All posts by anomalogue

Native tongue

Kabbalah

The intuited truths I have struggled for decades to articulate clearly and coherently can be said with perfect clarity, coherence and luminosity in Kabbalistic language. But to ears who have not learned to hear it, this language is worse than foreign. It is the most senseless babble.

No. It is even worse than nonsense. It is meaning-sucking antisense that threatens reason. It is communicable insanity. It is a deadly mind virus, leaked from the inner laboratory of a secret laboratory, hidden under a ruin of a destroyed laboratory, concealed within a mirage of a long rebuilt laboratory. But the laboratory itself has escaped.

Exnihilist light

Kabbalah

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 entirely of Yetzirah. As a hand cannot grasp itself, as seeing is not itself visible, as hearing is not itself audible, the forming of Yetzirah is not itself a comprehensible form. (Comprehension cannot be comprehended, only existentially apprehended. But our apprehensions, reduced to events — if we are alert, receptive and diligent — can be understood in ways that open new possibilities of participatory knowing: Da’at d’Yetzirah.)

Beriah creates. Beriah does not form what is already here (or rather, more precisely, Beriah forms through/as Yetzirah.) Beriah creates finitude from its own infinity, which to us looks like something from nothing. Creation ex nihilo.

A profound event in Yetzirah rebirths us into a new world. We find ourselves reborn in a new rebirth of Malchut, a.k.a. Kingdom. This event allows Yetzirah to shine into the new life through Keter d’Assiyah, a.k.a. Crown, or if you prefer, Halo.

But multiple events of this kind demonstrates in the most undeniably immediate way that Yetzirah can enworld us myriad ways. What kind of reality is this that can bear forth entire worlds, each with its own shocking ontological novelties?

Shocking ontological novelty — inconceivable prior to its revelation, masked by oblivion — but thereafter impossible to re-obliviate — bringing forth new realities, new distinctions, new understandings that instantly recrystallize All in new brilliant clarity — from the depths of apparent Nothing! From Ayin.

Now — and only now — can we catch “sight” of Keter d’Yetzirah which opens the gates to the Kingdom of Malchut d’Beriah, from whom the brilliant halo of Keter d’Yetzirah, implodes forth. This is the ineclipsible light of exnihilism.

Who shall I say is calling?

Kabbalah, Philosophy

(Below is a response to the fifth aphorism from Gershom Scholem’s “Ten Unhistorical Aphorisms on the Kabbalah”.)

I (semi-ignorantly) intuit that Hegel’s dialectic rises only as far as Da’at d’Yetzirah. I suggest Yetzirah, because Hegel clearly leads his reader beyond Assiyah, by effecting changes in enworldment through Yetziratic (Yetz-erotic?) reunderstanding, thus demonstrating (for cooperative, receptive readers) how Yetzirah forms and reforms givenness of reality.

I (semi-knowingly) believe that Voegelin’s critique of Hegel, expressed in his own Platonic language, was this: Hegel’s understanding to this point is legitimate, but he is unable or (more likely) unwilling to intuit a supraintelligible world who manifests intelligibility but who transcends the intelligible. Thus Hegel barricades himself inside the intelligible world, and becomes prisoner and warden of a “mind [that] is its own place…”

But that self-consciousness is catastrophically insufficient if it is not crowned with the question of transcendence: from whom is the self-awareness given? Hegel’s Da’at d’Yetzirah was uncrowned and unperfected, so the entrance to Beriah was closed. (As was my own until very recently.)

“There are more things in Heaven and Earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy.”

Metanoia is necessary but insufficient. We must re-pense and turn to our creator: Teshuvah. An uncrowned philosophy is a dream of misapotheosis.

My current understanding of Da’at is that it is a personal self-consciousness of one’s own being within a given Sefirot — a Sefirot becoming self-conscious within the center of one’s self.

  • Da’at d’Assiyah answers to the nickname Nefesh.
  • Da’at d’Yetzirah answers to the nickname Ruach.
  • Da’at d’Beriah answers to the nickname Neshemah.
  • Da’at d’Atzilut answers to the nickname Chayah.

When addressed by the Crown, we answer from fourfold Da’at: Hineini.

But who shall I say is calling?

A halo is a luminous tunnel within whom one holy face appears to another.

Fourfoldedly

Kabbalah

When we understand fourfoldedly, we vivify ourselves fourfoldedly, and inhabit four-worlds-in-one.

Every halo is a tunnel… up the trunk of the Trees of Life…

…up the artery in the divine circulatory system (divine light flowing down, divine minerals flowing up)…

…up the spinal column of Adam Kadmon, encased in thirteen vertebrae.

