Category Archives: Esoterism

Traversing the star grid

Autobiography, Esoterism, Fables, myths & parables, History, Ideas, Kabbalah, Philosophy

I am pretty sure I first read whatever it was that implanted the myth of the star grid in my head when I was eight or nine, and I was at an apartment building playground near where my friend Devlin grew up. My mom was friends with a woman named Chichi (or something like that). She lived in an incredibly cool ring-shaped house, with a garden in the center. My mom would visit with Chichi and my sister and I would play on the playground with the kids who lived there. Years before we became friends, I encountered Devlin on this playground, wearing a Frankenstein mask chasing shrieking kids all around the pinestraw and cheap playground equipment ubiquitous in the mid- to late-70s, whose white, scarlet and royal blue paint was always sunbleached and chipping under rust rot, and always missing several bolts and, like our moms, barely holding together.

I must have been in the habit of bringing books to that playground, because I have two vivid book memories from that exact spot. One was Roald Dahl’s Charlie and the Great Glass Elevator, and specifically a part of the book where Charlie is menaced by vermicious knids. The other was an astronomy book, whose name I do not remember, which introduced me to the notion that from some point in the universe an observer could look out into space, and in every direction see the stars in orderly array.

This idea embedded in my imagination, and might even be my first philosophical experience. It is certainly the first philosophical idea I remember, unless we count the insight I learned from Mark Twain, that evil could be comical, which, of course, paved my path to Nietzsche.

This star grid insight, however, set me on the way to Thomas Kuhn. We could, it turns out, change what we see by changing how we see it; and one way to change how we see is by changing our own position relative to what we see.

And suddenly, transformed by that image, a new perspective on seeing crystalized in me. The difference between arbitrary scattering of stars or data-points and diamond-clear faceted order was a matter of aspect, of relative position and orientation. You can toil at mapping the vast mess you see from your seat, and scry whatever meaning you find there. But you might find something shockingly simple if you just unchain your head from its fixed point, stand up, walk around, resituate your body and eyes and observe from many positions and perspectives how things present themselves.

I’ve told this star grid story before, but I’m inspired to tell it for a specific reason today.

Today I am hearing it as a story of multistability. Gestalt psychology was, as far as I know, the first systematic study of perceptual multistability. Philosophical hermeneutics approached texts as a matter of semantic multistability.

But my core interest is psychic multistability — because when we find a new perspective of semantic stability in a text, that change reverberates in us. The meaning of the text transforms before us, and in some elusive way, we change with it. This inner change is why books linger with us and change the mood and tone of our lives.

Philosophical texts, though — and this includes philosophical fiction — induce stable, lasting shifts in our conceptual order, which extend beyond texts and reading experiences, and apply directly to the givenness of the world. We effortlessly, spontaneously perceive and conceive some part of reality differently, and experience it in a new way, intuitively, prior to any thought or language. We experience a new given truth.

And sometimes even the bounds of the text’s subject matter are breached, and these same concepts and percepts appear unexpectedly, and equally spontaneously across many fields of experience, in the intuition of analogy. (“This is just like the star-grid!”) A form (what Plato, speaking Greek called “idea”) that orders one domain applies also to other domains, otherwise unrelated.

But some psychic reorderings break the bounds of analogy and all figuration, and reveal reality as a whole in a completely new aspect, changing literally everything all at once, opening entirely new previously inconceivable meanings, the most important of which are outside the domain of form.

This is why I care about the different modes of reading and writing, and the forms of truth they indicate and induce.

These are all gestell shifts, and they are known only by their fruits. They are known inwardly by their experiential fruits in the articulate gestalts we perceive and conceive across the What, How, Why and Who of our experience; they are known outwardly by observable responses to these experiences.

We have fixed notions of what these gestell shifts essentially are, why they occur and what behaviors should result from them. We tend to admire them, at least from a safe distance. Because they are admired, they are pursued by some who lack intrinsic interest in what induces the shifts. Some try to induce the inward transformation through strict self-control, by adopting outward behaviors of those reputed to have been transformed. They want to become admirable. Others ape the outward behaviors of transformed souls, in order to win admiration for what they are not.

I am not sure how helpful these old criteria and conventions are. They may just reflect what humankind required at its point of development between 300 BC and 300 AD. Earlier times admired radically different qualities. We must change our individual and collective selves in response to what new technologies enable us to self-inflict, to cope with and to achieve. Different technologies create new self-inflicted conditions, copes and possibilities.

Religious language relies on spatial metaphors. Spiritual journeys involve ascensions to higher planes, and risks of falling into lower ones. Mediums leave their bodies and rise heavenward. And when expressing intellectual experiences, we speak optically and spatially about standpoints, perspectives, points-of-view, aspects. Many of the most consequential shifts in understanding I have experienced can only be expressed geometrically. A person can lie in bed dreaming, or sit in a dark theater watching a stationary screen, or sit in a ramshackle playground reading a book and be transported to distant imaginary, intellectual or imaginal places. How many transports are there, and how many are yet to transport us?

