Category Archives: Religion

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:

In Assiyah, wholeness is comprehensive system.
In Yetzirah, wholeness is gestalt given.
In Beriah, wholeness is enworldment.
In Atzilut, wholeness is 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!

Another note on “Creation redescription”

Esoterism, Fables, myths & parables, Philosophy, Symbols and diagrams

Another note on “Creation redescription”:

Start with a blank sheet of paper.

Draw lines across the paper, from one side to the other, vertically, horizontally, diagonally. This is division without separation.

Cut the paper along all the lines, but keep the pieces touching like pieces of a puzzle. This is separation without exclusion.

Now remove one section of paper from the others. This is exclusion.

On that removed section of paper, draw horizontal, vertical and diagonal lines.

Cut the paper into bits. Arrange them how you like. If you wish, you can make little duplicates of the cut bits. If you wish you can exclude what doesn’t fit, and remove them from the other scraps, because they are irrelevant.

We can if, we wish, take all the original cut up bits, including those we removed and reconstruct the section like a puzzle. We can restore the section to a state of defined finitude.

We can, if we wish, continue by placing that restored section back with the others, and restore the paper. Imagine a great puzzle made of pieces which are themselves little puzzles.

Alternatively, we can keep our little construction made of cut up bits of the removed section of paper. We can say one of the bits is the ultimate bit and forget all the others. Or we can say the section of paper is not a section of anything, but the whole sheet of paper.

A note on “Creation redescription”

Design, Enworldment, Esoterism, Exnihilism, Philosophy

A note on “Creation redescription”: This was written in response to a question I’ve been intuiting in the background of Sholem’s Major Trends. For an Infinite Creator, creation is necessarily a subtractive process. It creates by negation. This is the fundamental insight of tzimtzum, the heart of panentheism. But (not to get too Hegelian) but negation does not negate or exclude or subtract from infinity, it negates, excludes, subtracts within infinity, as an intrinsic part of infinity. Oblivion is essential to infinity, and nihilitude is a fine name for it. Nihilitude makes finitude possible and actual within infinitude.

Nihilitude can be seen as a distributed tzimtzum. In Sloterdijk’s idiom, where tzimtzum suggests a grand cosmic sphere of divine nothingness, nihilitude suggests a whole spherology of scales, of granularities. Nihilitude can be a foam, or a bubble, or a globe, or an everything-sized universe or even a more-than-everything-size metaphysics.

As a designer, I constantly encounter piercing of foam-scale nihilitude — “oh, wow, I never noticed that!” — “oh, I see what you mean, and now I can’t see it any other way!” — “Oh, I heard it differently, but now I’m hearing it your way!” — “This. Changes. Everything.” — We paper these events over with opaque language. But I see and cannot unsee them as everyday minor miracles.

I didn’t always see things this way. The meta-event of coming to see these everyday surprises as minor miracles came as a piercing of a slightly larger bubble-scale nihilitude. It was a paradigm shift — a localized conversion experience, that jostled my overall enworldment but did not burst it.

But several times in my life I have burst my enworldment. My ultimate, outermost heaven-dome was pierced. An epiphany irrupted into what seemed given, and forced a rippling comprehensive transformation of everything-all-at-once. The first time it happened it seemed like truth itself had exploded into what had been pure enslavement to convention, and that was true as far as it went.

But when this happened again, and then again, an even stranger epiphany pierced of an even vaster sphere of nihilitude.

Etcetera, ad infinitum, ex nihilo.

The creativity that we know is combination of givens we have passively received.

The nothing we know is just exclusion from a finite everything that, to us, seems limitless because it is bounded by oblivion, a nothingness that is absence precisely when it is present.

And the infinity we know is the endless concatenation of whatever givens we have been given, ex nihilo, and therefore with nothing beyond it.

Creation redescription

Enworldment, Everso, Exnihilism, Kabbalah, Letterpress, Symbols and diagrams

From Absolute One

…

Pure Infinitude to Articulate Infinitude (through definitude, divine Withness)

Articulate Infinitude to Defined Finitude (through nihilitude, divine Orness)

Defined Finitude to Formational Beings (through finitude, divine Notness)

Formational Beings to Material Actualization (through combination, divine Andness)

…

From Unformed Matter,

Inarticulate, undefined, unformed, at one with

Absolute One

The passage above is not translation. It describes in pure English what I have been shown in Hebrew.

+0(

Jacob’s Lattice

Design, Enworldment, Exnihilism, Kabbalah

In the Jacob’s Ladder figure (which a designer might be tempted to call Jacob’s Lattice), four Sefirot appear in vertical arrangement, each a world, overlapping at Malchut-Keter.

The terminal consummation at the foot of the world above (its fully realized Malchut) initiates the world below (that world’s Keter). Each world is suspended between an inheritance and a bequeathal, a coronation (Keter) and a kingdom (Malchut). The King is dead; long live the King.

Each world is the emergence of a category of transpiration. A mode of transpiring transpires.

