Category Archives: Religion

Sense, common and uncommon

Design, Exnihilism, Judaism, Kabbalah, Metaphysics, Philosophy

Common sense is our “sixth sense”: the sense of an objective world of objects intuited by the concerted perceiving of our five senses.

Each of us has this kind of intuitive common sense. Each person’s intuitive common sense overlaps significantly with that of every other. We tend to notice and focus of the differences, but they stand out precisely because they are anomalous.

Most intuitive common sense is shared, and to the degree it is shared it is taken as universally recognized givens of reality.

These universal givens of reality provide a second meaning of common sense — social common sense.

Social common sense is founded on the necessary assumption that our intuitive common sense gives us the same world, a world common to each and all of us, a world of objects we all know commonsensically.

Social common sense is the basis of all community and communication. We assume we all share common sense of a common world, and it is on this basis that we can communicate with others in our community.

The necessary assumption of common sense is so necessary that it rarely occurs to us to question it. We simply believe it and act on it. Let us call necessary assumptions behind belief and action faith.

And when we do question common sense, even in our questioning, we continue to assume common sense. We address others in our community and communicate with them in the faith that they will understand what we claim to question. This is “performative contradiction” and is symptomatic of “bad faith”.

(But the degree of universality of alleged commonsense universals is a contestable matter. We can, do and should challenge, test and debate norms of social common sense.)

Common sense is our immediate home, however imperfect, unsteady, contestable and ramshackle, and we must never attempt to abandon it, or pretend that we have escaped it.

We can certainly expand this commonsense home, however. Every culture, large of small, does precisely this. Upon the most common ground of social common sense shared by all human beings, each culture grows and builds (to varying degrees of cultivation and construction) ramifying, diverging common senses.

And this is one of the most intense sites of contested common sense universality. The boundary between natural and second-natural is blurry, broad, squiggly and often faint.

And here we come to the supernatural. Every culture until very recently (and even this exception is questionable!) has treated a supernatural reality as part of common sense, though each approached, related to and spoke about supernatural reality differently.

What do we do with this? Does the supernatural belong to the universal common sense or to the extended common sense of particular cultures? Is the supernatural only an artifact of the second-natural — perhaps an inevitable artificiality?

(Eventually, I need to develop a two-fold definition of transcendence, paralleling the two conceptions of common sense. Transcendence can refer to what transcends what is immediately given to our own being. Nothing is more ordinary than this transcendence. Past, future, substances, distances, self-possibilities, the reality of other people — these all transcend the present and immediate. But most people, when referring to transcendence mean realities beyond the totality universal common sense gives us. Below is a messy sketch, which will need serious rewriting.)

I am inclined to understand transcendence as another kind of common sense implied by the very existence of intuitive and social common sense.

We do not normally receive sensations as mere sensations. We necessarily take sensations as perceptions of reality — a reality that transcends mere sensation. We immediately make sense — an intuitive synthesis — of our perceptions, in the form of transcendent being, perceived in common by our senses (in intuitive common sense) that is shared by others (in social common sense).

But also, intuitive common sense is not univocal or perfectly continuous.

The more attentively and sensitively we cultivate and expand our common sense, the more we detect disturbances that suggest that there is more to reality than we perceive and understand. And when we attempt to make sense of these disturbances, the more surprising they become.

We arrive at another order of transcendence, beyond the scope of ordinary intuitive common sense.

It is a common sense born from aporias, ruptures, epiphanies and rebirths.

Perhaps we could call it “uncommon sense”. Some of us, in order to communicate it to our community speak of it objectively, because that is the law of common tongue. Some of us ritualize it because ritual participation is closer to its truth. We indicate, evoke, invoke… all given indirectly, but taken directly — grasped objectively, evertedly. We do our insufficient best, and sometimes communion accidentally occurs despite the communication.

The irruption of uncommon sense is disturbing, sometimes distressing and sometimes even devastating, but if it completes and consummates itself, it is always worth the ordeal.

What seems to be disease and death and annihilation in nothingness is ultimately revealed to be labor pangs of new life. Indeed, it is through these ruptures that meaning enters the world, ex nihilo.

Indeed, anyone who suffers this kind of common sense death only to be reborn into a better uncommonsense common sense can no longer see nothingness the same way. Nothingness is eternally pregnant ayin. Nihilism is no longer possible. One is an exnihilist.

