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.
Category Archives: Philosophy
Anteconscious
The invention of “the unconscious” was a disaster, if only for its impact on folk psychology. Maybe we would be better off talking about the anteconscious. I think we would.
Hall of reflex
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…?
Kabbalistic exnihilism
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.
Protected: On identity
Kabbalistic reflections on Guenon
Guenon:
The Self is thus the principle by which all the states of the being exist, each in its own proper sphere, which may be called a degree of existence; and this must be understood not only of the manifested states — whether individual, like the human state, or supraindividual, in other words whether formal or formless, but also, though the word “exist” then becomes inadequate, of the unmanifested states, comprising all those possibilities which, by their very nature, do not admit of any manifestation, as well as the possibilities of manifestation themselves in their principial state; but this Self subsists by itself alone, for in the total and indivisible unity of its innermost nature it has not, and cannot have, any principle external to itself.
This one-sentence passage is very dense and of the highest importance, so I want to break it down into its elemental components, and connect them with Kabbalistic concepts, which are rapidly becoming my native tongue. My own Kabbalistic connections will be italicized and parenthesized.
- Self is the universal principle. By the principle of Self all other states of the being exist.
- There is no principle by which Self exists. Self is the principle of all principles.
- States of being exist in various degrees of existence, which may regarded as spheres. (In Kabbalah, these spheres are articulated into “four worlds”, Olamot.)
- The human individual state is formal. The supraindividual state is formless. (In Kabbalah, the formal and individual world is Assiyah. The formless, supraindividual world is Yetzirah.)
- Manifested and unmanifested states is a different distinction from formal and formless. So far, we have spoken only of manifested states which can properly be said to “exist” (again, the actual world of Assiyah and the formational world of Yetzirah. Now we are transcending to the unmanifested worlds of Beriah — creation — and Atzilut — emanation).
- Of the unmanifested states some do admit of manifestation and are the possibilities of manifestation in their principial state. (The former is the world of Beriah, which manifests by principle and in its lowest Sefirah — Beriah Malkhut — creates the highest Sefirah in Yetzirah — Yetzirah Keter — from which the world of Yetzirah manifests, via the Yetzirah Sefirot).
(Those unmanifested states that do not admit of manifestation are only of Atzilut, but not of Beriah. These are pure ineffable mystery, for the sake of which All is, and we feel this for-the-sake-of whenever anything matters to us. When we say “God is love” the truth of this statement is charged by Atzilut, and beyond Atzilut, Ein Sof.)
I have what might be an unusual understanding of Yetzirah is essentially supraformal, because it forms, but is not itself form, just as seeing sees but is not seen and hearing hears but is not heard.
I’ve come to understand the Sefirot of Assiyah as attempting, in human objective terms, to represent the worlds above, but by uppaya (skillful means to teach transcendent truths inexpressible in the terms of the present faith-state of the learner).
We try to indicate the forming of Yetzirah by the conceptual forms of the Sefirot Yesod, Hod, Netzach, Tif’eret, Gevurah and Chesed. Those are formal indicators of supraformal manifested being, formal fruit by which we know the tree of formation.
(The Hod-Netzach pair in Assiyah, incidentally, is the locus of uppaya.)
By my understanding The subtle (or astral) plane is not Yetzirah itself. The subtle plane is only these non-material objective entities that belong to the Sefirot who objectively represent Yetzirah.
The entire point of my weird term “enception” is to establish a distinction between capacity to form, formation and form, capacity to conceive, conceiving and concept! A capacity to form — to conceive or perceive — or most generally, to receive (the literal meaning of the word “kabbalah”!) is created from Beriah, manifests in Yetzirah as a action — forming — and then actualizes in Assiyah as forms, concepts, sensibly recognized (perceived) material objects, etc.
So an enception is the analogue to the faculty of sight, hearing.
Without the requisite enception, one remains oblivious to what one would otherwise receive. When a person exclaims “I was blind, but now I see!” this is the annunciation of enception. It is by this — disoblivion, anamnesis — that we experience Beriah.