Insight bombs

Biography, Kabbalah, Letterpress

“It lies beyond the scope of this study to deal in a comprehensive manner with the issue of [y]… for a comprehensive study of this matter would require a separate study. But for present purposes, suffice it to say [x]…”

Whenever an author starts a sentence this way, I am on the edge of my seat, because I just know the author is winding up to deliver an insight bomb that I will be obsessive-compelled to put in my insane quotation wiki and/or letterpress print into pulpy paper.

To steal Jerry Seinfeld’s “why don’t we make the whole airplane out of the black box” joke, I would like a whole book made of matters requiring a whole book to study comprehensively.

(And this is exactly what Nietzsche and Borges did in their respective hyperfictional genres! Which is exactly why I adore them both. I read them with an ecstatic part of “myself” who feels entire unborn worlds within a sentence, word or letter.)

Polycenteredness

Philosophy

Each person was born directly into the center of the universe, and dwells there now, however far they have wandered. To reach them, we must address this central point, but from our own centrality. Our best originality polycenters us together, speaking from and to our common origin.

Hall of reflex

Philosophy

When we are shocked by the possibility that apparent truths we have always assumed to be necessary and absolute may be discretionary and relative we can fall into a reflexive assumption that — now that we finally have some freedom in how we understand — we should immediately exercise our new freedom and get to work re-understanding everything.

But who says? We might discover, for instance that the — singular supreme truth we were raised to believe is far from singular or supreme, but does it follow that we are now obligated to adopt an opposite or alternative one, or none of them?

We might discover that what seems self-evident to us falls apart under rigorous scrutiny, but does it follow that we must automatically reject all intuitive self-evidence, and believe exclusively in the testimony of rigor?

We might find that the origins and accounts of moral norms we were taught to obey and fear are not only spurious, but groundless, or grounded in things we despise. Are we not only allowed but obligated to reject them on these grounds?

Behind all these reactions is a faith in something very few of us have detected, questioned, or even know how to confront.

But, say we do detect, question and confront it — are we obligated to abandon it now that we can…?

Dollars-for-drugery

Design

A healthy organization is not primarily fueled by money. The same is true of a healthy economy. To the degree an economy runs exclusively on money, it is an unhappy, unwholesome economy.

This is not meant to suggest that money is not important. Money helps provide artificial motivation when organic and intrinsic motivations are insufficient to make action happen. Organic and intrinsic motivations include things like inspiration, curiosity, enjoyment of skillful action, camaraderie, reciprocity in mutual generosity, desire to help, sense of duty, habit, momentum, friendly competition, joy of progress, satisfaction of reaching goals, etc. It is the motivations of play.

Think of money like promises in a marriage. Promises are absolutely necessary to keep a marriage alive, but if a marriage is nothing but forcing oneself to fulfill promises — to do things one would very much prefer not to do — after a point, that marriage is in trouble.

But when most or all of the motivation in an organization comes from money, the organization can be said to run on artificial motivation. Too much of this, and an organization will begin to feel artificial, in the pejorative sense of “unnatural”. That icky, lifeless, meaningless, unlovable feeling we call “corporate” is the result of an organization relying on money to generate service. A corporation can hire professional meaning-makers — “creatives” — to apply a veneer of meaning, play or style to the outer surface of such an organization, but such attempts are skin deep and fool nobody.

A dollars-for-drudgery organization will feel dry, boring and neutral at best. At worst it will feel false, soulless, coercive, manipulative and threatening to anyone with an intact spirit.

The essential purpose of service design is to understand how to organize people with needs to give specific kinds of value and needs to receive specific kinds of value so that they can exchange value with one another in mutually beneficial ways. This kind of organization allows organizations to reduce their dependence on motivation by money to keep things running. Service design aspires to social orders animated by rich, dense, diverse value exchanges of function, meaning and belonging, substantiated by carefully formed material and nonmaterial artifacts.

The goal is to create living organizations that thrive through natural, organic intrinsic motivations, as opposed so socially engineered mechanisms that run on money and which are controlled by afar through monitoring and driven by greed for rewards and fear of punishments.

In this money-driven economy it is easy to use designers to find new ingenious ways to improve the social engineering of institutions. The modern designer’s skillset can certainly be harnessed to creating management systems of control and monitoring. But designers rarely enter the field of design to amass money, otherwise they would pursue something more lucrative, like management or engineering. And the value exchange in such an application of their skill will not work out for a designer who is a designer from the heart.

Kabbalistic exnihilism

Hermeneutics, Kabbalah

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 of Yetzirah in the inadequate terms of Assiyah. Psychologized religion is antireligion.)

Until one intuits the transcendent source of all the material and immaterial objects, one knows nothing of Yetzirah. Yetzirah can only be known by apperceptive participation in various modes of existence in Yetzirah. (This is the radical pluralism of hermeneutics.) Yetzirah is known solely by its fruits in Assiyah.

