Category Archives: Religion

Alchemical design

Design, Esoterism

Craft is material dialogue. Dialogue is conversation craft. Alchemy is the craft of crafts.

First, I intuited it implicitly in R. J. Bernstein and Gadamer. Later, I found it stated directly in Buber: our best access to divine being is through dialogue with others.

Dialogue presumes two things: alterity and a possibility of transformative understanding.

Dialogue requires two things: shared good faith to arrive at understanding and shared material to serve as the medium for this understanding.

In alchemy not just any material will do.

The material must be real enough to perform its configurative, transformative task.

In alchemy, material is dissolved, freed from form, cleansed of ideal dross, and rendered pure matter (hyle), pregnant with myriad reformative possibility.

In alchemy, soul is dissolved, freed from form, cleansed of accidental dross, and rendered pure spirit, pregnant with myriad reformative possibility.

In alchemy, fragmentary soul and material are dissolved and purified and passed through the narrow neck of the alembic into the chamber to combine and unite, and unified are then drawn back through the neck to recrystallize together, refaithed, rematerialized, reenworlded. New artifact, new artifex, new chamber.

This is why designers go to the rough ground of reality.

It is only here we find matter-rich materials that can support radical new understanding. What gets passed along in organizational media is precisely form, not matter. The form of the medium filters whatever data it cannot convey. The data that survives transmission is too anemic to support anything but compulsive rethinking of old thoughts.

It is the media, the material forms, the forms of understanding, the very soul-form of the organization that is in play in radical design.

Radical design is alchemy.

This sacrifice of form in radical design must be performed in the faith that resouling and reenworlding will redeem the sacrifice.

Subject and object shed form together in order to be reclothed, refurnished, rehoused, reenvironed together, all at once, in new enworldment.

This is the artifice of design.

Design is a craft requiring much technique, but much more than technique.

Mere technicians can only construct systems of unnatural artificiality. They are limited to assembling preformed components. They can build only structures the components afford. But today, the problem is the form of the components. This is why the design work of design technicians is sterile and entirely uninspiring, which is good enough in a joyless world that no longer desires or expects anything beyond fixed function.

The higher goal of design is second-natural artifice that summons whole worlds teeming with inconceivable new beings and meanings.

Alchemy might have preceded modern science, but modern science refused the very cornerstone of alchemy: its transformative Why.

This rejection of Why, first methodological, then later metaphysical, is the nihilism concealed in the heart of technik, which knows only the questions What and How, and hears that implicit question behind every truth. When someone asks “why?” the ear of technik hears a prescriptive “in order to what?” or a descriptive “how did this occur?”

Design is alchemy’s true heir, but to receive its inheritance it must reject the rejection of technicity.

Design must restore the Why to technik’s What-How so the technocratic world of techno-scientific engineering and management can answer to a higher Ought and serve our human purpose instead of enslaving humankind to its Whyless systems.

Not only are we allowed to do this, we must do what we Ought.

Protoconsultant Chuang Tzu

Design, Taoism

Solid consulting advice from Chuang Tzu, twenty-three centuries before the invention of consulting:

Yen Hui went to see Confucius and asked permission to take a trip.

“Where are you going?”

“I’m going to Wei.”

“What will you do there?”

“I have heard that the ruler of Wei is very young. He acts in an independent manner, thinks little of how he rules his state, and fails to see his faults. It is nothing to him to lead his people into peril, and his dead are reckoned by swampfuls like so much grass. His people have nowhere to turn. I have heard you say, Master, ‘Leave the state that is well ordered and go to the state in chaos! At the doctor’s gate are many sick men.’ I want to use these words as my standard, in hopes that I can restore his state to health.”

“Ah,” said Confucius, “you will probably go and get yourself executed, that’s all. The Way doesn’t want things mixed in with it. When it becomes a mixture, it becomes many ways; with many ways, there is a lot of bustle; and where there is a lot of bustle, there is trouble — trouble that has no remedy! The Perfect Man of ancient times made sure that he had it in himself before he tried to give it to others. When you’re not even sure what you’ve got in yourself, how do you have time to bother about what some tyrant is doing?