In Beriah, creation transpires, starting from an inheritance of a consummate emanated world, Malchut of Atzilut, culminating in a consummate creational world (Malchut of Beriah) where formation can commence (Keter of Yetzirah). Here transpires creatio ex nihilo: something from nothing.

In Yetzirah, formation transpires, starting from an inheritance of a consummate created world, Malchut of Beriah, culminating in a consummate formational world (Malchut of Yetzirah) where actualization can commence (Keter of Assiyah). Here transpires formatio ex spiritu: something from something.

In Assiyah, actuality transpires, starting from an inheritance of a consummate formal world, Malchut of Yetzirah, culminating in a consummate actual world (Malchut of Assiyah). Here transpires ars ex formatione: thing from something — first, inception of an idea, then its unfolding as multiple possibilities, then development as one specific possibility, then finally to full actualization as a voiced word or physical act or artifact — a material actuality.

If material is invited to reciprocate — as it should, for this is the material dialogue of craft — the influence ripples back upwards. Material responds to actions, actions respond to form, form responds to creation, and presses into inconceivability, impossibility — nihilo —

…And sometimes a response issues from the emanative beyond — a divine echo of creation, revelation from nowhere, revelatio ex nihilo, also known as inspiration. Some shocking, inconceivable impossibility is conceived as a given possibility.

And when this happens, two things happen. The qualitative meaning of infinity is experienced directly as radical surprise. And the person who receives the surprise is transformed, sometimes a little, sometimes a lot, occasionally completely, and neither they nor the world they now inhabit is ever the same again.

Conversion is reenworldment ex nihilo. With a sufficient number of reenworldments, a person might become metaconverted to a world of enworldment, where reenworldment ex nihilo is permanently possible and forever expected. Such a person can never take nothingness, inconceivability or impossibility at face value ever again, for nothingness is the tender mask of infinity, worn for our own fragile finitude.

Let us call this metaconversion exnihilism.

Each one in One

Enworldment, Exnihilism, Love, Philosophy, Religion

Each one of us is the image and likeness of the One.

But each one is merely image and likeness, a self-similar part of the One.

The essence of the One is absolutely unique all-inclusive infinitude. Only the One is absolutely unique, all-inclusive and infinite.

Each one is finite, unique solely by other-exclusion, and has a given finite appearance of centrality within an all-containing everything given through the negative element of infinitude, nihilitude.

Nihilitude defines finitude against absorption in the exnihilating infinitude of the One. The layered protecting garments that bless finite beings with the possibility of enworldment are woven from the divine negative substance, nihilitude.

It is easy to confuse Nothingness with the Infinite, because the infinite One against whom our finite one is defined is concealed in nihilitude. But nihilitude is only the skin of the Infinite One, relative only to some particular finite one. The nothingness comprehends only some particular one, not the One.

Some of us despise our own finitude. We want to transcend it in order to escape it. We want to lose our finitude and be re-absorbed back into the infinite. Others hate whatever reminds us that we are merely one, not One. We try to annihilate whatever and whoever punctures the thin skin of our universal everything-that-is. Whether that everything-that-is happens to be objective scientific fact, or an absolutist religious doctrine, or a socio-psycho-physio-historic theory does not matter — whatever or whoever defies our universal gnosis cannot be. Some of us are just lonely and do not want to be alone inside our own finite one. We long for another to be one with us. Or we subscribe to something universally good. We try to become one with a collective one so vast and grand that it seems, in comparison with our own one, to approximate One.

We must learn to want our finitude. We must learn to savor inexhaustible moreness, and its practical manifestation, inexhaustible surprise. This requires us to intuit and love the nihilitude that protects our finitude and the finitude of others. It is from this nihilitude that creation and revelation come to us from the Infinite One, in small enough quality and magnificence that we may grow toward the infinite without exnihilating into it, altogether.

Years ago, a strange friend shared a quote with me in a characteristically strange way, which, it turned out, was a poetically simple expression of this truth.

Postperennialism

Autobiography, Esoterism, Religion

Perennialism (also known as Traditionalism and Sophia Perennis) compares traditional religions to paths up a mountain. At the foot of the mountain, the paths are separated by many miles. They converge with altitude, and eventually they meet at the summit. The lower divergent understandings of the tradition are exoteric. The higher, convergent understandings are esoteric. The higher the esoteric understanding, the more one understands the depths of one’s own tradition and its transcendent unity with the others.

I was raised Unitarian-Universalist, so this one summit with universally valid paths to it from diverse points of departure resonates. It harmonizes with both U’s of my childhood brainwashing and with the tolerance gospel it preached. But Perennialism provides a depth, seriousness and respect for religiosity that I felt was lacking among the UUs I’ve known, and leftists in general, including religious leftists.

But Perennialism also had some ideas that I found hard to accept. One, I believe, was an artifact of Islam, which claimed that no new traditions were possible after Mohammad. According to Guenon and Schuon, Mohammad was the last prophet who founded what was necessarily the last valid tradition, an idea I reject for multiple reasons. Another is an eschatology of the Fall, which accounts for why no new traditions are possible. Another is that only strict enduring adherence to a traditional religion is a path to esoteric realization. And I dislike the authoritarian politics that normally follow from these beliefs.