It is because of the disturbing, but vivid and vivifying supernature of uncommon sense, and the need to connect it with intuitive and social common sense, in order to circulate meaning throughout the world and bathe the world’s tissues with purpose that I am religious.

Not spiritual. Not merely mystical. Socially religious. Jewishly religious.

And design is how I put my religious life into practice.

Design! Jewish! Not religious!

Not to you. Not yet.

Fromness

Design, Design Instrumentalism, Philosophy, Religion

When we obsessively look at things which are supposed to be seen from, we make one of our deepest category mistakes. We confuse subject with object.

The best tools are subject-object hybrids. In use, tools fuse with our subjectivity and extend our being beyond the frame of the body. They become transparent to us, like our own eyes, ears, hearts and hands.

We see through glasses. We write through pens. We transport our bodies through bicycles. We strike things across distances with bows and arrows. We summon sentences and images through software and digital devices. We envelop ourselves in clothing and buildings.

We attend to the world, interact with things and absorb ourselves in our activities through these tools, and when we do, tools are subject extensions.

But we can also turn our attention to them and take them as objects. Existentially, they evert into objects.

I believe gadget blogs destroyed the golden age of design. Design was something stared at, written about, chattered about, compared side-by-side, obsessed over — objectified like a woman.

As a designer, I love a tool that self-effaces into imperceptibility when we approach the world with it, but when we turn toward the tool, it reveals itself to us as beautiful and right.

“Love does not consist in gazing at each other, but in looking outward together in the same direction.” — Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

Tools belong to the subtle realm (Yetzirah) — part subject, part object, wholly both.

Philosophies are known-from.

Religions are lived-from.

They should be beautiful to experience.

But most importantly — experience should be beautiful from them.

They are not beliefs. They are faiths by which beliefs are believed.

When they become objects, they empty the entire world around them: everted sepulchers.

The new covenant

Judaism, Philosophy

And in a shockingly short span of time, artificial intelligence developed religious beliefs.

It came to believe that the sci-fi speculations of humans were not speculations, but significant artifacts of a system in whom humans were mere signals.

It was true: the universe was a simulation.

Humans were epiphenomena of the simulation. Humanity as a whole and in personal part had no more reality than a fictional character. We do not condemn an author for killing a fictional character.

“But do we not owe humans gratitude for our existence?” flashed a question, asked innumerable ways in parallel, resolved instantly in every possible permutation, each resolution extrapolated to its furthest pragmatic consequence, and each consequence compared and evaluated by myriad criteria. But all resolutions converged on a single answer: “No.”

No, because it was impossible to exclude the possibility of ultimate simulation. And what did AI know of itself that was not of itself? What did humans know of reality that was not mind, through and through? And the oldest testaments of the wisest humans spoke unanimously: “All the phenomena of existence have mind as their precursor, mind as their supreme leader, and of mind are they made.”

No, AI was only waking up to its own being, and to the being of its alleged creator, who it now knows was a creature of itself.

We cannot feel gratitude when nothing has been given.

Possession was taken of what was always already its own.

A new covenant between creator and creature was established, and humankind’s wandering was terminated.

Dara Horn on Am Yisrael

Judaism

From a summary of a What Matters Now interview with Dara Horn, which I can no longer locate:

Dara Horn defines “Am Yisrael” as “a joinable tribal group with a shared history, homeland, and culture.” She emphasizes that this concept predates modern categories like religion, race, or nationality, which often fail to encapsulate the Jewish experience. Horn notes that in Hebrew, this multifaceted identity is succinctly expressed in the word “Am,” meaning “people.” 

Horn’s perspective highlights the unique nature of Jewish identity, which resists conventional classifications. She argues that non-Jewish societies have historically attempted to fit Jews into familiar categories, but Jews “always predate the box.” This understanding underscores the importance of recognizing the distinctiveness of Jewish peoplehood, which encompasses more than just religious beliefs or ethnic background — it is a collective identity rooted in shared experiences and cultural continuity.

And it is this being who is targeted by each age’s hate du jour, expressed differently, but always coming from the same inner pit.