“Do you know what it is that destroys virtue, and where wisdom comes from? Virtue is destroyed by fame, and wisdom comes out of wrangling. Fame is something to beat people down with, and wisdom is a device for wrangling. Both are evil weapons — not the sort of thing to bring you success. Though your virtue may be great and your good faith unassailable, if you do not understand men’s spirits, though your fame may be wide and you do not strive with others, if you do not understand men’s minds, but instead appear before a tyrant and force him to listen to sermons on benevolence and righteousness, measures and standards — this is simply using other men’s bad points to parade your own excellence. You will be called a plaguer of others. He who plagues others will be plagued in turn. You will probably be plagued by this man.

“And suppose he is the kind who actually delights in worthy men and hates the unworthy — then why does he need you to try to make him any different? You had best keep your advice to yourself! Kings and dukes always lord it over others and fight to win the argument. You will find your eyes growing dazed, your color changing, your mouth working to invent excuses, your attitude becoming more and more humble, until in your mind you end by supporting him. This is to pile fire on fire, to add water to water, and is called ‘increasing the excessive.’ If you give in at the beginning, there is no place to stop. Since your fervent advice is almost certain not to be believed, you are bound to die if you come into the presence of a tyrant.

“In ancient times Chieh put Kuan Lung-feng to death and Chou put Prince Pi Kan to death. Both Kuan Lung-feng and Prince Pi Kan were scrupulous in their conduct, bent down to comfort and aid the common people, and used their positions as ministers to oppose their superiors. Therefore their rulers, Chieh and Chou, utilized their scrupulous conduct as a means to trap them, for they were too fond of good fame. In ancient times Yao attacked Ts’ung-chih and Hsu-ao, and Yu attacked Yu-hu, and these states were left empty and unpeopled, their rulers cut down. It was because they employed their armies constantly and never ceased their search for gain. All were seekers of fame or gain — have you alone not heard of them? Even the sages cannot cope with men who are after fame or gain, much less a person like you!

“However, you must have some plan in mind. Come, tell me what it is.”

Yen Hui said, “If I am grave and empty-hearted, diligent and of one mind, won’t that do?”

“Goodness, how could that do? You may put on a fine outward show and seem very impressive, but you can’t avoid having an uncertain look on your face, any more than an ordinary man can. And then you try to gauge this man’s feelings and seek to influence his mind. But with him, what is called ‘the virtue that advances a little each day’ would not succeed, much less a great display of virtue! He will stick fast to his position and never be converted. Though he may make outward signs of agreement, inwardly he will not give it a thought! How could such an approach succeed?”

“Well then, suppose I am inwardly direct, outwardly compliant, and do my work through the examples of antiquity? By being inwardly direct, I can be the companion of Heaven. Being a companion of Heaven, I know that the Son of Heaven and I are equally the sons of Heaven. Then why would I use my words to try to get men to praise me, or try to get them not to praise me? A man like this, people call The Child. This is what I mean by being a companion of Heaven.

“By being outwardly compliant, I can be a companion of men. Lifting up the tablet, kneeling, bowing, crouching down — this is the etiquette of a minister. Everybody does it, so why shouldn’t I? If I do what other people do, they can hardly criticize me. This is what I mean by being a companion of men.

“By doing my work through the examples of antiquity, I can be the companion of ancient times. Though my words may in fact be lessons and reproaches, they belong to ancient times and not to me. In this way, though I may be blunt, I cannot he blamed. This is what I mean by being a companion of antiquity. If I go about it in this way, will it do?”

Confucius said, “Goodness, how could that do? You have too many policies and plans and you haven’t seen what is needed. You will probably get off without incurring any blame, yes. But that will be as far as it goes. How do you think you can actually convert him? You are still making the mind your teacher!”

Yen Hui said, “I have nothing more to offer. May I ask the proper way?”

“You must fast!” said Confucius. “I will tell you what that means. Do you think it is easy to do anything while you have {a mind}? If you do, Bright Heaven will not sanction you.”

Yen Hui said, “My family is poor. I haven’t drunk wine or eaten any strong foods for several months. So can I be considered as having fasted?”

“That is the fasting one does before a sacrifice, not the fasting of the mind.”

“May I ask what the fasting of the mind is?”

Confucius said, “Make your will one! Don’t listen with your ears, listen with your mind. No, don’t listen with your mind, but listen with your spirit. Listening stops with the ears, the mind stops with recognition, but spirit is empty and waits on all things. The Way gathers in emptiness alone. Emptiness is the fasting of the mind.”

Yen Hui said, “Before I heard this, I was certain that I was Hui. But now that I have heard it, there is no more Hui. Can this be called emptiness?”