And it is by this that we can never again take nihilism at face value. Everything can, at any minute irrupt from oblivion and bathe the world with overwhelming meaning. Nothingness is where this meaning enters, and so nothing is no longer an argument against anything. Exnihilism annihilates nihilism!
None of this is meant to suggest these worlds are not metaphysically real, only that our attempts to make them objective is uppaya.
Reification is different from objectification. This Kabbalistic ontology hyperreifies and disobjectifies the worlds beyond Assiyah.
Protected: Fidelity to faith
Pyrite Rule
Pyrite Rule: Thou must do unto me as I would do unto others.
Knowing the absence of knowing
I get excited when I meet service designers who entered the discipline from practical need.
Such service designers encountered some problem or set of problems they recognized as beyond the reach of their own methodology.
This is much harder than it sounds: The adage “If all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail” is profoundly true. To see beyond the expert’s disciplinary scotomas requires a poet’s originary eye.
These people recognized that they not only lacked the tools and methods to solve a kind of problem they faced, they lacked concepts and language for defining and communicating them. Despite this conceptual chaos known as perplexity they searched out ideas, vocabulary, methods, tools and logics until they found them in service design.
There are many fine service designers out there who were drawn to service design in undergraduate school. They were presented with an array of career options and for various reasons — interest, ability and opportunity — chose service design.
But having that before-and-after experience of a real-life practical perplexity resolved into a defined, solvable problem leaves a permanent trace in a practitioner — an appreciation that is lacking in people who learned to see both the solution and the problem before they ever struggled without either.
The same is true of human-centered design in general. HCD was not always here to learn and use. It only became self-evident and inevitable only after it was, through arduous work, instaurated as a discipline. HCD was a hard-won accomplishment. People who have been trained in HCD methodologies sometimes speak knowingly about the many methods they have learned and could learn, but this knowingness betrays an obliviousness to the blind chaos and nothingness from which these methods emerged. They cannot imagine looking at a design problem and seeing only an engineering, marketing and technical writing problem. They can’t see how Don Norman did anything terribly impressive, and so perhaps his reputation should be reassessed and downgraded.
It is the same difference as people who lived through the fog and fear of historical events, whose outcomes were the furthest thing from assured, and those who learned the history with the 20/20 vision of hindsight, and are blind to the blindness that permeates every unfolding present and believe the unknown only hides in darkness.
The study of history is difficult because we are so possessed by the present. It is freeing ourselves from the omniscience of now and reclaiming the unknowing of the past that is hard. It becomes much harder when our “historical fiction” revises history to force it into conformity with contemporary prejudices, instead of alien and much more interesting prejudices of the past — which are the very essence of history. Popular entertainment product like American Girls and Bridgerton exclude history from their contemporary costume dramas, and this is why young consumers of this “relatable” content are radical presentists. Every totalitarianism tries to establish its own year zero, and to lock away in oblivion the prehistory that produced it.
It is those simple world-transforming insights that are hardest to conceive, but then after, hardest to unconceive. Once we see them we cannot unsee them. We cannot even conceive life before their conception. They shape even our memories and our grasp of prehistory.
Food tastes different to people who have experienced hunger.
I hope Kabbalists recognize me as someone who came to the tradition from the most urgent need.
I was made to memorize this Emily Dickinson poem in ninth grade:
Success is counted sweetest
By those who ne’er succeed.
To comprehend a nectar
Requires sorest need.Not one of all the purple Host
Who took the Flag today
Can tell the definition
So clear of victoryAs he defeated – dying –
On whose forbidden ear
The distant strains of triumph
Burst agonized and clear!
Metaconversions
If you have experienced no authentic conversions you’ll conceive conversion as change in belief. “I used to think this, but now I think that.” You may be pretty sure you’ve experienced conversions, but that you describe it using different language. Everything transpires within the same universe. Deep changes in how we experience the universe are psychological. Subjective reality changes, but objective reality remains the same. There is much chatter about pluralism, empathy, self-awareness, understanding, ethics and even spirituality, and these epiphenomena feel important to us. They are crowned with faint but opaque halos of vague significance.