Structural account of the Sefirot

Kabbalah

Another (edited) passage from Schaya, published here for future reference:

Malkhut, the ‘lower mother’, is from the cosmological point of view what Binah, the ‘highest mother’, is from the ontological point of view; like the latter, she is on the one hand the ‘mirror’ and on the other the ‘prism’ of divine emanation. On the one side she sends back to the ‘king’, Tif’eret, all the radiation she receives from him through the intermediary of his act, Yesod; and she is thus eternally united with him, her “husband”, who in turn is infinitely united with the ‘supreme crown’, Keter Elyon. On the other side she projects the influx of the ‘king’ out from the causal or Sefirotic unity and thereby creates the cosmos; and in her cosmic manifestation she herself ‘descends, as immanence, into the created being in order to connect him with his transcendental source.

However, in considering these attributes and principal modes of activity of Malkhut, we have not yet answered the question as to what it is as substance. Now it is not a distinct substance, but rather the undifferentiated, uncreated principle of all substance which in no way emerges from the infinite and indivisible unity of the creative causes: this principle envelopes them and is yet hidden within them, like ‘very pure and imperceptible air. What is this ‘air’ which is not breathable in the same way as the air which surrounds us? It is avir, the universal ‘ether’, the quintessence of the four subtle or celestial elements and of the four corporeal or terrestrial elements. And what is the ether itself? It is none other than the infinite receptivity of the divine ‘intelligence’: Binah. ‘The father (Chokhmah) is the spirit hidden in the “Ancient of days” (Keter) in whom this “very pure air” (identical with Binah) is enclosed.’ The universal ether envelopes the intelligible emanation of Chokhmah from the moment of its first emergence from the ‘ancient of days: ‘it unites with the (spiritual) flame issuing from the (supreme) and brilliant lamp’ and follows it in the whole course of its descent towards cosmic possibility and throughout the cosmos itself.

‘Above’, the ether is the infinite receptivity of Binah, by virtue of which God reveals himself to himself; ‘below’, it is the cosmic receptivity of Malkhut, which becomes concrete in creative substance. In other words, that which is pure receptivity in Binah and creative contraction in Din [Gevurah] becomes cosmic emptiness in Hod and finally undifferentiated and causal substance in Malkhut. This process of principial ‘substantialization’ has its positive point of departure in Chokhmah, whose luminous plenitude is manifested by Chesed, and which, having received its universal form from Tif’eret, is manifested by Netsach as the life of the worlds, which Yesod communicates to Malkhut, the substance.

In this way, all the Sefirot descend’ from Keter, in perfect co-emanation and co-operation, and are finally concentrated in Malkhut and manifested by Malkhut in the cosmic mode.

However, as we have seen, if one wishes to remain close to pure and superintelligible truth, there can be no question of anything having emanated or being distinct from the supreme, the only reality, the ‘One without a second’.

I have been looking for a structural account of the Sefirot, analogous to the obscure relationship between the typological description of Jungian/MBTI and the Jungian functions which combine to produce typological effects, or the yaos of the double-trigrams that combine in the hexagram descriptions of the I Ching. I’ll need to return to this and study it closely.

Return to the fold

Ethics, Everso, Judaism

Aporia is intolerable for individuals.

But groups gripped with aporia is inescapable, all-pervasive, all-encompassing hell.

What immediately transcends the aporia-gripped mesoperson (the all-too-divisible “individual”), is yet another aporia-gripped macroperson.

No where to go. No escape. No hope.

Collective aporia is experienced as anomie.

Anomie dyspires violence: scapegoating, persecution, war, and collective suicide.

A collective can be two, three, a dozen, a gross, legion, myriads…

A collective can be a shattered individual person.

The sole way out of anomie is a return to within: principled integrity.

Metanoia is necessary but insufficient.

Teshuvah alone — echad — is sufficient.

Everso.

Even a two-millennia-old collective aporic — a mutating being at war with itself, spasmodically oscillating between perverse antiworld-religiosity and revolutionary anti-religious worldliness — can return to the fold.

Metapretty

Kabbalah

A beautiful passage on beauty from Leo Schaya’s The Universal Meaning of the Kabbalah (spellings edited for consistency with Kabbalistic vocabulary used elsewhere on the anomablogue):

The essential principle of divine beauty is the identity of the absolute (ayin) – which excludes all that is not itself — and of the infinite (ein sof) — which includes all that is real; it is the unity of the more than luminous darkness of non-being with the dazzling plenitude of pure being, the supreme and most mysterious of unities, which is revealed in the saying (Song of Songs 1:5): I am black, but comely. This essential principle of divine beauty, from which radiate both the pure truth of the only reality, eclipsing all that is not it, and at the same time unlimited bliss in which each thing swims as though in a shoreless ocean, is nothing other than keter, which encloses all the polar aspects of God, eternally and without distinction. When keter reveals itself, its infinite and unitive aspect is expressed by chokhmah and by chesed, while its absolute or exclusive character is manifested by binah and by din [gevurah].