Today I realized that what I reject is Perennialism’s exoteric doctrine. The eschatology, historiosophy and practical prescriptions are not essential or even necessary extensions to the esoteric doctrine, and I do not find them to have the same overwhelming persuasive force. I do not reject any of them entirely, and I might find them more persuasive later. But from where I stand, these ideas seem like a connecting belt across converging but as-yet-unconverged exoteric paths, not to be confused with the convergence at the crown.

Polycentered declarations

Autobiography, Design, Enworldment, Esoterism, Exnihilism, Hermeneutics, Judaism, Philosophy, Polycentered design, Polycentrism, Star

The main difficulty I have with esoteric thought is this: I know from direct experience how effective esoteric thought structures are in the dissolution, coagulation, crystallization and stabilization our own souls (psyches) and, consequently, the givenness of the world. Comprehensive conversion — transformation of soul — is a perpetual possibility. This is not even open to doubt, because I’ve experienced conversion phenomena for decades. And people who dismiss this only demonstrate spiritual naivety paired with hubris.

I also know firsthand the role that symbols play in these soul transformations. Radically new truths following from such transformations often emerge first in visual images and diagrams that precede the ability to verbalize the new truth. And when words come, they first come as poetry. Only much later can explicit language be found, but this language still collects around the original structural, visual and poetic core. This genre of revelatory drawing, poetry and writing is hermetic. Again, people who dismiss these things as nonsense only reveal their own limitations.

And I believe that esoteric and normal religious practices can do the same things that thought can. Periodic services and ceremonies, rituals, prayers, forms of mediation as well as religious observances (mitzvot) integrated into everyday life can change or stabilize the givens of reality. And as Susanne Langer taught, our best art is continuous with these religious productions.

To be fully transparent, for me these are less core to my own religious life than thought and symbol work. But they are profoundly important to people in my life that I love most, and by participating in them and bringing my own symbology to my participation, I contribute denser, richer meaning to these practices and receive spiritual communion with others.

Prior to participation in a religious tradition, my spiritual isolation bordered on intolerable. This could be called religious alienation. (Despite what the spiritual-but-not-religious folks believe, serious spirituality craves community of faith. My strong hypothesis is that if this seems otherwise, a person’s spirituality already subsists in an unacknowledged community of faith, perhaps a political one.)

The challenge for me was finding a religious community whose general faith, symbology, practices and metaphysics could accommodate my own faith and its peculiar ways. I absolutely could not belong to any community with anti-intellectual tendencies. I could not belong where devotion or punctiliousness or inchoate mystical feelings of knowingness prevail, and condescendingly assume all religious thinking must be mere theology — a handmaiden of “real” religiosity, or an idle distraction from it.

I found my home in Judaism, where deep study is not thinking about religion, but is itself a core religious praxis on par with prayer. Since the destruction of the Temple and the loss of its material sacrifices, Judaism has sublimated sacrifice and become a radically hermeneutic religion, where lesser understandings are ritually sacrificed and burned on the altar of Machloket l’Shem Shamayim and freed to climb like smoke into the aether, so that insights can descend through the dissipated vapor, back into our souls for recirculation.

This is the religious life as I know it firsthand and very close secondhand.

If you want to know why in Heaven’s name I live a Jewish life, this is my best answer. I am grateful for the miraculous Jewish tradition, and what it has given me (and to all of us, if we are willing to feel the depth and magnitude of gratitude we owe it, instead of stealing these gifts like today’s fashionable anti-Jew “antizionist” prophets of horseshit). And having been adopted into this dysfunctional holy family, I love it in that same stormy, spastic way tight, loving, fucked-up families love — with warmth, fury, irritation, dismay, toughness and hope. And now whatever happens to Am Yisrael — pride, shame, pain, glory, awe, and everything between — directly in my own heart, soul and body, like it happened to me directly, like it happened to my child.

This is identity. It is being a living organ of a living supra-personal body. Anyone who thinks it is a social category imposed on us from without only knows half of the truth, and most very obviously know far less than half of this half.

This section is about what identity is — belonging as an organ of supra-personal being — and what identity is not, a social category that is assigned by oneself or another. It can be skipped, if it bores or offends.

Progressivism is an identity. What progressivists “identify as” is not. This identifying-as is only an expression of one’s Progressivist identity.

The same is true on the right. A great number of Tradcaths and Orthobros express their political identity through some requisite traditional religious devotion.

Progressivists who “identify as a Jew” mainly experience Jewish “identity” as a category assignment within their political identity. Like all members of their faith they are jealous of their category. But they feel directly and spontaneously only the triumphs and humiliations of Progressivism. The daily vicissitudes of the Democratic Party are more viscerally real to them than the existential struggles of Israel. To put it in the starkest terms, November 2024 was personally devastating, where October 2023 was a news story about something that happened far away to someone else.