But the indirect experiencing of Yetzirah can open awareness to Beriah — but only if we learn how nothingness works. It is natural to know nothing of nothingness.

Once we catch Beriah in the act of creation ex nihilo, we become exnihilists.

Symbolic degradations

Esoterism

Symbolic experience is intensely intuitive — pre-cognitive.

What we do with these experiences, however, has everything to do with how we cognize. And that “cognitive how” is determined by how our intuitions are organized as organs in a spiritual organism.

Such spiritual organisms are souls, and the soul’s organic functioning is faith.

This organic faith-functioning of souls, though, is known solely by its fruits — the objects of faith: belief, language, action, style, preferences, etc.

Those unable to understand upwards from object mangle everything symbolic and try to make symbols signify downwards. Downward into literalism, into explicit beliefs, into physicality, into body — into irreversible downwardness.

The same thing that makes a “jihadist” make literal war on neighbors who seek peace — is the same thing that drives those seized by the upward call of Androgyne to instead lie down under the knife on an operating table — is the same thing that compelled human sacrifices — is the same thing that makes a psychologist imagine a world of suppressed, submerged subconscious beliefs as the wellspring of myth — is the same thing that makes charlatans use the celestial maps to navigate sewers and to conjure chaos from sacred order in order to sell mumbo jumbo to the gullible.

When an alchemist’s metaphysic knows only the lowest physicality he is cursed with the Midas touch, compulsively turning whatever gold he touches into cash.

Mechanocracy

Politics

If you accept James Burnham’s theory of managerialism, it is clear that AI is bringing that social order to an abrupt end. And changes in social order bring revolution.

We have a strange tendency, perhaps inherited by Marx, to omit questions of collective character from macrosocial analyses. It is almost as if we think the persons who constitute overclasses are interchangeable tokens. It’s just a quantitative difference ranging from zero power and total innocence to absolute power and absolute corruption.

I would say, though, that those who ascend by military prowess, those who ascend by risking and winning wild bets, those who ascend by forming interpersonal relationships, and those who ascend with pure engineering brainpower will form entirely different ruling classes who will dominate society very differently.

We are about to witness a return to genuine capitalism, after a hiatus we didn’t even realize had happened.

The means of production are being re-seized by a technological elite, who win, not by understanding people, but by rigorously excluding personal considerations. Theirs is an objectivity through elimination of subjectivity — or at least all subjectivity beyond their own hyper-technik subject.

These new technologies not only manufacture things, but information, analysis, insights, beliefs and souls. And they manufacture new technologies that invent technology-inventing technologies. And they manufacture weapon systems that no force of human warriors however large, skilled or brave can battle longer than a single afternoon.

Every age has its apocalypse. We have these apocalypses because each of us will die, and to our little selves, when we die the world dies with us. We feel it coming: nothingness.

We rummage in the dirt for what meanings mean.

2016, explained

Politics

I can’t believe I never posted this. I’ve been repeating it for years.

Who you voted for in 2016 is almost entirely a matter of who you hated more as a kid: the teacher’s pet, who took your name and made you stay in from recess, or the bully who atomic-super-wedgied you on the playground.

The Great Tetrad

Kabbalah

At the core of Kabbalah is a tetrad — a hierarchical tetrad, the tetrad — most compactly expressed in the Tetragrammaton — ???? — Yod – Hey (1) – Vav – Hey (2).

The Olamot, the four worlds — Atzilut (Emanation), Beriah (Creation), Yetzirah (Formation), Assiyah (Actualization) — correspond to each of these letters, as does our own selfhood across these four worlds — the distinctive kind of subjective presence and participation in each of the worlds. One very important kind of participation — increasingly important as one ascends from the actualizing world of Assiyah toward Atzilut — is modes of understanding, exemplified in four modes of understanding scripture, the hermeneutic tetrad PaRDeS. These definitions come from Nissan Dovid Dubov’s Inward Bound:

  • Pshat – Simple interpretation corresponds to the world of Assiyah. (Hey 2)
  • Remez – Allusionary interpretation corresponds to the world of Yetzirah. (Vav)
  • Drush – Homiletical interpretation corresponds to the world of Beriah. (Hey 1)
  • Sod – Secret/mystical interpretation corresponds to the world of Atzilut. (Yod)

At this point, I’d call these modes, respectively: factual, literary, revelatory, transformative.

The reason these hermeneutic modes matter to me, apart from the simple fact that hermeneutics is intrinsically fascinating, is that these modes of understanding are, I believe, our best and most tangible access to what otherwise might seem grand abstract speculations on unknowable metaphysical ultimates.

We “know” Yetzirah and its relationship to Assiyah because we have understood truths belonging to each, in a manner suited to each. We know how to read literary fiction and lose ourselves in its imaginary, vividly populated, poetic space, while bodily seated in an actual chair in an actual room. And when we have turned our attention from our book, stood up and looked around actual places, we have experienced how the mood, tone and coloration of our book clings to the world around us. Two parts of ourselves are activated together, and sometimes this feels like a restoration of inner integrity.