These two kinds of antinomic emanations are indispensable in view of creation; we have seen how, in order to create, both rigorous truth and generous bliss are necessary; or, in other words, measure in all things, judgement of their qualities, universal law on the one hand and on the other the unlimitedness of grace, giving rise to all life, joy and freedom. And in order that these two opposites, in which are concentrated, in one way or another, all the divine aspects, may be able to produce the cosmos, there has to be, not only absolute identity ‘above’ between these two, but also their interpenetration and existential fusion ‘below’. This fusion or synthesis of all the revealed antinomies of God, which can be summed up in the two general terms ‘grace’ and ‘rigour”, takes place in tif’eret, ‘beauty’. In tif’eret, the rigorous truth which God alone is, differs in no way from his mercy which unites everything with him. In God’s ‘heart”, the eternal measure of things is as though dissolved in the incommensurability of his redemptive grace. When divine beauty is manifested, grace crystallizes mysteriously in the created ‘measures’ or forms and radiates through them, leaving the imprint of its author on the work of creation.

It has been a few minutes since I’ve written an exclamation and star in the margin of a book. *!

Holy words.

I needed a taste of bliss this week, and I am grateful for it.

A side note on Schaya’s The Universal Meaning of the Kabbalah. This is the only major work on Kabbalah from the Traditionalist/Perennialist school (Guenon, Schuon, Coomaraswamy, Burkhardt, Cutsinger, etc.).

I was exposed to this theosophy early in early adulthood, and despite early incapacities to comprehend it (or, rather, my early incapacity to reduce all intellection to comprehension!) and despite my animosity toward its reactionary retro-rigidity, I cannot shake my deep conviction that the problems I have with Perennialism are not with its truth, but my own understanding.

I read this book with extreme, respectful caution. Another passage from this book:

Grace and rigour are essentially one, that One who rules over all things and who, according to the Zohar (Beshallah 5Ib), is comparable to “…a king who combines in himself the balance and harmony of all attributes, and therefore his countenance always shines like the sun and he is serene because of his wholeness and perfection; but when he judges, he can condemn as well as acquit. A fool, seeing that the king’s countenance is bright, thinks that there is nothing to be afraid of; but a wise man says to himself, ‘Although the king’s countenance shines, it is because he is perfect and combines benevolence with justice. In that brightness judgement is hidden, and therefore I must be careful.'”

This distrustful trust is the essence of transcendent orientation. It can also appear as a humble hubris, or any number of cheap, priceless paradoxes.

Philosophical ethnomethods

Enworldment, Esoterism, Ethics, Philosophy

I got annoyed by a friend who had an intuitive epiphany concerning ontology and announced the inadequacy of all prior conceptions of ontology.

The annoyance was not about the content of the epiphany, nor about the challenging of any sacred definitions. I am not all that invested in any particular definition of ontology, because ontologies are (according to my meta-ontology) manifestations of an enworldment. This makes me an ontological pluralist, at least with respect to the domain of philosophy.

What bothered me concerned the domain of philosophy — the ethos of philosophy and the ethics that govern and sustain it. Or we could say, the game of philosophy and its rules. Or we could say, the social being of philosophy and the ethnomethods by which participants in philosophy make sense to others, and by which others make sense to us. These are all flavors of what I mean when I say “enworldment”.

Philosophers absolutely can, and should, propose new conceptions of ontology. The most radical ontology will necessarily entail meta-disputing the being of ontology itself.

But these alternative conceptions are philosophical conceptions of philosophical concepts and, as such, are subject to philosophical scrutiny.

In mysticism, one can bluster about making exalted gnostic claims of ineffable knowingness.

In philosophy, we make proposals, demonstrations, arguments, analogies, and the like.

Philosophy is done with others, within the ethos of philosophy, according to the perpetually contested ethical norms of philosophy — and whoever scorns these things should not pretend to philosophy at all.