With respect to the Jewish people — Am Yisrael — Progressivist “as a Jews” are like an estranged spouse with a new lover. Technically they remain married, but their heart belongs to someone new. They are, in fact, Jewish, and nobody can take that away, but they are faithlessly and soullessly Jewish.

They might have a lingering fondness for ethnic Jewishness, and they may feel occasional spasms of ownership, especially if they spot their spouse out in public with someone new (like me, for instance!). “That’s mine, not yours, you lame imposter!” But they have no commitment or loyalty. All that goes to Progressivism. And deep down they know their “as a Jew” identity, is conditional. They must regularly, vocally and explicitly betray their people. Their function is to be human proof-points that Jews, too, can be indifferent or hostile to Israel, and therefore that Anti-Zionism is not anti-Jewish. As long as they keep serving that function, they can be Progressivists in good standing. For now. If the need to renounce antisemitism disappears — and that seems likely — the “as a Jew” Jewish Progressivists will find themselves in the same boat as their disloyal ancestors — abruptly expelled and attacked as outsiders. This pattern has recurred in every European and Arab nation, which of fucking course was precisely why Zionism became necessary. That and two thousand plus years of oppression, persecution and deadly pogroms. To be clear, in this age of exaggeratedly reified metaphor, by “deadly” I mean intentional, non-figurative, non-rhetorical, literal, physical, biological life-ending deaths in large numbers. Folks like Scott Weiner who accuse Israel of genocide, but not enough to satisfy the insatiable hatred of Israel-haters should remember that kapos — even the most willing ones — only delayed their gassing and incineration.

This is how I understand and experience Jewish identity, and how I see it in relation to technically Jewish “as a Jew” Progressivists of Jewish ancestry.

Now I want to speak frankly about important doubts about esoterism, hermeticism and the like. These center on magical claims beyond effects on souls.

Here I have only secondhand knowledge.

To make matters worse, these claims conflict with my metaphysics. These ideas remain outside my faith, perhaps beyond my faith, cloaked in oblivion, as these things are before they reveal themselves ex nihilo.

All this might very well be beyond my reach in the same way my firsthand knowledge of spiritual transformation is beyond the experiential range of the as-yet unconverted or authentic Jewish identity is outside the experience of ethnically Jewish Progressivists.

And I do not mind showing my limits. I am who I am, and I have only come as far as I am today.

I will try to stay faithful to what I know while maintaining as much exnihilist humility as I can toward what may someday come to light. And I will try and re-try never to alienate anyone whose spiritual center is remote from mine.

I will, in other words, respectfully polycenter myself where I am: I, here, now.

And I, here, now believe — humbly and tentatively — that design does, in actuality, and even more in potentia, what magic (also) claims to do.

That is, design forms, reforms, maintains and repairs materials and souls together to instaurate enworldments capable of mediating infinite, finite and definite being. Design circulates the divine light through exchange of gifts.

I have written about design this way before, in a variety of ways, so I will leave things here, compact and opaque and pregnant with hope.

Ingratitude and alienation

Ethics, Metaphysics, Philosophy

When someone gives you something that you value, either willingly or unwillingly, and you try to take possession of it “no strings attached” without gratitude toward the giver, something very bad happens to your soul. You suffer guilt.

This is especially true if you have no theory of relationship to help you conceptualize what gratitude is — or for that matter, any concept expressing one’s own organic belonging to living orders that transcend one’s own individual selfhood.

A philosophy of isolated self cannot make sense of gratitude, of jealousy, of loyalty, of belonging, of guilt or even of love beyond the inwardly felt emotional content. Such a philosophy takes these valid intuitions of spiritual realities as psychological hallucinations, or as biological responses to stimuli. It severs a whole category of direct intuition from the reality intuited, and this severing leaves the individual cut off from its own relational context. That is, it takes the perception of an apparent phenomenon as pure pheno- (appearance) with no corresponding superperceptual reality (noumenon).

A philosophy of isolated self is not only an expression of a spiritual state of social alienation, but alienation of all being who transcends the egoic self. All being of this kind is assigned names and explanations that strip them of the same kind of being that an egoic self has and reduces them to physical concepts.

And even this physicalization is distortive, because physical concepts do not necessarily involve any actual relationships with matter.

Physics, and science in general, is a particular class of theories about material relationships, substantiated by closely observed material interactions and rigorous tracing of causal implications of what is observed, expressed as theory. But a great many folks who never stepped foot in a laboratory or much concerned themselves with how laboratories generate theoretical knowledge, accept scientistic doctrine the way others have accepted Christian or Buddhist doctrine without ever undergoing the kinds of firsthand experiences that make immediate sense of these religious concepts, and in fact necessitate them. Scientism is an ungrounded dogma with exactly the same form as dogmatic religion, just populated with a different style of content. In other words, the medium is identical, and its spiritual effect (message) is the same.

The spiritual effect is compulsive playing of construction toy games with abstract concepts derived from physics (or theology) without ever contacting, or missing contact or even wondering about the concrete realities from which these abstractions were abstracted!