If you have experienced one authentic conversion, you’ll conceive conversion as a revelation of a formerly concealed reality. “I was blind, but now I see.” You transitioned from a false faith to the true faith. The universe veiled something infinitely profound, ineffable and important.
Once you have experienced two conversions, though, you’ll conceive conversion as transition between faiths, each with some gain and some loss. You are converted to a radically pluralistic world where conversions are a perpetual possibility. Conversions are no longer as consequential as before, because they happen against a stable background of enworlding faiths. It is a major conversion to minor conversions and sporadic trivial conversions. Liberalism is far deeper than anyone suspected!
But then, after who knows how many minor conversions — maybe six? nine? seventeen? — deep patterns emerge. We notice: When everything changes, some subtle constants never change, and these constants become impossible to doubt, at least in practice, and only if we are subjectively fastidious. And now a major conversion happens. And this one feels like the first conversion. “I was blind, but now I see.”… transition from a false faith to the true faith… something infinitely profound, ineffable and important is now plainly revealed.
Keter – Da’at
Everso and the four worlds
I understand that most of my recent philosophical focus has concentrated in Yesod-Malchut within the world of Beriah, which corresponds with Keter-Da’at within the world of Yetzirah. This is where the plurality of Yetzirah’s forms converge and are constrained by the supraformal Absolute.
(The closest thing we can have to “absolute truth” are truths which are faithful to the supraformal Absolute as they grasp whatever content they comprehend. We can clearly and consistently comprehend all kinds of forms, but only some of these help us maintain our roots in transcendent reality. Many, in fact, sever these roots, in order to grasp more comprehensively, clearly or consistently. This is what Technic systematically, methodically does, in fact.)
Prior to this, I focused on Yesod-Malchut within the world of Yetzirah and Keter-Da’at of the world of Assiyah. This is where the “Everso” eversion occurs. This is where subjective potential “concavity” manifests in actual grasping of “convex” objects of experience — where intentionality finds intentional objects. Those material objects we call “objectively real” are the entities of Malchut in the world of Assiyah. And the truths we call “subjective” are, in fact, the imaginative and emotional objects of Yesod, Hod, Netzach, Tif’eret, Geverah and Chesed. The purely conceptual, abstract objects of modern philosophy reach up into Beriah and Chokhmah within Assiyah. Modern theology extends to Keter within Assiyah.
Assiyah is objective top to bottom, and even what it calls “subjective” (meaning “nonmaterial”) is, in terms of form, objective.
Yetzirah, though essentially formal, is formation — the act of forming — the How of formation. We cannot understand formation in direct formal terms. New terms — new How and new What — are needed to get at this level of truth. The Tree of Yetzirah is known by its objective fruits in Assiyah. Yetzirah conceives and enwords, and manifests an enworldment of Assiyah.
When it seems that we inhabit different worlds, this is because we enworld Malchut by different states of Yetzirah.
And when it seems that some of these worlds are nihilistic, alienated and alienating (or to themselves, uncompromisingly scientific, rigorous, and fully in touch with objective reality) and others of these worlds are saturated with meaning and divine light (or to others subjective, irrational, fantastical, retrograde, woowoo or dogmatic), this is because some enworldments are focused solely on Assiyah, where others are focused primarily or exclusively on Beriah.
Judaism tries to enworld transparently between Beriah and Assiyah. A transparent Yetzirah is angelic, in its proper sense. A Yetzirah that attempts ultimacy and autonomy (from Beriah) is ideological.
Yetzirah, alone with Assiyah, without Beriah, seems pluralistic. The question is only what conceptual systems — Kuhnian paradigms — can adequately organize our material actualities so we can understand and control matter.