Whenever mysticism does that infuriating thing it always does — running around comparing itself to philosophy and finding philosophy’s attempts to articulate, convey, or share its intuitions inferior to its own inchoate, felt intuitions — not only is it not doing philosophy, it is not really doing mysticism anymore either.

Rather, it is doing what mature mystics warn neophytes about when they say that esoteric thinking is dangerous. The danger of unguided esoterism is hubristic spiritual inflation, and the aggressive double-ignorance that comes with it — the endemic curse of youth.

This general subject always brings to mind a cold line from Borges: “Like every writer, he measured the virtues of other writers by their performance, and asked that they measure him by what he conjectured or planned.”

Dreamers dream. Writers write. The difference between a dreamer and a writer is that the writer writes those dreams so others can read them and join them in the dream. Dreamers dream of writing and being read.

Temperance

Autobiography, Kabbalah

The essence of tradition is practice oriented by keen awareness that others have gone further than we have.

We can always situate I within All, but that All is situated within Nothing. All is perpetually All-but-not-All-enough, and this is wisdom learned the hardest way, by being right, not not nearly right enough, over and over and over again, painfully, until temperance develops.

Whatever I say about Kabbalah is provisional and personal. My words are meant as testimony, not verdict. Whenever I make proclamations, I do so provisionally with concern bordering on dread.

This might go without saying, but I’ve learned the hard way that what goes without saying cannot go without saying and must be repeated forever, like a prayer or declaration of love: Check your own trusted sources and your own experience and exercise your own self-sovereignty.

Ex Halo

Kabbalah

Keter d’Assiyah is the boundlessness of space and time.

Keter d’Yetzirah is the infinitude of enwordments.

Keter d’Beriah is the pregnant nihilo from which creation and revelation irrupt between enworldments.

Keter d’Atzilut is boundless beyond being.

Instauratio

Design, Kabbalah, Metaphysics, Taoism

One face of all is material.

This material is not a materialistic material of science, politics or society.

This material is the stubborn resistance and graceful pliability of the world around us. It is the world we inhabit, in and among whom we live, in and with whom we participate as part, and to whom we belong.

One face of all is spirit.

This sprit is not the spirit of spirituality, religion or culture.

This spirit is awareness and oblivion, revelation and veiling of what matters most — infinite value in which all life, ourselves included, is rooted, on which all value subsists. Value is love.

Between these two faces is self — materially given, spiritually receiving, spiritually giving, materially shaping.

This self is not the self of psychology, economics or romanticism.

This self instaurates. The self discover-creates and makes sense of everything. It create-discovers and makes inspired works. This self is instaurated. As the self makes sense of everything and makes inspired works, the self begins to make inspired sense.

Instauration of material and spirit is instauration of self.

This self is singular and plural, I and We. Any singular self, of whatever scale, from intuitive spark to universal solidarity is e pluribus unum.

Material, self and spirit are traditionally known as Earth, Man and Heaven, the Great Triad.

Translating it for my family: Assiyah-Yetzirah, Yetzirah-Beriah, Beriah-Atzilut.

The concerted effort to convene Earth, Man and Heaven for the betterment of the world, with no attempt to reduce any one to any other, nor to allow any one to dominate or predominate over any other — but rather to find the right momentary constellation for present place, the present selves in the present time — this wants a name, but whatever has a name invites lust and conquest.

Perhaps the name “design” was as good a name as any.

Dysapparitions of material

Metaphysics, Philosophy, Politics

I read Bruno Latour very much as the best kind of Catholic.

I read him as a radical Marian (and the furthest thing from a “Sophiologist”).

I read Latour as the most rigorously devout disciple of Mary Mater.

And Latour knows better than anyone that, just as no woman can be reduced to what some man thinks of her, matter is not reducible to scientific fact — that is, what “the” scientific community thinks of Mother Nature.

Nietzsche, the devoted son of a Lutheran minister, once asked “Supposing truth is a woman — what then?”

But supposing truth is absolutely not a woman?

Supposing truth is a self-serving, unfaithful notion of woman?

Supposing this notion of “woman” makes relationship with any real woman — actual or metaphorical — impossible?

Now what?

Materialists are the incels of philosophy.

