….it was said that one god, Hermes Trismegistus, had dictated a variously estimited number of books (42, according to Clement of Alexandria; 20,000, according to Iamblichus; 36,525, according to the priests of Thoth, who is also Hermes), on whose pages all things were written. [Anomalogue: From what I’ve read, Hermes Trismegistus was not a god; … Continue reading Meditation on the ten-thousand everythings
I am leaning toward calling my book The Ten Thousand Everythings. I am going to return the term “chaos” to the fractal geometers, mythologists and the general public. Chaos is experienced disorder, with many possible metaphysical underpinnings. My own underpinning for chaos, which is speculative and entirely unprovable, but nonetheless believable and useful, is what … Continue reading The Ten Thousand Everythings
Open note to self: Nihilitude protects all everythings from exnihilation in the infinite. This is my reunderstanding of tzimtzum.
The Sapir–Whorf hypothesis, can be simplistically stated in a diamond-terse Basque saying and its negative corollary: “What has a name is real.” “What lacks a name is unreal.” What is meant here by “real” and “unreal” is relative to us in our first person plural. What has a name is (taken by us as) real; … Continue reading “Why philosophize? To recapture reality!”
Willfred Sellars said: The aim of philosophy, abstractly formulated, is to understand how things in the broadest possible sense of the term hang together in the broadest possible sense of the term. Under ‘things in the broadest possible sense’ I include such radically different items as not only ‘cabbages and kings’, but numbers and duties, … Continue reading Hanging with Sellars
Scholem, from Major Trends: Nothing seems to me to express better this sense of the distance between God and man, than the Hebrew term which in our literature is generally used for what is otherwise called unio mystica. I mean the word devekuth, which signifies “adhesion,” or “being joined,” viz., to God. This is regarded … Continue reading Devekut
Before 2016, I characterized my religious attitude as exoterically (ethically) Jewish and esoterically (metaphysically) Taoist. Then I began studying Kabbalah, and learned “esoteric Hebrew”, carefully translating it into “esoteric Chinese”. Now esoteric Hebrew has become second natural to me. It is so second-natural that I now understand in it without any need to translate back … Continue reading Metaphysical 3D glasses
I have connected design and gifts for a good while. When I understand the core service design concept of value exchange in the clear light of gift exchange, so that it includes, but also transcends, transaction, and enters the domain of freely given gifts, service design gains importance and universality. Let us define transaction as … Continue reading The Medium
I used to say this often, but I haven’t in a while: a soul extends to the limits of what we mean when we say “everything”. Each soul is universe-sized. This is why I sometimes refer to everythings, plural. Materialists who believe that a soul (psyche) is an emergent property of our nervous system, and … Continue reading More than every possible everything
To our finite minds, the infinite appears as nothingness. It is out of this nothingness that creation proceeds ex nihilo. The shimmering halo of creation — its crown, its Keter — is sometimes called Ayin. This is the living, pregnant nothingness from which epiphanies come, by which we know Ayin and the Absolute One. Creation … Continue reading Hymn to Ayin
Yes, I am using ChatGPT as a weird kind of thought partner. If you find yourself recoiling slightly, I understand. I have the same reaction. But it is a valuable exercise. Consider the following exchange: Me: How faithfully does this represent Leibniz’s monadology? “The fundamental unit of the universe is not the atom, nor a … Continue reading ChatGPT as thought partner
I’ve used the word “natural” to four very different ways, and each is defined against a different opposite. These are each The first two are the boring obvious ones. Natural versus manmade. Is it from the wilderness, or is it from our own hands? Natural versus supernatural. Does it obey the laws of nature, or … Continue reading Natural as opposed to what?
If you know what to intuit for, the world is infused with halos of every possible tone. As with light, the gamut of intuitions trail off into the analogue of inperceivable nothingness of infravisible infrared and ultravisible ultraviolet. Intuitions, though, trail off into inconceivable nothingness of infraintelligible sub-ipseity and ultraintelligible super-alterity. Or try another anomalogy: … Continue reading On halos
We apprehend that something is, but we may not comprehend what it is. “Apprehending that” establishes something’s existence. “Comprehending what” establishes its conceptual relations within our understanding. Sometimes (often, in fact) we apprehend something, but we cannot immediately comprehend it. We either ignore it as irrelevant, gloss over it, or are forced to figure out … Continue reading Second verse, same as the first
When I first moved to Atlanta, I saw it primarily through the windsheilds of cars and windows of buildings. During my brief but transformative residence in Toronto I learned to rely on my bicycle as my primary mode of transportation. Returning to Atlanta, and experiencing it from my bicycle changed my conception of its space. … Continue reading Voluminosity
I am trying to write a post, but it keeps expanding and extending under its own power. It is displacing my reading. I am waking up and just writing. I hope this is my book. If this is the book I end up writing, my old working title, The Ten-Thousand Everythings would be the natural … Continue reading Interim report
To apprehend is to know-that. To comprehend is to know-what. When know-that stubbornly resists know-what, when we touch with the tips of our fingers something that cannot be grasped by the hand of our thought, we feel ourselves situated within something incomprehensible. We comprehend the fact that we are comprehended by something incomprehensible. The relation … Continue reading Apprehend, comprehend, suprehend
I’ve contacted some letterpress printers about making my pamphlet, which used to be titled The 10,000 Everythings, but has been sobered up into Geometric Meditations, which is a more precise description of how I use the content of the book. One printer has responded so far, and suggested some changes that seems to have improved … Continue reading Book
If you are a person who invests your best time and effort into understanding what matters most to you, chances are you’ll end up understanding things differently from most people in your life. But everyone has some kind of understanding of what matters most to them, even if they have not spent time explicitly interrogating … Continue reading Soulsizing
When we say we know what something is, or know how to do something, or know why something is valuable or worthless we implicitly assume we understand what it means to know these things. But how sure can we be of this? Are we sure we understand exhaustively what understanding is and can be? Are … Continue reading Wordless ground of meaning