Things get considerably more complex and constrained if we consider the subjective effect of our paradigms. Do they flood reality with meaning, beauty and hope, or do they drain it of meaning and drown us in despair? This is a function of Yetzirah’s relationship with Beriah. Now the question is whether our conceptual systems organize our material actualities together with a relationship with the Divine One of whom we are an organic part.
One way I have expressed this is that, since the Enlightenment, we have focused exclusively on the What and the How of our experience, and bracketed the Why. Scientific method excludes all Why considerations. Liberal-Democracies proceduralize public life, and relegate all meaning to the private realm of home, business and faith community.
This moment in history witnesses a popular implosion of nihilism. It seems most people cannot find meaning in the condition we’ve created for ourselves — the enworldment of Technic, the enworldment that capitalism and communism alike enworld and inhabit — both uncritically, unconsciously and with pseudo-divine omniscience.
Intentional focus
In phenomenology, all consciousness is understood to be consciousness of something. We call this something the intentional object.
But must this something be an object?
By object, I do not even mean physical object. I mean forms of every kind. Objective forms are, in fact, primarily conceptual, even when we perceive them as material.
(This points to why I enjoy provoking folks who call themselves “materialists” and call them idealists who traffic in ideas about matter — without ever encountering matter herself.)
Supraformal and infraformal realities can be intended, and intended in quite different ways than objects. But most of us, apparently, only know how to intend objectively, and this is not only intellectually limiting — it is intellectually crippling. It makes religion impossible.
A better word might be “intentional focus”.
Thambos
A footnote from Hadot’s book on Plotinus: “Thambos designates a kind of ‘sacred terror which one feels at the approach of a person or object charged with supernatural force’…”
I’m researching and actually finding books about ancient Greece’s repertoire of words designating responses to transcendence.
Again, my friend Jokin’s Basque saying comes to mind: “What has a name is real.”
Conversely, what lacks a name, lacks reality. At least for the good residents of Wordworld, where people feel happiness and sadness and anger and, now, trauma.
The view from the Tilt-a-Whirl
A dust storm gains visibility from the debris it picks up and sets in motion. The mass in motion makes it real. From without, it is a dark, chaotic and destructive object, tossing and trampling the land, ruining whatever blocks its path. But from its own wildly whirling standpoint, the world is already spinning out of control. Everywhere it looks it sees violent power, careening and smashing everything.
Nobody goes to a carnival just to stand and look at the rides. To really experience the carnival, climb into the Tilt-a-Whirl and watch what happens to the whole world around you. Now it is obvious who hurtles through space. It is the observers who think they stand on solid ground.
Ptolemy. Galileo. Einstein.
Whirl
There truly is no point in arguing into a closed epistemic-moral-logical circle, especially when that circle touches neither ground nor sky but just swirls about in mid-air.
At this middling height and depth, nothing is anchored enough to arrest its motion.
And its motion is all it is, however much it seems to turn on its revolutionary objects.
Argument feeds its force and gives it new material to pick up and wind into its own forms, now bound up in its own twisted objectivity.
We just have to wait for it to stop whirling and to waft apart… vapid… dissipated… dead air.
Barbell
My boss reminded me of a drawing I used to use a lot 15 or so years ago. I called it the barbell, and it looked like this.
I would draw it very differently today. But there is a truth in it. Our exchanges with one another, whether communications, services or products, are only the foreground to a relationship.
That relationship has a continuity to it, and today I would call that continuous relationship a real being that transcends each person in the relationship. It is a collective soul — an egregore.
We can psychologically reduce that being and chop it into bits and stuff the bits into mindstuff within physical brains. When we do that we gain control over it. We can manage it and measure it. We can buy and sell it, and that’s great. Or we can turn it over to a government for equitable distribution., and that’s also great.
But we lose something when we do that. Because it is entirely possible to understand the world in ways that do better justice to what we actually experience when we relate to one another and participate in beings that we know transcend us. It does better justice to our moral insights and experiences of awe, beauty and love.