If you understand the experience of the scenario I just described, imagine taking this kind of experience as indicative of realities that elude the comprehending grip of factual knowledge.

Try to entertain the possibility that the materialism most educated people take for granted is only one possible mode of understanding, optimized for predicting and controlling the behavior of physical matter — but that this mode of understanding comes with tradeoffs, namely a loss of meaning and purpose. The cost of a materialist metaphysic is nihilism.

A materialist will conceptualize my scenario (of the experience of being absorbed in reading) physically and biologically. It will be all about evolution, organisms, societies, economies, brains, neurons, paper, ink, molecules, atoms, quarks, energy, etc., and, in doing so, they will close off myriad incommensurable modes of understanding. These modes of understanding, however, are the very channels that open us to feeling our belonging in creation. No amount of fairness or justice, affordance of dignity, acknowledgment of our various self-classification in this or that social identity can do anything to replace this lost meaning. And indulging in carnal or political pleasures or passions, provides only temporary relief, and eventually none at all. Addictions all terminate this way.

Placing material reality, and political realities in broader contexts of reality and ways of knowing, and giving each its own full due validity — science works, and justice is good! — allows us to develop higher selves who open us to the source of all meaning.

If we do not do this, we will become increasingly capable of controlling material reality, but increasingly alienated from who we are or why we should care about anything. We will rely on stimulating animal rage in order to even feel our own selfhood through that thick numbness that engulfs us. This is why I am one of the increasing numbers who advocate a return to religion, though I believe that many, perhaps most, of the loudest religion advocates are as clueless about religion as those who despise and oppose religion.

So, again, we know the Olamot, who are the various levels of emanation of the Absolute / One / Ein Sof by how we, ourselves, are present in them, and we know our presence through our participation — most tangibly through how we understand and the contents of our understanding. Our participation across the Olamot activates and unites our selves — highest to lowest — together and within their source, bathing our lives and worlds with meaning and light. So we know reality, ourselves and our relationship to God (in God’s own hierarchical Allness — ???? ) — all together, inseparably.

So:

  • In Assiyah, Nefesh (vital soul) animates as the Pshat / factual mode of understanding. (Hey 2)
  • In Yetzirah, Ruach (spirit) animates as the Remez / allusionary (literary) mode of understanding. (Vav)
  • In Beriah, Neshema (breath of life) animates as the Drush / homiletic (revelatory) mode of understanding. (Hey 1)
  • In Atzilut, Chayah (living one) animates as the Sod / mystical (transformative) mode of understanding.

One more related idea… A mistake I have been making is confusing the Sefirah/Sefirot associated with each world for the world itself. Or worse, the idea of the Sefirah, for the Sefirah, for the world.

The kinds of ideas beings like ourselves can have, ideas that are defined conceptual objects, belong only to the world of Assiyah. Actual, physical objects are confined to Malkhut in Assiyah, and the rest are mental or emotional objects.

When we try to think worlds above Assiyah, the best we can do is contemplate mental objects that imperfectly correspond to and transmit meaning from being beyond objective knowledge.

So, it is by conceptual objects of the Sefirot that we begin to understand higher worlds. By Yesod, Hod, Netzach, Tif’eret, Gevurah and Chesed we can conceptually approximate and receive the superformal meanings of Yetzirah. By Binah, we can conceptually approximate and receive the meaning of Beriah. By Chokhmah we can conceptually approximate and receive the meaning of Assiyah. This is (I think) why we speak of Sefirot corresponding to or predominating among worlds.

In all of this, of course, I may very well be wrong, especially where I say, parenthetically, “I think”. I’m being cautious, where I am aware of a need for caution. I don’t know why I bother, though. Our deepest errors are never where we expect them.

All these understandings, of course, make me insanely happy, which always compels me to letterpress something beautiful and holy.

I’m thinking of a reference card, connecting the Tetragrammaton to the four Olamot, each linked to a Sefirot, to the levels of soul, to the hermeneutic modes of PaRDeS.

This is a first, rough, highly inadequate draft. I’m going to consult with a rabbi to ensure everything is correct, both the ideas and the Hebrew. And I’m going to work at improving and perfecting its beauty and clarity.

This is the deepest and fastest change in understanding I’ve experienced since 2011, when my world was inverted, razed and reconstituted by Bruno Latour.

I’m no longer a philosopher at all. I have great respect for objective knowing, even more for objective praxis, but both are positively dwarfed by my respect and love for what transcends objective truths and the realities we can know by objective means.

I’m no longer a philosopher. Perhaps I never was one. What I am is a Kabbalist, still novice.