When I first learned the word “instauration” from Latour’s magnum opus, An Inquiry Into Modes of Existence, I was thunderstruck. Latour described precisely how it is to find the kinds of truth we discover-create in design research. But now, I am thunderstruck all over again, recognizing that the creation and revelation essential to Beriah is … Continue reading Instauratio ex nihilo
If you’ve known a being to emerge from nothing to change everything you’ll be converted from illusion to truth. If it happens again — God forbid — a different order of conversion should occur.
Every finite one is articulated from the infinite One by degrees of nihilitude. Nihilitude and finitude belong entirely to infinitude and are essential within infinite self-articulation. Before the beginning, there is a faint trace of indivisible difference. At the beginning, infinity and the possibility of finite being divide without exclusion. In the beginning, exclusive subjectivities … Continue reading Scraps for the exnihilism file
We look for meaning, and all we see is nothing. But this is exactly what meaning always looks like the instant before it irrupts out of nowhere ex nihilo, flooding the world with divine importance. “But this time is different!” Of course it is. This time is always different, and in this respect, it is … Continue reading Exnihilist maxim
To put it differently (but still topologically), what would be the opposite of a metaphysics of surprise? — its everse? The everse of a metaphysics of surprise would be a metaphysics of comprise — a belief, explicit or implicit, in our own capacity to comprise the absolute in some ultimate theism, pantheism, theory or praxis. … Continue reading Looping in on exnihilism
Keter d’Assiyah is the boundlessness of space and time. Keter d’Yetzirah is the infinitude of enwordments. Keter d’Beriah is the pregnant nihilo from which creation and revelation irrupt between enworldments. Keter d’Atzilut is boundless beyond being.
Yetzirah enworlds. Yetzirah is known only by its enworlding, and its enworlding is known only by its fruit: the givens of our “lived experience” and its consequent truth. Empathy: Yetzeros. Anything with graspable form, whether material thing, objective fact, or “subjective” phenomenon is of Assiyah. Here “subjective” belong in quotes, because subject, properly understood, is … Continue reading Exnihilist light
Speaking in Kabbalist language, objective thought is confined to Assiyah. Material and sensory objects are confined to Malkhut d’Assiyah; subjective objects to Yesod, Hod, Netzach, Gevurah and Chesed d’Assiyah; objective truth to Binah d’Assiyah; objectivity itself to Chokhmah d’Assiyah. (Psychologism everts the relationship of subject and object. It is the futile attempt to grasp truths … Continue reading Kabbalistic exnihilism
Forms are objective. All content of experience is form. Things as perceived by our senses are form. Ideas conceived by our mind are form. To our naive experience everything seems to be material and ideal objects, which is why we say things are “objectively real”, known in “objective truth”. In actuality, they are all formed … Continue reading Exnihilist light
In a deep and consequential epiphany, the revelation comes from nowhere. What I come to know as given, prior to the epiphany, is inconceivable and, therefore, nothing. In a moment of epiphany, a new given emerges from nothingness — ex nihilo. I, who could not conceive and was oblivious, and that which was inconceivable and … Continue reading Exnihilist Manifesto
When you stare out into death and don’t attempt to project an afterlife into it — when you let it be sheer nothingness, Ein Sof — God comes to you from nothingness, ex nihilo, and blesses your life with new meaning. Even if you cannot know or feel the truth of this declaration, it is … Continue reading Exnihilist declaration
Genesis does not begin with nothingness. Creation is not ex nihilo. Genesis begins with more than everything. Creation is ex infinitio. As with scripture, so it has been in that already-in-progress life inside which you awoke, from the chaos of infancy. Somethingness — toomuchness — is primal. In the beginning is chaos. Nothingness is abstract. … Continue reading Ex infinitio
1. When we are young we are full of potential. We feel immeasurable future before us and we overflow with hope. When we are older, after living most of a lifetime, looking back on the one narrow path we actually followed through these possibilities, we might feel bitter. Was all that possibility an illusion doomed … Continue reading Experiencing infinitude
Once again, I’ve been reading selections from the Sophia Perennis. My response today, as it has been from the beginning is this: Accepting as given the intellective certainty that we are endowed with microcosmic insight to know a divine macrocosmic Absolute is certainly one beautiful way to understand the human condition and to relate ourselves … Continue reading Exnihilist irruption
What is inconceivable to you is nothing to you. Conception of the formerly inconceivable makes existence immerge (sic!) from nothingness. * A witness of ex nihilo creation no longer trusts nothingness: infinity’s backglow betrays it. Any apparent nothingness might be a blind-spot concealing a novel everythingness. Witnessing ex nihilo creation transforms nihilists into exnihilists.
I am making a list of some strange phenomena which are the daily fare of strategic designers, but which are seldom experienced outside the field, at least not in the way designers experience them. By designers, I mean anyone engaged in human-centered design. These phenomena do not occur at the same intensity and frequency in … Continue reading Raw experiential resources for my next book
I have been thinking of PaRDeS as modes of understanding, but I have been losing confidence in that conception. And now I am having to rethink the being of the self and of how truth is known at each level. Buber’s duality of I-Thou and I-It strikes me as a choice of Ruach. When two … Continue reading Articulating truth and word
For the last 25 years I have been iteratively refining a set of technical distinctions. These are the heart of my philosophy and design practice. Kabbalah accommodate these distinctions and gives them language. Are these understandings already there in Kabbalah, waiting to be recognized? Or are the latent possibilities, realized by configuative instauration? I am … Continue reading Philosophical-Kabbalistic mapping
When I called the second edition of my Kabbalah reference sheet a “one-page book” I mostly meant it as a joke. As so often happens, however, this silly irony has become serious. I am thinking of it now as a book, and its title has become The Well-Tempered Kabbalah. I am continuing to work on … Continue reading The Well-Tempered Kabbalah
Within the actual world are myriad objects of myriad materials which can be combined or taken apart, in myriad ways. Within the formational world are myriad subjects to whom reality is given and withheld, each in its own way, according to receptive capacities and responsive capabilities. Within the revelatory world is being beyond subjectivity and … Continue reading Quadrephania