“That’s all there is to it,” said Confucius. “Now I will tell you. You may go and play in his bird cage, but never be moved by fame. If he listens, then sing; if not, keep still. Have no gate, no opening, but make oneness your house and live with what cannot be avoided. Then you will be close to success.”

Single-prompt interview research

Anthropology, Design, Kabbalah, Letterpress, Metaphysics, Philosophy, Religion, Star

A couple of weeks ago, I wrote about a “single-question magic interview“. Placing this question between two genuine interlocutors really does something astonishing, important, rare and rarer by the day.

It made me want to letterpress print this question.

I love words that act directly on a souls.

Whenever I find such words, I want to sink them deep into the surface of paper.

This is my letterpress impulse.

I am now interested in instaurating more single-question interviews. I want to collect and print them.

I will, of course, do this work in faithful, observant service to design praxis, which is sacred and therefore not to be used, but the everse of using. Faithful, observant service to praxis means giving ourselves to our praxis and allow ourselves to be used as its agent, or (as Latour put it) the actant of praxis.

I have a big fear mitigated by some hopeful hypotheses.

My fear is that an increasing number of people have unwittingly been taken by ideological faiths — what some have called “political religions”. Religion, though is not only a misnomer, but a category mistake of the highest pragmatic consequence. Ideologies are fundamentalisms.

Fundamentalism is not religion taken too far, but religion aborted and never reborn in a barren soul.

A fundamentalist faith is (I believe this also came from Latour?) a distinctive attitude toward beliefs. It could be called a belief about beliefs — beliefs being objective facts taken as true.

A genuine religion tries to transcend factual beliefs. It does so by way of a different attitude toward truth, a different mode of of believing, a different configuration of soul, which has believes on a trajectory beyond conceivability, toward “something” ungraspable by the objectively comprehending mind. (See “Religious notes” below for more.)

To a religious soul, fundamentalism is ideo-idolatry, a confused reduction of an essentially inconceivable, incomprehensible reality to a comprehended concept. The fundamentalist worships something that is inside their own heads, and part of themselves. We do this all the time, even in mundane life, when we love an idea of a thing and forget that the idea indicates a reality beyond that idea, whose value is precisely what the idea cannot capture. We confuse mental categories of groups for real persons and love or hate the mental image. We confuse stories for the complex polycentered unfoldings of real events. It’s just how we are, especially when we forget to try to be otherwise.

So — An interview with a fundamentalist, whether that funamentalist adheres to a right-fundamentalism of mis-taken religion or a left-fundamentalism of scientististic psycho-social-political beliefs is unlikely to reveal anything beyond more and more belief system content, which never touches the eclipsed host of these believed-in beliefs.

But it is precisely and exclusively this eclipsed being — this unique intuitive living in the heart of each soul — I want to coax out in these single-question interviews.

Here is where I permit myself the mitigation of hopeful hypotheses.

First, I hypothesize that any apparent soullessness is only apparent, and that what actually happens is only eclipse. A person’s weird, intuitive uniqueness never stops existing, however much it is occluded by opaque belied-in factual content. A belief-system is its own place, which makes heavens of hells and hells of heavens, but these places are not the souls who become imprisoned within them by identifying with what holds them captive. Someone is in there to be sprung.

Second, I hypothesize that the path to an occluded soul (the exit from the cell) is craft. Craft is where a person engages a reality unmediated by language, skin to skin. Where are they blurring the boundaries between their soul, their body, an instrument, and an emerging work in music or visual arts or other flavor of alchemy? Where have they become someone new with someone? Where are they losing themselves in physical exercise? Where do words fail them, precisely where their bodies and souls succeed? I need single questions that puncture belief-systems and get at these experiences.

Third, to get there, I might need to abandon the limitations of conversation. I might need to adopt some of the most radical practices of design research, which preclude the asking of questions. For in generative research we are not interested in answers to our own questions. We are after the implicit questions constituting the subjectivity of our research participants. What questions are relevant to them? To get there we do not ask direct questions, we request lessons. We ask them to teach us about their lives. This is why our research briefs are not defined by questions to answer, but areas of inquiry to learn about.

So the obvious single-question interview about craft might be neither a question, nor an interview. It might simply be:

Please show me your best craft.

In research, things never go as expected. It might be a finished artifact, or it might be a demonstration of doing the craft. Either way, I will have to go to the participant’s place.

