynamically, that is morphologically. Which “direction” is one going with respect to the One? Here it is difficult to avoid transcendence language. Ascent is everted descent, on the same ladder. Inhalation is everted exhalation in the same lungs.

For now, I have no conclusive answers, only new meditations to commence.

It is all very pretty.