This understanding does better justice to scientific and technological practices and understandings than scientific and technological understandings and practices can do to it. But none of this can be explained in scientific and technological terms.
Taking this latter road makes all the difference. Everything changes because one’s own everything has changed.
Kill the giants
According to Wikipedia the expression “standing on the shoulders of giants” originated with William of Conches:
The ancients had only the books which they themselves wrote, but we have all their books and moreover all those which have been written from the beginning until our time.… Hence we are like a dwarf perched on the shoulders of a giant. The former sees further than the giant, not because of his own stature, but because of the stature of his bearer. Similarly, we [moderns] see more than the ancients, because our writings, modest as they are, are added to their great works.
I was going to say that the dwarfs despise the giants for being so short and lowly, but I think that adds little to the original text.
So, yeah, what William of Conches said: we all intellectually, and in some ways morally, perch upon the shoulders of giants.
But it is important to recognize that our perch gives us much more than an expansive view of the objects around us. Our height also gives us a lofty subjectivity — a subjectivity who not only sees and knows, but also judges and feels from a height.
We lose something crucial when we naively assume that this altitude is our natural birthright. When height is all we have ever known, it is easy to take for granted the layers upon layers of understanding that have raised us further and further above barbarity.
We cannot imagine how life might be at lower elevations. We are incapable of imagining ourselves as possible selves born in barbarous times and conditions. We confuse the peaceful, sensitive, reasonable second-natures instilled in the nursery with primordial nature herself.
Even without civilization, we think, we would have had the virtues, attitudes and understandings essential to who we are.
We keep the gifts of civilization, but lose all gratitude. We steal the gifts of our ancestors.
But we go from ingratitude to depravity when we start blaming the giants for the heights we have not yet reached, when we see the giants beneath us not as a tower lifting us up but iron chains holding us down. We think that if we untether ourselves from the bloody dirt around the giants’ feet, we will float up to the utopian heaven where we belong.
So we punch down, kick down, drop heavy rocks, pour molten lead and buckets of acid on the past. Once the giants are dead to us, their accomplishments forgotten, their teachings unlearned, the chains will corrode, dissolve and vanish into oblivion. Finally, we are free.
Spiritual prosopagnosia
Materialists suffer from spriritual prosopagnosia.
Prosopagnosiacs cannot recognize faces, so they are unable to identify the same person in different settings.
To someone who can recognize faces, it is immediately obvious when the same person is doing different acts. To a prosopagnosiac, determining whether a person doing an act on different days requires an elaborate process of observation and reasoning.
Spiritual prosopagnosiacs cannot recognize the same soul in different contexts.
Materialists believe only in material reality, so they can’t recognize that the same soul across multiple acts for the simple reason that, to them, souls aren’t real. Souls are a quaint way to characterize minds. And minds are epiphenomena of brains.
So if you can’t point to some continuous material entity, or continuous network of entities, that causes something, there is no real responsible being . There is only an image, projection, confusion or propagandistic notion on the part of the person seeing it.
A spiritual prosopagnosiac cannot recognize individual souls, and are unable to tell when an intimate has changed souls on them, as sometimes happens, and is no longer faithful to them. Same brain means same person. Being unfaithful is something a person’s body does. If the body hasn’t been unfaithful, then everything is the same.
But things become impossible if a collective psyche — an egregore — is behind various public events. This requires a process of observation and reasoning so elaborate that it borders on impossible. And for a materialist, that kind of impossibility is strong evidence, if not proof, of nonexistence. They dissolve delusions with rigor.
Prosopagnosia is rare, so prosopagnosiacs tend to recognize their condition. Not so with spiritual prosopagnosiacs. They are, in fact, participants in a collective soul that imparts spiritual prosopagnosia on its participants.
I’d write more but my invisible elephant needs to be taken out for his daily walk.
Hymn to Ayin
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 itself was epiphany. Creation continues, for each of us, in the renewal of epiphany.