The research will have a dual-nature. I am doing the research in order to produce a learning-teaching event, and it will be iterative prototyping testing of the research protocol itself.

The final deliverable of the research will be one or more short, letterpress printable prompts.

These will be used to make some kind of beautiful sacred printed objects, maybe a booklet, a set of cards, a small poster or reference sheet or some combination of these.

A good friend of mine suggested another question:

What is the worst thing that ever happened to you, and how did you benefit from it?

If any researcher or interviewer or front-line service provider or talented conversationalist happens up this, and has a soul-coaxing prompt or question that has worked for them, I am collecting them.

Anyone who contributes a prompt will get a copy of whatever gets printed.

Religious notes:

1.

Generally, fundamentalism believes that a belief system and sound life practice is constructed upon a foundation of concrete fact.

Religion senses a divine ground beneath all objectivity, supporting it, though less solid than water, or even aether. But without this grounding, all fact disintegrates into isolated grains of truth, unable to support even humble truth constructions, much less towering edifices of fact meant to penetrate the ultimate.

2.

Religion believes toward … Toward what is essentially inconceivable, and is not what, but someone who is better but not perfectly characterized as Why or Who. An interrogative combining Why, Who, How, What, Where, When would approximate it better than any one of them. But perhaps refusal to name this interrogative mystery … or even to invent a category for … is a better response. Perhaps we just address … with a simple situating of Nefesh-Ruach in I-here-now: “Here I am.” To say “Hineini” is for Neshamah-Chayah to inhale the pneuma of Nefesh-Ruach into itself, like an atmosphere receives back a lungful of exhaled breath.

3.

All this, of course, is said in the language of my own chosen faith, or, rather, the faith who chose me. Speaking of which, much has been made of the expression “chosen people” but this expression is rarely heard oriented by the best question. It is natural for any envy-inclined mind to hear in this a response to “Which people were chosen versus which other people who were not chosen? A better question would be “Which people made a choice of faith, and which people were made by being chosen by a faith?” Chosenness does not signify a status: chosen versus unchosen. Chosenness signifies only who chose whom.

Sinistre! Gauche!

Autobiography, Existentialism, Kabbalah

When sincere impious questing arrives at a conclusion, the conclusion must be accepted. Repetition is bad faith.

Questioning unquestionable truths, or transgressively experimenting where matters are settled, can under rare circumstances be necessary and good. Such things should be done only when answers and results are urgent, and when we are fully prepared to accept the response we receive.

Do not seek where you are unwilling to find.

This is an attempt to account for some of my early, shadowy wanderings along left-handed paths. I can neither regret nor condone what it took to get here.

Maps and travelogues

Metaphysics, Philosophy

When explorers discovered the New World and began mapping it and sending back to Europe sketches of the people, animals, plants and landscapes they saw there, the images were strange and divergent. If one had never seen in-person the realities depicted in these images it would take significant imagination to constitute a common source. Imagine the exponential difficulty had the New World not been merely a remote variation on Europe, but in fact a different stratum of being for which explicit, descriptive, objective language were inadequate. The varying accounts might have been taken as pure fantasy. Or, worse, imagine if the nature of this reality had been what Charles Stein calls “configurative”, instaurated (revealed-created) between the explorer and explored, subject and object, different for each witness, the furthest thing from arbitrary, yet eluding common sense. What then?

Having grown up in a thoroughly secular left-liberal Unitarian-Universalist household on solid ground of technoscientistic rationalism under a heaven of roll-your-own spirituality… living the postmodernized PMC lifestyle mediated by screens, teleporting into this virtual reality or that, corporate, ideological, the personal-political, the personal brand — things default to Derridean. If we do not actively resist living simulated lives, we drift into an inescapable text-trap, with nothing outside it.

When studying Kabbalah and its history, in conditions of mass solipsism, it is all-too-easy to succumb to a semiconscious attitude that takes mystical schools of thought as thought and only thought, forgetting that these were inspired attempts to articulate realities that transcend and defy thought and text. We lapse into charting traditional strands and tracing influences from mystic to mystic, and lose sight of the divine referent, the whole point of it all.

Domain-subdomain throwndown

Design, Metaphysics, Philosophy

To an objectivist (an adherent to an epistemology confined to objective comprehension), all truth is objective knowledge of objective reality.

Objective knowledge — as opposed to what? Subjective experiences.