Notice how this dogmatic physicalization move resembles the self-isolating one: A revelation of a given reality is taken as the only reality, severed from the reality given. The experience of givenness of reality is accepted as real, but the given reality is denied reality. An intuition of relationship with being beyond oneself is taken as an experience within the self (an emotion one has). A theory of matter derived from disciplined and intensive interactions with matter is taken as knowledge of matter. And of course, infamously, a belief in a theology (a serious attempt to make sense of one’s actual religious life in relationship with divine being) is treated as religion itself, as if a religion is a belief system!

All these moves ignore the fact that all knowledge is abstracted from concrete reality, and concrete reality is given by intuition. Every explicit understanding is rooted in tacit intuitions.

And if you habitually suppress intuited givens, especially intensely intuited givens, in order to preserve a construction of ungrounded concepts, you will suffer alienation. Less and less of reality will feel real to you. As social alienation increases, people will feel like phantoms or identity avatars. As world-alienation increases, the world will seem like a simulation or shadow play. And you, yourself, will feel like a ghost, dissipating and reappearing, today as one me and tomorrow another. A thunder-perfect nobody, alienated from self, precisely because that self is alienated from whatever is not of itself.

The strange thing about alienation is how all its various forms converge at the same abyss-point, the antipode of the esoteric summit: “Mind as its own place.” Milton knew.

But when we intuitively ground ourselves in a shared reality, intuited and valued diversely, but loved in common, we now have ground for participation in something realer than real in whom we subsist. We now have the participatory medium we need, connecting us to each other, connecting us to a world that feels real, connecting us to reality beyond our own sphere of experience and knowledge which may at any moment irrupt into our midst, apparently from nowhere, changing everything.

Guilt is real, gratitude is real, love is real because we belong to something greater than us. And that belonging is the source of all meaning. If we know this we will feel grateful for our guilt. If we do not, we will feel anxious hostility toward even love.

Kvetch

Autobiography, Design, Esoterism, Judaism, Philosophy

I have a genuinely original vision that I need to get out, but it is hard to communicate.

There’s a little for everyone to love, and a lot for everyone to reject, and much for people to claim as their own domain of knowledge, and therefore a domain to which I have no claim at all.

Mystics sneer at my philosophy. Philosophers sneer at my mysticism. Both sneer at my capitalist servitude, and servile capitalists sneer at my impractical interest in mystical and philosophical matters!

I can’t win!

And everything I know about is generally considered matters of opinion. We all have philosophies. We all have beliefs about religious beliefs. And “design thinkers” spilled the beans on design: Everyone designs! Everyone is a designer!

I am no longer interested in talking to people who know better than me on the things I know best.

I sit silently waiting to get back to writing.

I’ve stopped counting but surely I’m at the end of the third trimester.

St. N.:

Ideal selfishness. — Is there a more holy condition than that of pregnancy? To do all we do in the unspoken belief that it has somehow to benefit that which is coming to be within us! — Has to enhance its mysterious worth, the thought of which fills us with delight! In this condition we avoid many things without having to force ourselves very hard! We suppress our anger, we offer the hand of conciliation: our child shall grow out of what is gentlest and best. We are horrified if we are sharp or abrupt: suppose it should pour a drop of evil into the dear unknown’s cup of life! Everything is veiled, ominous, we know nothing of what is taking place, we wait and try to be ready. At the same time, a pure and purifying feeling of profound irresponsibility reigns in us almost like that of the auditor before the curtain has gone up — it is growing, it is coming to light: we have no right to determine either its value or the hour of its coming. All the influence we can exert lies in keeping it safe. ‘What is growing here is something greater than we are’ is our most secret hope: we prepare everything for it so that it may come happily into the world: not only everything that may prove useful to it but also the joyfulness and laurel-wreaths of our soul. — It is in this state of consecration that one should live! It is a state one can live in! And if what is expected is an idea, a deed — towards every bringing forth we have essentially no other relationship than that of pregnancy and ought to blow to the winds a presumptuous talk of ‘willing’ and ‘creating’. This is ideal selfishness: continually to watch over and care for and and to keep our soul still, so that our fruitfulness shall come to a happy fulfillment! Thus, as intermediaries, we watch over and care for to the benefit of all; and the mood in which we live, this mood of pride and gentleness, is a balm which spreads far around us and on to restless souls too. — But the pregnant are strange! So, let us be strange too, and let us not hold it against others if they too have to be so! And even if the outcome is dangerous and evil: let us not be less reverential towards that which is coming to be than worldly justice is, which does not permit a judge or executioner to lay hands on one who is pregnant!

This is what you deserve if you allow Nietzsche to convert you from Western Buddhism to a bizarro dysfit judeochristian esoteric Judaism.

Intuition, commonality and scalar being

Design, Enworldment, Esoterism, Philosophy

In all three facets of my work — as a philosopher, esoterist and designer — intuition is central to what I do, not only in the content and goals of my work, but in how I approach the work and do the work.