This nothingness must never be confused with the dead, hopeless nonexistence into which all past, present and future love, joy and light is sucked and annihilated — the nothingness of nihilism.
Ex nihilo, the from-nothing.
Ad nihilo, the to-nothing.
One places a shimmering halo around our heads, radiating beyond mind, into being and beyond it.
The other places a light-sucking antihalo inside our skulls, made of pure weight, which drops itself through the heart, through the gut, and falls interminably into a fathomless pit beneath belowness. If you have ever felt depression, you will recognize this.
For creatures like us, nothingness is inseparable from everythingness. And in some respects the everythingness is what hides nothingness from us.
We know everything — past, present and future — only by our way of knowing.
A depressed or nihilistic way of knowing produces a depressing, hopeless, meaningless, nihilistic understanding of everything. The past, even a past one experienced firsthand as happy, is now revealed as delusional bullshit happiness, or doomed happiness or groundless happiness. And similarly the future is drained of hope and meaning. Everything will come to nothing.
A depressed self takes a depressing reality as given.
A depressed self sees no meaning, joy, happiness or (if we are honest) love, and concludes that this absence of evidence of value is evidence of absence of value.
Nihilism is the bad faith of depression, that drowns everything in an omniscience of cynicism.
Nihilism sees bullshit wherever it looks. But nihilism sees with an evil eye. It is nihilism that is bullshit.
The everpresent possibility of epiphany annihilates nihilism and repairs awareness of infinity in nothingness. We relearn the vision of the invisible, the being within Ayin.
When an epiphany comes, we are overwhelmed. Everything changes. The epiphany overflows the present, and saturates our memories and anticipations with new meaning. What we now mean when we say “everything” is different from what we meant prior to the epiphany. It is by this epiphany that we understand even our old understanding, and this means to forget how things were, unless we carefully preserve before and after, in order to compare them, and catch sight of the oblivion into which the before slips and from which the after emerges. This comparison teaches something crucial that could be called the transformation of everythings.
We realize, suddenly, meaning can irrupt into everything at any moment. And this irruption of meaning is always and necessarily inconceivable until the moment of epiphany. We cannot conceive or perceive its arrival because its arrival is itself the capacity to conceive or perceive. And because this possibility is always inconceivable and imperceptible, the apparent nonexistence of hope in hopelessness, the apparent absence of all meaning in meaninglessness, the apparent nonexistence of divinity in atheism — these are illusions. They mistake absolutely, mistaking infinity for zero. They mistake Ayin for dead nonexistence.
If the epiphany of inexhaustible epiphany comes to you ex nihilo — and it might arrive at any moment, especially if you open your hands and invite it — nihilism is behind you. You are now and forever an exnihilist.
Atheists are right: God, in fact, does not exist.
But atheists are not right enough: God is existence itself, and the source of existence beyond being.
Relativists are right: There is no absolute objective truth.
But relativists are not right enough: There is truth of the Absolute, which is not objective, nor subjective, but both and neither.
Disbelieve in God if you have no God to believe in.
Disbelieve forcefully, thoroughly, clearly, profoundly, nobly.
But try to understand: the object of your noblest disbelief is not God.
You can suspend final disbelief. This is your birthright.
The hatred of those who harbor such ill feelings as, ‘He reviled me, assaulted me, vanquished me and robbed me,’ is never appeased.
The hatred of those who do not harbor such ill feelings as, ‘He reviled me, assaulted me, vanquished me and robbed me,’ is easily pacified.
Through hatred, hatreds are never appeased; through non-hatred are hatreds always appeased — and this is a law eternal.
“Most people never realize that all of us here shall one day perish. But those who do realize that truth settle their quarrels peacefully.”
— Dhammapada
Shun evil and do good, seek peace and pursue it.
— Psalm 34:15
May God bless you and keep you.
May God look kindly upon you, and be gracious to you.
May God reach out to you in tenderness, and give you peace.
— the Priestly Blessing
Walk good.
— everyday Jamaican blessing