If a subjective experience motivates behavior, it triggers an event in objective reality, and now can be known objectively as truth. Until then, subjectivity is objectively real only as neural processes productive of mental epiphenomena.

Objectivism sees objects of sight, while excludes its own seeing as real.

Objectivism is often materialist, but not essentially.

Objectivism concerns form; materialism concerns substance.

Matter is unformed but formable; understood formationally matter it is material.

A metaphysics of matter differs from a material metaphysics.

Someday, when materialists figure out how to explain the emergence of consciousness from non-conscious matter, without committing the performative contradiction of assuming and relying upon both their own consciousness and the consciousness of those to whom they explain away consciousness, I’ll take them seriously as philosophers.

Until then, I’ll regard them as scientistic technicians unconsciously overstepping the bounds their mastery into metaphysical questions they do not yet even know how to ask, much less answer.

The methodological reductionism so virtuous and necessary to science is, when applied to metaphysics is not only unhelpful but vicious. To confuse the ontology and practice of science with the ontology and practice of metaphysics is to conflate objective braininess with wisdom (the intuition of reality beyond the cognitive grasp of objectivity).

We can, and maybe should, place panpsychism outside of the domain of science, but we should never allow the domain of science to limit or even dominate or even try to found/underpin/regulate the super-domain of understanding to which science belongs as part.

The same error that places knowledge under the rule of science, and locates subjectivity within objective reality also sees design as a subset of engineering. Design is the superset, and all engineering work should be defined, guided and supervised by design.

“Why philosophize? To recapture reality!”

Design, Enworldment, Esoterism, Existentialism, Exnihilism, Kabbalah, Metaphysics, Philosophy

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; what lacks a name is (taken by us as) unreal.

In order for something to be unreal to us, however, it must already be given to us in some way, in order to be denied as unreal. Otherwise, it is ungiven, and, to us nothing, and, as nothing, can be taken neither as real or unreal.

In every age, most of all now, some of our most important givens are rejected as unreal to our deepest detriment. And some of our key given truths are ideas and only ideas, mistaken for intuitable realities, also to our detriment.

The designerly task of the philosopher is to identify these rejected, nameless unrealities, and name them, so they can become real to us.

To quote Eric Voegelin, “Why Philosophize? To recapture reality!”

Etymology will provide us some basic ideas required for the work of restoring reality to crucial ideas that are unreal to us. They will root and anchor our work.

Etymologically, the word “datum” means given; “data” is multiple givens.

Etymologically, taking is what we do when we receive something as given to perception or conception. The root “-ceive” refers to the act of taking, and “-cept” refers to that which is taken.

This etymologic frames a set of give-and-take questions:

Given how? Given by or via what mode of giving?

Taken how? Taken by or via what mode of reception?

In order for us to take something (through sensory perception or intellectual conception), it must, in the first place, in some way, be given.

Otherwise, we are oblivious, and the datum remains ungiven and is, to us — not unreal, but, rather, nothing at all. Whatever it is, however real, if we are oblivious to it, it has entirely escaped our awareness, and it is nothing to us. It remains submerged in pristine nothingness, until it itself penetrates our awareness, or someone else directs our attention to it.

A brief ecstatic interlude: At this very moment, I am directing your attention to nothingness. Nothingness, however, is only given to us by the experience of revelation ex nihilo, the radical surprise of the irruption of something from nothingness. Whatever the reality, it was there all along, but not to us, until the moment of epiphany. Sometimes such irruptions introduce a whole new mode of being, requiring everything (as we have it) to be re-understood. This is the most fascinating truth of the human condition: the omnipresent possibility of revelation ex nihilo, and the inspired reunderstanding of everything-all-at-once, which transforms the world and our place in it, on the whole and in every part, in literally inconceivable ways. Nothingness is not what it seems, and to know this exnihilates nihilism. Nothingness is eternally pregnant preexistence, the furthest possibility from dead nonexistence. Exnihilism is the best news a soul can enceive.

The mode of givenness that concerns us most is the direct, unmediated givenness known as intuition.

Intuition, as we are using it here, is the immediate awareness that something is, without reason or language recognizing what it is. Intuition apprehends being, prior to comprehension. Intuition apprehends with know-that.

Notice the “media” words: “unmediated”, “immediate”. “Medium” is another. “Media-” means middle. Something that comes between. Here the medium is reason, often, but not always, via another medium, language.