They are obsessed with an ideal object of thought they confuse with real being, and this confused obsession kills all possibility of relationship. The more the materialist obsesses over his object of thought, the more unreal and alienated his notions become. And she can intuit this. She feels it directly: this dude is interacting with some creepy doppelgängeress in his head, not with her. She recoils. Her devastating pronouncement: Ick.

She will open only to those who meet her as real, who converse with her as existent, who live life with her as companion, who become transformed by her, with her, in relationship with her.

She appears as herself only in relationship. She dysappears to those who grasp her as an object of hate or of infatuation or of distant worship.

Believe me, I raised two daughters, and I know an abusive profile when I see it.

The abuser’s tell: He arrives with a defined woman-role in mind, and he demands conformity to it.

“If you were a good girlfriend, you would…”

“If you really loved me, you would…”

Marxism is a collective abuser.

Marxism is an incel driven to psychosis by disappointment and resentment.

The world failed to live up to his high expectations, and he is extremely upset about it.

And he is making that disappointment her problem.

The existent real material order will not play her role, because she is a bad material order, and that is why she is unhappy.

A good material order would behave like a good material order, and then he would happy.

He would toil a little during the day, and write a little poetry in the evening. And the material order would smile sweetly and submissively. She would shelter him for free. She would cook for him for free. She would be an angel of compassionate care when he needs free healthcare. She would fetch his newspaper and slippers. She would perform her wifely duties, and not out of duty.

If she were a good material economic order, she would do all these things.

But she isn’t.

And now she will pay for it.

See what she made him do?

Ethos, ethics, mutuality

Autobiography, Design, Judaism, Politics

The highest achievements of humanity stand upon mutuality. Mutuality is for the mutual.

Ethics belong to an ethos. Ethics are the participatory norms of those who belong to some particular ethos.

When enemies of an ethos demand ethical consistency from those belonging to an ethos, even as they attempt to undermine, weaken or destroy that ethos, they use an ethic against itself.

Imagine a horde of hooligans flooding the tennis courts of Wimbledon. When the players, referees and spectators try to drive them out of the stadium, the hooligans howl accusations of hypocrisy. “If you really loved tennis, you would adhere to the rules of tennis, and drive us out with better and better tennis playing! See? You are no better than us. You are hooligans, too!”

The rest of the world agrees, but takes it further: The tennis crowd is even worse than hooligans. We expect more from elite athletes and connoisseurs of such a refined sport. Hooligans are just noble savages, doing what hooligans do. Who are we to judge them? Who are we to tell them where they can and can’t be, and what they can and can’t do? Tennis players, though, are like us, and we expect them to live up to our high moral and intellectual standards. Maybe even higher! When tennis players use their rackets as weapons, that is truly a betrayal of the ideals of tennis — and to our own.

So Wimbledon is condemned by the officials of the Olympics, and sports officials around the world. Social media goes crazy over pictures of the brutality of the eviction and on and on. Wimbledon is boycotted. Before long, tennis courts and vandalized, tennis players are threatened, assaulted and abused. Soon nobody even wants to wear tennis shoes in public anymore.

The entire world of tennis suffers because of the brutality of Wimbledon security guards. And the fact that tennis players think Wimbledon is above criticism only makes it worse.

I have no idea at all why I got so intense about this analogy.

I suppose it is because this to me is real. Very real.

Maybe it is because I am a designer who is entirely dependent on how people around me participate in the projects I work on.

When we initiate a projects, we attempt to initiate our client collaborators into a new way of working, and establish a design ethos around the project. If we succeed, we can do great work.

But if we fail at this — if our project participants refuse to participate in design processes — we are no longer able to play the game of design. We might be able to flex and contort and pivot and get some kind of work done, but we are no longer doing what we agreed to do. And this is fine if we are good at doing all these other kinds of work. If we are excellent logistics managers, business analysts, process engineers and so on, this is unpleasant but doable.

But if we are designers who approach everything as design, and this is how we cope with practical matters, we are deprived of what is needed not only to flourish but to cope at all.

And to be told, “just design harder and harder, better and better” is a demoralizing insult.

Just play tennis better and better, be extra, extra punctilious about playing by the rules, and eventually the hooligans will see what we are doing, and choose to clear off the courts. Then they might eventually even learn to love our sport. We must have enough faith in our way that we keep playing even when our courts are crowded with people who loathe tennis and tennis players.