By intuition, I mean something quite simple. To dumb it down to the simple essence, intuition means “without linguistic mediation”. Whenever we experience or know or do something without using words to explain it to ourselves or to direct ours actions, that is intuition.

We can have intuitive perceptions, intuitive responses, both with people (with others and ourselves), with things around us, intuitive understandings and with reality in general.

Intuitive perceptions and responses is the stuff of what Husserl called the lifeworld. We spontaneously effortlessly see-as and wordlessly deal with the things around us. We only reach for language if something resists our intuition, and we need to figure out what it is or how it works or what we ought to do.

It is almost the same with our social environment. Through what Garfinkel called ethnomethods, in social settings where we “belong”, we know how to spontaneously and wordlessly “read” other people’s symbolic actions, and to produce legible symbolic actions so we are understood. Here, too, we only resort to explicit language if things get awkward and an explanation is needed, or, in more extreme cases, demanded.

Finally, at the heart of it all, radiating to the furthest reaches, is our intuitive understanding of how particulars hang together within the universal. Prior to any explicit thought, we carry an intuited ontology within an intuited metaphysics. Or, if you prefer, we can say we have an intuited sense of everything, within which every thing is intuited, in intuited relation to everything and to every other thing. Some call this “worldview”, but the spectatorial overtones can mislead. I (perhaps confusingly) call this intuited ontology and metaphysics a faith. A faith is not what we believe, but that by which — by whom — we believe.

And all our activities, solitary and social, materially and symbolically shape the world we share. In our immediate environments, where we have ownership, we are able to shape it according to our own preferences. We have less and less influence at as scale increases. At smaller scales, we actively shape the material environment, often to make it more accessible to intuition. At larger scales we influence it only indirectly, if at all, and often what is outside of our control is also unintuitive, and, therefore in need of explanation. Here we use language to make as much sense of things as we can, to get it somehow to fit our faith — our intuitive sense of everything and things in general. This material shaping of our environment and of our general understanding of things we influence and cannot influence is what I call an enworldment.

As a designer, I am concerned with the shaping of environments. My goal is to shape them in such a way that they are readily intuited (with minimum need to figure them out), can be interacted with intuitively (with minimal need to verbally direct one’s actions) and most of all, intuited as valuable — as stabilizing and enriching one’s own enworldment.

As a philosopher, I am concerned with the shaping of symbols, primarily linguistic ones. But some of my most important symbols are visual or diagrammatic, and these help me extend the reach of my philosophical work. I have come to recognize that my philosophical work overlaps with the genre of hermeticism, in that it deploys words and diagrams and dense visual symbologies to say true things about reality beyond the scope of words. I’ve been talking a lot about objects held and valued in common, but one of our most important common objects are symbolic, linguistic and literary.

Finally, as an esoterist I am interested in what can be done with faiths. They are far from immutable. They can change in ways that can make life immeasurably and ineffable better… or worse. Think of this as soul hacking. There are many possible means for hacking souls, but my favorite means, and the one I am best at is hermetic philosophy. But design is also a powerful tool, because design shapes materials into media, and media convey and support (or block and undermine) faiths.

These three intuitive activities, initially separate concerns of compartmentalized parts of my self, over three decades have gradually converged and grown together into one complex multifaceted being. Three trees have intertwined into a lattice, and in their interilluminating density this shared set of ideas have gained reality and a palpable halo of significance. And I, as a person, have gained a sense of integrity, wholeness and reality. I am no longer spiritually fragmented, conflicted or of two or more minds on important matters.

I think, feel and act more wholeheartedly, because of my inward richness of common concerns.

I have enworded myself with enworldment.

It has been obvious to me for decades now that being is scalar, and that the individual person is only one of these beings.

Unfortunately, in this time, many of us have developed a great number of conceptual and linguistic habits, reinforced by scientistic metaphysics, to obscure and explain away the smaller and larger scales.

People who rely entirely on language for their thinking, and people whose thinking is purely instrumental (used to direct practical and social activity) will be entirely oblivious to this reality. People who depend upon ready-made words with ready-made definitions as their thought construction materials cannot think with the originality of those who articulate intuitions to develop new generative language. It is the difference between a person who enjoys constructing elaborate new things with LEGO blocks and the inventor of LEGO blocks. It is the difference between ingenuity and genius.

But if we take our intuition seriously, sub-individual and super-individual being is manifestly real. It is given even when we lack language-equipped concepts to receive it.

My first observation was of being at the smaller scale. I noticed that people became different in the company of different people. They used different words, behaved differently, exuded different energy. I intuited as different. I also notice some aspects of them were suppressed or marginalized. We see this when people fall in love. They can almost become strangers to us in their new intimacy with another.

I associated this with politics. For example, when the Germans invaded France in 1940, they met less resistance from the French Army than might have been expected. But this was not just weakness. Much of the French right felt more loyalty to the right wing spirit of the Nazis than they felt for their own republic. And when the Nazi successfully conquered Paris, they established the infamous right-wing Vichy government to govern southern France. For the Vichy French there was more solidarity across the right-wing parties than for the left and centrist French.