When our intellect comprehends it adds “know-what” to an apprehended “know-that”. It links this known what to a vast network of other whats and whys and hows, and makes sense of it in the context of everything else.

Etymologically, comprehension means “together-grasp”. To comprehend means, first, to grasp-together the intuited object in all its complexity as what it is — as an object of comprehension — and, second, to grasp what it is in the context of everything else, as part of a comprehensive totality we call “everything”.

But “everything” is relative, in ways unphilosophical folks seldom appreciate. When we say “everything”, we mean everything as given to us, and everything is given to each of us quite differently.

Some everythings are larger, denser and subtler than others. In order to avoid the strange pluralization of the normally singular everything, let us refer to any given everything as an enworldment.

An enworldment is everything, as given to some particular subject.

Let us understand that each enworldment appears to the enworlding, enworlded subject as the one and only everything. We naturally confuse “everything” with infinity, but infinity is infinitely more inclusive than what any of us can mean when we try to speak of infinitude. We are made in the image of the One, but we, alas, are and can only be one, unless we accept our place as organs of the infinite, what we Jews indicate when we say Adonai Echad.

When we comprehend, always with our intellect, we integrate some datum into our own given everything, which is our enworldment.

The data we are most prone to reject as unreal are given by intuition. We intuit that something is, but we do not recognize what it is. We apprehend that but cannot comprehend what. “Our reach exceeds our grasp.” We become apprehensive. In these situations we may explain our intuition away, by comprehending our apprehension as an unreasonable response to something “nonexistent”. “It was nothing real.”

Is this explaining away bad? Heavens no! We do this rejecting of misfit intuitions to preserve our enworldment. It is normal intellectual hygiene, required to maintain subjective health. Not every intuition should be admitted and integrated within our enworldment.

Which intuitions ought to be named is a matter of personal judgment, not criteria and rule.

But the judgment should revolve around matters of alienation. That is, they should consider where we are obstructed from participation in realities that matter most to our own lives together.

When the way we enworld ourselves preclude love, community, belonging, selfhood, beauty and value in general, that enworldment might need philosophical intervention.

Here is a quick litany of alienations: The positivistic limitation of real entities to objects of physics. The reduction of all meaning, including love of others, to emergent properties of purely physical processes, to evolutionary psychology. The reduction of identity to social categorization. The reduction of religion to scientistic explanation. Not to mention the reduction of science, itself — science being the disciplined systematic interaction with, observation of and understanding of matter under various conditions — to scientistic explanation! The cynical suspicion of every spontaneous conception as bias, paired with the gullible acceptance of expert claims as the remedy to bias!

Across the board, what is nearest and dearest and most concretely present in any human life is explained away as “subjective” or imaginary or distorted, in favor of far more distant, abstract and depersonalizing notions, many of which are not rooted in any possible intuitive immediacy.

These are features of an alienated and alienating enworldment shared by perhaps the majority of young members of the lower-overclass. It is responsible for a growing nihilism, manifesting in self-destructive politics and collective and individual mental illness.

If we manage to exnihilate this enworldment, we will emerge on the other side into a renaissance ex nihilo.

Mapping olamot

Design, Enworldment, Exnihilism, Kabbalah, Philosophy

An enception is a conceptual capacity, the ability to “get” a concept. Once an enception is established (by our enworlding neshamah to our conceiving ruach), its conceptual form can be received (whether intuitively perceived or intellectually conceived) as given wherever its corresponding form occurs in reality, both by our conceiving ruach in Yetzirah, and our constructing/construing nefesh in Assiyah.

Or so I think. I’m trying to map my own experiences to the experiences of others who seem to know this strange space I navigate. Today it seems that:

Assiyah is a world of actuality, where, using given objects of perception and truth, we (as nefesh) construct systems of materials and ideas and methods, and truth is understood pshat, construed objectively in terms of their place in a constructed system, but that objectivity is determined by the conceptual repertoire given by Yetzirah. Whatever is not in that repertoire is inconceivable and is perceived as senseless chaos. Assiyah actualizes an enworldment, giving it perceptible material and symbolic form.