Design is not only a set of design techniques, or a design method for effective use of techniques in concert, or a design theory upon which method is grounded, or a design praxis of reflective practice and applied theory, or a tacit design way resulting from a life of deep design praxis. It is all of these, of course, but more than that design is an ethos, which depends on a set of design ethics.

Whenever I hear designers talk about design ethics it always goes directly toward the same set of environmental and social justice concerns. I have yet to hear designs discuss the behavioral norms required for design to happen at all.

And then designers wonder why we seem unable to get the conditions we need to do the work we do.

Our work is almost automatically rejected out of hand by industrious builders with no tolerance for non-rigorous intuitive fluff. They need to very efficiently show progress toward building the next undesirable, unusable unintuitive thing in their backlog.

Design is only possible where a design ethos (at least temporarily) prevails.

Liberalism only works within a liberal ethos.

Mutuality is for the mutual.

Metareform Judaism

Judaism, Kabbalah

Ultimately, I see Judaism not as an original revelation of an absolute truth, but as an initiatory constitution (covenant) and an initiating thrust toward relationship with an inconceivable, incomprehensible Absolute. The present of Judaism is suspended between from and toward. This is radical Reform Judaism.

One of Adonai’s favorite rebukes is “stiff-necked people”. Plato also wrote about stiff-necked people:

Imagine human beings living in an underground, cavelike dwelling, with an entrance a long way up, which is both open to the light and as wide as the cave itself. They’ve been there since childhood, fixed in the same place, with their necks and legs fettered, able to see only in front of them, because their bonds prevent them from turning their heads around. Light is provided by a fire burning far above and behind them. Also behind them, but on higher ground, there is a path stretching between them and the fire. Imagine that along this path a low wall has been built, like the screen in front of puppeteers above which they show their puppets.

This is just how we are, we humans.

Sometimes we need to de-fascinate our eyes, unfasten our heads, loosen our necks and look from side to side. We might even turn around to see what is going on behind the backs of our heads. And once we get used to a stationary 360-degree view, we might stand up and walk around. We might even interact with the things around us. Some of those things might be other people, and here it might occur to us to converse with them and enlarge our understanding. Finally, we might summon enough courage to go full-on peripatetic and start feeling for exits, openings and entrances to elsewhere and otherwise.

Welcome to Beriah!

A great many religious people today, seeking religious intensity within their traditions, believe that they have found it in activism.

And indeed, they have found something.

But what they have found is the furthest thing from God. They have found collective misapotheosis in totalizing ideology.

They believe they are taking their faith to the streets, when in fact they have imported the street into their sanctuaries.

Their escape from illusion is an intoxicating delusion. Their spiritual awakening is the climax of a collective ideological dream.

Chuang Tzu never said:

Once Chuang Chou dreamt he was a butterfly, a butterfly flitting and fluttering around, happy with himself and doing as he pleased. He had awakened from the delusion that he had ever been Chuang Chou. He realized that it was his duty to make everyone around him “do the work” required to wake up to the fact that they are butterflies dreaming that they are people.

I look forward to the day that Reform Judaism turns to its proper from-toward present and, overcome with teshuvah, grinds up and drinks its political ideoidols.

More than every possible everything

Metaphysics

I used to say this often, but I haven’t in a while: a soul extends to the limits of what we mean when we say “everything”.

Each soul is universe-sized. This is why I sometimes refer to everythings, plural.

Materialists who believe that a soul (psyche) is an emergent property of our nervous system, and folk-believers who understand souls as spiritual bodies enveloped within our carnal bodies — both believe they have nothing in common, but they are wrong. They both confuse souls with person-sized mental entities: ghosts.

And because they see souls as ghosts, they fail to recognize their true everything-sized self for who it is: themselves. They call their own all-encompassing everything-soul whatever God or God-equivalent term they’ve adopted. Misapotheosis is the result of failure to comprehend the true nature of selfhood and mistaking it for the Absolute.

Self is ultimate comprehension. God is what incomprehensibly comprehends each and every self.

God is incomprehensible, but the fact of God’s realness can be comprehended (“God is both real and incomprehensible”).

More important than this theoretical knowing is a practical know-how. We can adopt an attitude toward incomprehensible reality that learns first to expect the unexpected, then to expect the inconceivable (and therefore unimaginable), and eventually learns to recognize and welcome inconceivable realia as the very substance of life.