Similarly, across two people newly in love, spiritual factions within each can come together with such powerful affinity that it breaks the each person’s pre-love integrity, to create a new integrity between them. They become disordered and reordered, and both can estrange them from the people who had been important to them before they fell in love. This threat of estrangement and its reality is the substance of jealousy. Jealousy is the intuition of relationship-threatening psychic reorderings.

I already hinted at the larger scale beings with my Vichy France analogy. Nations are always uneasy alliances of ideological factions. Some nations have inward integrity. The factions might disagree on certain matters, but they hold other things about their nation in common, valuing them in different ways. People agreeing that they are valuable, even if what is valued differs. But if ideologies begin to value their own ideological ideas more than their nation, they may even become hostile to their nation for refusing to share their ideological loyalties. They might break faith with their own national tradition and betray it with dalliances with more like-minded foreign actors.

I first intuited this kind of ideological being as being (as opposed to simply agreeing on the same facts, preferable policies) — that is, as a shared living faith — during the charged time between 2001 and 2005 when a great many Americans discovered the intoxication of mass Standing United. Suddenly I head people adopting common language, concepts, lines of reasoning and attitudes that I’d never noticed before. I started feeling like something was speaking and acting through them, and I found it intensely and profoundly repellent. The same thing happened in 2020. People began to adopt new language, beliefs, concepts and behaviors en masse, which were not only different from before, but in direct conflict with the liberal values they used to espouse, seemingly sincerely. Now they were hardcore identitarians, who believed different categories of person should have different standing before the law, different social status, be awarded different privileges? and held to different norms. I had the same intuitive revulsion, but this time it was compounded with a sense of betrayal, because it was my liberal values they’d turned against. Their liberalism, it turns out, had been mere social conformism, not a principle of personal integrity. It seems that most people are like this. Most of us conform to a belief that integrity is important, but very few people have the integrity to resist if our tribe drifts into illiberalism, tolerance of evil or actual evil. This is normal, and this is why maintaining social order is so crucial. The majority of people, it seems, are potential extremists or supporters of extremism, because their primary mechanism of integrity is their social context, not a cultivated inner integrity. Many of the most spiritual-but-not-religious people who see religion as empty formalism (to put it in bigoted anti-Jewish language “pharisaism”) need religion far more than they can understand from within the debased faith they’ve accidentally drifted into on the currents of ideological conformity. Judaism, by the way, more than any other religion, precisely because of its formality, has emptied, fulfilled and refulfilled itself innumerable times, and has developed the richest set of symbolic forms diversely valued in common of any religion, very much including its brittle squabbling, splitting, warring offspring who believe they are the heirs of the covenant while dramatically demonstrating the opposite.

Of course, there are many scales of being between psychic factions within a person or across couples in love and ideological factions and nations. These are what interest me most, especially as a designer.

Organizations can have differing strengths of integrity. They can be integrated around common purpose, or they can be managed in siloes, or they can descend into departmental and factional wars. Organizations are beings composed of beings, belonging to larger scale beings.

To put it in the flakiest possible way, service design is in the egregore business. And design is their heir of alchemy.

I’ll just leave it there, to be rejected, neglected, forgotten or pondered.

+0(

Shit Theory Handbook notes

Design, Judaism, NOTA, Politics, Shit theory

Announcing a new shit: Horseshit.

Horseshit is whatever horrible shit the far left and the far right can find to agree on. It is called horseshit because it collects between the converging extremes described in horseshoe theory.

With horseshit, we are now up to three kinds of shit, because there is also bullshit and chickenshit.

We are no longer limited to giving two shits about anything.

This post, which began as a rant appears to be developing into a textbook.

To catch everyone up, here’s some foundational Shit Theory, to help everyone keep their shit straight:

According to Shit Theory, “chickenshit” is tedious nonsense — all the formalities, procedures, reports, busywork and minutiae that ruins everyday existence — that seem like it ought to add up to something important but never does.

In contrast, “bullshit” is meaning-mongering nonsense — notions that seem overflowing with promise, benevolence and idealistic intention — but which can never be achieved, or even put into practice.

And now “horseshit”. Let us formulate a provisional technical definition.

“Horseshit” is malevolent nonsense — artifacts of ignorant, paranoid resentment meant to answer the eternal question “who can we blame for this shitshow?” This question drives ignorant but urgently inquiring minds to extremes of left- and right-wing politics. But by some diabolical antimiracle these theories all converge in a negative common ground of suspicion and hate. And, 100% of the time, as if by cosmic law, smack in the middle of this common ground is always and inevitably The Jews.

Now, let us explore practical applications of Shit Theory.

The origins of the discipline were practical, which is why Shit Theory is not, like most theory, pure bullshit.

It was developed to diagnose and treat a common and deadly strain of shittiness found in most organizations. This shittiness is known as “corporate”.

Corporations are terrible at integrating meaning and practice. Integrating meaning and practice means committing to a difficult, qualitative, nonlinear and not-entirely-predictable process called “design”.