Yetzirah is a world of formation, where pure concepts interrelate, harmonize or clash, overlap, attract, repel, stabilize, destabilize and restabilize at various scales, forming subjective patterns of receptivity, obliviousness, attraction and revulsion in us (as ruach) which determines what is and is not given as real and true in Assiyah. Ruach is organic enceptions within enceptions, a capacitive system in everse. Yetzirah defines the limits and terms of intelligibility within an enworldment. Ruach understands in the mode of remez, that is it recognizes and relates forms, thematizing, analogizing, discovering the connectable dots and associating them, within an enworldment. Yetzirah is concerned with carrying a possibility of enworldment into its development of integrated forms and developing, integrating and strengthening it to the point where the enworldment can be actualized in Assiyah.

Beriah is a world of instauration (creation and revelation) where a new enworldment can enter Yetzirah, always ex nihilo, effecting radical expansion and reordering of subjects (ruach), how they enworld themselves (nefesh), on the whole and in part, in actual life. Amidst this change to ruach and its enworldment, a higher self maintains its continuity in Beriah as neshama. Conversion experiences are of Beriah, and they are understood in the mode of drash, homiletically, in pure and spontaneous interpretive application without objective construal, disclosing everything as belonging within an intuited, given enworldment. Beriah is where enworldments differentiate themselves within an infinite field, where difference is possible in principle.

Atzilut is the world in which all being is rooted, regardless of degree of awareness of this rootedness, in whom all neshama is of common chaya. It is from here that all value flows, and when we feel a rush of intensely inspired gratitude and joy with an epiphany from Beriah, that is the light of Atzilut, the brilliant bloodflow of the world, and it is understanding in the mode of sod. I am almost entirely sure there is much, much more to sod than this, but this is what I have had of it, if I am not mistaken.

For many years, and with increasingly intense focus, instauratio ex nihilo is crucial to me as a designer, philosopher and mystical fanatic.

My live question is cartographic. It is bound up with Beriah, but I’ve wavered on “where” it happens. I think I am moving toward (or into) an understanding that takes Beriah as a holistic world conception that perfects at Malkhut of Beriah, and bursts whole into Yetzirah as its Keter. And what it bursts through is the veil of nihilitude demarcating the worlds. On the side of Beriah, the nihilitude is part of infinitude, but on the side of Yetzirah, it is the outer limit of existence, beyond which there is nothing.

I have learned never to take that nothing on the outer limit of existence at face value. As a designer, as a philosopher and as a mystic I have pressed against the nothingness, and punctured it, and I testify: there is very real, very beautiful being on the other side of it, and if we cross over we return with transformative treasures, the best of which is exnihilist faith.

I am writing this same piece over and over again. I am circling this problem like a GPS satellite, photographing what is below, sending geolocation data down to the surface so I can figure out where I am.

A few years back, my friend Jarrett, team alchemist, gave me a framed print of a Ptolemy, as hermetic cartographer, lunar compass in one hand, solar globe in the other. This demonstrates why I have always loved working on her teams.

Hanging with Sellars

Esoterism, Kabbalah, Metaphysics, Philosophy

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, possibilities and finger snaps, aesthetic experience and death. To achieve success in philosophy would be, to use a contemporary turn of phrase, to ‘know one’s way around’ with respect to all these things, not in that unreflective way in which the centipede of the story knew its way around before it faced the question, ‘how do I walk?’, but in that reflective way which means that no intellectual holds are barred.

My live question: Understand how? Hang together how?

Understanding construed as hanging together as systems… constructions, theories, explanations?

Understanding conceived as hanging together wholes… gestalts, paradigms, ontologies?

Understanding comprehended as comprehensive totality within which everything hangs together… faiths, visions, wordviews?

Understanding suprehended as enworldments, each an overlapping totality of hung-together everythings, against a ground of enworldment… metaphysical epiphany?

Understanding revealed as infinite and exteriorless all-influsion of infinite One, from which the possibility of enworldment emanates… … …?

The general movement is away from objective knowing at a distance, toward deepening and expanding withinness, starting from our own withinness and continuing beyond to the withinness in whom we participate and subsist.

I know these correspond to the multiple worlds of Kabbalah and more generally of neoplatonism, and it only on this basis that I experience something that can be a basis for belief.

I am not sure precisely how the terrain I’ve walked or surveyed relates to the many maps I’ve studied, and travelogues I’ve read, but where I am is where these cartographers and adventurers have been.

Nothing could possibly be more interesting, and nothing better dispels nihilism.

This transfigured nothing is the substance of exnihilism, the ex nihilo from which all creation, revelation, instauration, configurative being and radical surprise irrupts.

Jacob’s Lightning

Kabbalah, Letterpress

My next letterpress project is a Jacob’s Lightning poster, 8 x 23″.