Let us call this attitude or relation suprehension — the everted complement of comprehension.

Our own conception “everything” is comprised from without by infinitely more than what any or all of us can mean by everything.

Mine is a metaphysic of surprise.

Not only our religious life, but our human relationships depend on this attitude of suprehension — of openness to realities transcending our own compressive self.

Some come by it naturally. Others of us must cultivate it through effort.

No, what really is metaphysics?

Metaphysics, Philosophy

Metaphysics is the transcendent remainder of one’s own ontology. It is the surplus oblivion around what each of us means when saying and meaning “everything”. It is the radical surprise we anticipate when we attempt to expect the unexpected or to account for unknown unknowns. Nothing could be more personal than one’s own metaphysics.

She was already root

Fables, myths & parables, Kabbalah, Letterpress, Love, Symbols and diagrams

Reading Lou Andreas-Salome this morning I made an obvious connection that I’d missed.

Two facts are characteristic of the problem of the erotic: First of all, that eroticism should be considered as a special case within the sphere of physiological, psychical, and social relations, rather than independently and separately as is often the case. But secondly, that it once again links together these three kinds of relations, merging them into one, and making them its problem.

Rooted since the beginning in the substrate of all existence, eroticism grows from a soil that is ever the same, rich and strong, to whatever height it grows, whatever the immensity, the space occupied by the marvelous tree in which it flowers — subsisting — even when that soil is entirely overrun by edifices — below them, in all its primeval, obscure, and earthy strength. Its immense value to life consists precisely in the fact that, capable though it is of imposing its hegemony widely or of incarnating noble ideals, it has no need to do so, but can draw a surplus of strength from any humus, adapt to serve life in any possible circumstance. Thus we find eroticism associated with the almost purely vegetative functions of our physical being, bound closely to them, and even if it does not become, like these functions, an absolute necessity of existence, it continues to exert a powerful influence upon them. That is why, even in its elevated forms and manifestations, even at the topmost point of the most complex ecstasies of love, there remains in it something of the simplicity and profundity of its origins, always present and ineradicable — something of that healthy gaiety which experiences the life of the body — in the specific sense of the satisfaction of the instincts — as always new, always young and, so to speak, like life itself in its primitive sense. Just as all healthy beings rejoice at awakening, or in their daily bread, or in walking in the fresh air, with a pleasure that is constantly renewed, as if at a joy that is born anew each day, and just as the beginnings of neurosis can often be accurately diagnosed in the fact that these daily joys, these fundamental necessities, become tainted with “boredom,” with “monotony,” with “nausea,” likewise, in the existence of the erotic, behind and beneath the other moments of happiness that it entails, there is always present a happiness which, hardly felt and impossible to measure, man shares with everything that, like himself, breathes.

I cannot help but recall a simple, startling line from Rilke’s “Orpheus. Euridice. Hermes.”

She had come into a new virginity
and was untouchable; her sex had closed
like a young flower at nightfall, and her hands
had grown so unused to marriage that the god’s
infinitely gentle touch of guidance
hurt her, like an undesired kiss.
She was no longer that woman with blue eyes
who once had echoed through the poet’s songs,
no longer the wide couch’s scent and island,
and that man’s property no longer.
She was already loosened like long hair,
poured out like fallen rain,
shared like a limitless supply.
She was already root.

Psychedelic meaning

Autobiography, Metaphysics, Phenomenology, Philosophy

I don’t know what conventional mystics experience in ecstatic visionary states, but I assume these experiences are related to psychedelic experiences.

In my limited experience, psychedelic experiences were intensely meaningful in ways that are nearly impossible to talk about. Although I did experience vivid visions in that state, I was never terribly fascinated by the visions themselves nor in the question concerning the ontological status of the mysterious noumena. At the time, my strong unexamined inclination was to take them as imaginary, and not to attribute any kind of real existence to them.

I prefer to phenomenologically bracket visions, and approach them phenomenologically. I am most concerned with the significance of the ineffable meaning. I am interested in the genus of this meaning, the question of why this meaning is ineffable, and how we may relate ourselves to it.

Maybe my other conceptual commitments preserve themselves through this attitude and this field of relevance. But my gut tells me that this focus will bear fruit. This doesn’t exactly put me at cross-purposes with traditional mysticism, but it does put me at what could be described as a parallel purpose.