Design does not suit the kind of technocratic ndbf administrator who thrives in the upper half of glass towers. This type generally leans soulless, and is reliably numb and deaf to genuine meaning. They are more into efficiency, productivity, measuring things and evading blame. But their whole job is to make human resources produce maximum productivity. But for temperamental reasons, inspiring people to work together to achieve a common goal is out of the question. Their workaround is to coercively micromanage each isolated resource to construct some isolated bit of a complicated and entirely uninspiring system.

These bits, once built, can be bolted and hacked together to more or less function, or at least to check a box and evade blame for any larger scale systemic malfunction or dysfunction. The hacked-together lump is then sent off to creative, who try to repair, patch and sand the lump to inoffensiveness, before applying several coats of artificial charm to its surface. Then marketing pumps phony meaning onto it. Then the inoffensive, artificially charming, phony lumps are boxed up, loaded onto trucks and off it all goes for consumption.

Corporations fabricate bullshit-coated chickenshit.

And, unfortunately, so do most governmental agencies.

And so do non-governmental organizations (NGO), who are normally founded by ndbf technocratic administrators who are so amazing at corporateness they’ve become zillionaires whose egos have grown in inverse proportion to their infinitesimally shriveled souls.

They have big empty ideas about how their deep expertise in chickenshit, combined with the unlimited coercive power and scale of government could help produce bullshit of epic proportions and beneficence.

So the corporations and the government and the NGO zillionaires with great billowing bullshit ostentation, gather to have top-secret chickenshit meetings about the future of the entire world.

Of course, it is all bullshit that will result in nothing more than yet more chickenshit. But to those poor paranoids who don’t know jackshit about the realities of corporateness, it looks like some seriously sinister shit is probably going down.

Thus horseshit, in copious quantities.

I’ve been writing about bullshit and chickenshit for many years now, but I have never recorded the august ancestry of these two concepts.

My use of bullshit was inspired by Frankfurt’s famous essay:

It is impossible for someone to lie unless he thinks he knows the truth. Producing bullshit requires no such conviction. A person who lies is thereby responding to the truth, and he is to that extent respectful of it. When an honest man speaks, he says only what he believes to be true; and for the liar, it is correspondingly indispensable that he considers his statements to be false. For the bullshitter, however, all these bets are off: he is neither on the side of the true nor on the side of the false. His eye is not on the facts at all, as the eyes of the honest man and of the liar are, except insofar as they may be pertinent to his interest in getting away with what he says. He does not care whether the things he says describe reality correctly. He just picks them out, or makes them up, to suit his purpose.

I got the term chickenshit from Paul Fussell.

What does that rude term signify? It does not imply complaint about the inevitable inconveniences of military life: overcrowding and lack of privacy, tedious institutional cookery, deprivation of personality, general boredom. Nothing much can be done about those things. Chickenshit refers rather to behavior that makes military life worse than it need be: petty harassment of the weak by the strong; open scrimmage for power and authority and prestige; sadism thinly disguised as necessary discipline; a constant “paying off of old scores”; and insistence on the letter rather than the spirit of ordinances. Chickenshit is so called—instead of horse-or bull- or elephant shit—because it is small-minded and ignoble and takes the trivial seriously. Chickenshit can be recognized instantly because it never has anything to do with winning the war.

So there we have it. Bullshit. Chickenshit. Horseshit.

Isn’t it funny, too, that the latest deluge of horseshit is a reaction to institutional bullshit and chickenshit?

If you can fight fire with fire, why not fight shit with even shittier shit? All this shit flinging, by the way, proves conclusively that we are descended from apes.

And this is probably our best theory why everyone has suddenly gone apeshit.

Apeshit is the frantic nonsense we start flinging when the world has gone to shit, and the material we have available around us is shit and more shit. So that is what we throw at each other.

And so here we are.

We are up bullshit, chickenshit, horseshit and apeshit creek without a paddle. No, it is worse. These creeks have risen into rivers, and the rivers have swelled into an ocean.

A shitflood is drowning the whole world.

And Shit Theory is the Ark to help us stay afloat of it.

Belimah again

Everso, Exnihilism, Kabbalah

Reading further in Scholem, I just came upon that miraculous word belimah. Here is what Scholem says about it.

Various peculiarities of the terminology employed in [Sefer Yetzirah], including some curious neologisms which find no natural explanation in Hebrew phraseology, suggest a paraphrase of Greek terms, but most of the details still await a full clarification. The precise meaning of the phrase Sefirot belimah which the author constantly uses and which may be the key to the understanding of what he actually had in mind when speaking of the Sefirot, is a matter of speculation. The second word belimah which may be taken to denote or to qualify the specific nature of these “numbers” has been explained or translated in accordance with the theories of the several writers or translators: infinite Sefirot, or closed, abstract, ineffable, absolute Sefirot, or even Sefirot out-of-nothing. If the author of the book wanted to be obscure, he certainly succeeded beyond his wishes.