It will be printed on Lessebo Misty Blue 111# cover.

The Jacob’s ladder (aka Jacob’s Hyperlattice) will be printed in bronze-black ink spiked with some extra metallic copper.

Jacob’s lightning will be printed in two layers, first a bright tangerine-gold spiked with extra metallic gold, and a second with pure, undiluted glow-in-the-dark, which is transparent until the lights go out.

I will not lie or even dilute the truth: this is literally magical.

Bob Dylan and I apparently disagree on the spiritual dignity of strontium aluminate:

Disillusioned words like bullets bark
As human gods aim for their mark
Make everything from toy guns that spark
To flesh-colored Christs that glow in the dark
It’s easy to see without looking too far
That not much is really sacred

Kabbalah and design

Design, Kabbalah, Philosophy

People ask me how kabbalah relates to design. Here is how:

To nefesh in Assiyah, whole means comprehensive system.
To ruach in Yetzirah, whole means gestalt given.
To neshemah in Beriah, whole means enworldment.
To chayah in Atzilut, whole means atonement.

In Atzilut, only the One is whole, transcendent.
In Beriah, wholes are enworldments, given ex nihilo, revealed-created, instaurated.
In Yetzirah, wholes are given gestalts, conceived.
In Assiyah, wholes are comprehensive systems, constructed.

Devekut

Kabbalah

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 as the ultimate goal of religious perfection. Devekuth can be estasy, but its meaning is far more comprehensive. It is a perpetual being-with-God, an intimate union and conformity of the human and the divine will.

Yes, except for the word “distance”. One cannot have distance from infinity. And for a panentheist, this is everything.

If we understand the panentheism and infinitude we must understand also that there cannot be any question of belonging to the infinite One. The necessarily all-inclusive infinite One necessarily includes each of us, whether we intuit or acknowledge it or not. We cannot avoid this metaphysical belonging.

The only real questions concern our own finite understanding of and relationship to the infinite One: First, do we recognize our metaphysical situation — that we are situated within and belong to the Infinite One, who transcends but includes us? Can we suprehend the comprehending, incomprehensible truth that our own finite notion of “infinity” is necessarily bounded by nihilitude, which bestows upon us one-within-One identity — belonging to, but absolutely not identical to One’s own infinitude, of which at best we can participate?

This is why Jewish mystics, for as long as they live, teach and write, pursue devekut, not unio mystica.

Devekut is angelic, willing participation in the all-inclusive infinite One.

Note: A while back I finally understood that there is absolute truth, but that truth cannot be comprehended objectively. It is everted objectivity, which, when finite is subjective, but if infinite, is something a friend of mine calls “superjective” (not in a Whiteheadian sense). Absolute truth is that by which finite truths not only pragmatically work, but harmonize with devekut, and transmit divine light of our one-within-Oneness.

Another note:

In comprehension the given is a What.

In apprehension the given is a That.

In suprehendsion the given is a Whom.

In comprehension, we can reach out and grip some of reality; the hand of thought closes around an objective truth.

In apprehension, our reach exceeds our grasp; our fingertips touch something real, but we cannot close the hand of thought around any objective truth. The mysterious resistance makes us feel apprehensive. It is a perplexity, an aporia.

In suprehension, we intuit the reality that we cannot grip a reality in whose grip we are gripped. We cannot comprehend comprehension. No subject is an object of thought. And the superjective is itself the ground of our own thinking, the Being of our own being, the One in whom we are one.

Another note: I have been contemplating letterpress printing another hermetic tract, and? in the spirit of my own designerly kabbalah, receiving it as a design brief for some more accessible, less sacred books.

These prenatal books have had a kaleidoscope of shifting titles, including “Enworldment”, “Exnihilist Manifesto”, “Everso”, “The Ten-Thousand Everythings”, “Pearls and Shells”, “Second-Natural”, “Philosophy of Design of Philosophy” and “Hermetic Design”.

Today, writing about one and One and one-within-One, the ironic prankster in me — (who, in the most solemn moments, not only refuses to exercise quiet pious resoect, but goes into full-on boy-in-a-pew mode, and gets even louder, sillier and more fidgety) — suggests that the correct form for my esoteric tract might not actually be a chapbook, but rather a label on a castile soap bottle.

I really might do this.

Nihilitude:

Dilute! Dilute! Ok!