Artificial style

Art, Autobiography, Design, Enworldment, Esoterism

My friend Ash wrote a post on LinkedIn.

Artificial taste is not taste.

In fact, it reeks even more of ineptitude and forgery than Al hallucinations and tells. Hallucinations and tells are at least true reflections of their source.

The only thing convincing about work produced with “design like” and “write like” prompts is that it convinces the audience the creator has insufficient skill for the job and is trying to get away with something.

By the way, this perspective isn’t remotely anti-Al. It’s pro-creativity. I use Al every day in what I hope are creative and constructive ways.

I almost responded and then I got embarrassed for trying to speak philosophically in a professional setting.

I think you’re very right about this. Taste indirectly indicates a standpoint from which a first-person perspective potentially may be experienced. I think that is why genuine style innovations suggest unknown places or scenes where life is lived differently.

Counterfeit style promises a perspective but can’t deliver on that promise. Instead it serves up style schtick. It is a symptom of lack of integrity, sometimes so total that it isn’t even cynical, because the counterfeiter cannot even imagine a coherent perspective spontaneously experienced from an integrated personality. Style is just consistent decorative logic applied to the same-old here and now.

I remember at the dawn of adolescence, when I first experienced punk, I wanted to go wherever that was happening, and that place was definitely not rural South Carolina, where I was stuck. I had the same reaction to REM, and that was in a place pretty similar to where I was in most respects. But the style space was entirely new and promising, and that was where I wanted to go.

Punks always disparaged poseurs. Poseurs were happy staying right where they were as who they were, and they adopted punk stylings to continue playing the same boring prestige games.

It is essentially the same charge perennialists level against syncretists.

Note on my embarrassment: I wasn’t ashamed of my ideas. I was ashamed of placing them in the wrong forum. You don’t throw fancy-pants pearls into a practical pigpen.

Between wherefore and therefore

Chord, Esoterism, Kabbalah, Philosophy

Faith moves in the present, between wherefore and therefore.

“Wherefore…?”: Hermeneutic presequence is an implicit question upstream of belief

“Therefore…?”: Pragmatic consequence is a field of implicit action downstream from belief.

Each belief is engendered by an implicit wherefore before unfolding into explicit therefores.

Belief precedes speech and action, and is the fruit of faith. It is the rustling between whither and whence.

I originally formulated this idea using the model of the pragmatic maxim:

To fully understand the meaning of any idea, first, conceive it as the response to a question or problem that engendered it, then develop the practical consequences that follow from it.

Thanks to C. S. Peirce for the pragmatic maxim:

In order to ascertain the meaning of an intellectual conception one should consider what practical consequences might conceivably result by necessity from the truth of that conception; and the sum of these consequences will constitute the entire meaning of the conception.

Thanks to M. Tismisesky for bludgeoning Peirce’s verbosity into a two-word provocation:

And therefore…?

Thanks to H.-G. Gadamer for his “hermeneutic priority of the question”.

To understand a question means to ask it. To understand meaning is to understand it as the answer to a question.

Quadrephania

Design, Esoterism, Kabbalah, Metaphysics, Philosophy, Polycentered design

Within the actual world are myriad objects of myriad materials which can be combined or taken apart, in myriad ways.

Within the formational world are myriad subjects to whom reality is given and withheld, each in its own way, according to receptive capacities and responsive capabilities.

Within the revelatory world is being beyond subjectivity and objectivity, the source of all articulate reality – differentiation-in-unity – intelligibility. Here reality is given as absolute truth, inconceivable and incomprehensible, all-conceiving and all-comprehending, ineffable but certain. The source of subject is known solely by its fruits, subjective reformation effects objective change, revelation, creation, instauration ex nihilo.

Within the infinite world emanates the source of being, the source of infinite unity, beyond all. Here reality is ungiven mystery: infinite One. Emanating: am-ing, adonai-ing, is-was-will-be-ing.

Why am I compelled to return to the four worlds again and again, to show them so they can be recognized by those with the capacity to do so?

Because these worlds, far from exotic or distant or rare, are more present than presence, all the time. The only question is whether we are ready to receive them in their full fourfoldness and respond.

The actual world acts upon us, and we act upon it. The actual world resists us, and we resist it. We know reality by its defiance of our actions and expectations. We intuit many possibilities, and we are met with exponentially more impossibilities.

The formational world surprises us with different givenness from different subjects. Reality is given to me differently from how it is given to you. Reality is given to biology differently from how it is given to mathematics or to literature. We cannot in good faith doubt it is the same reality, but we cannot avoid contending with the difference, and this very contention is seeking an ever-elusive transcendent truth.

The revelatory world – which is also the creative world, and thus the instaurational world – is the world that radically surprises us with spontaneous changes to our own subjectivity and consequently changes to the givenness of reality. This is the site of the miracle of re-enworldment ex nihilo. Any first re-enworldment will be taken as revelation of a true self in a true world. But a truer self in a truer world is given with multiple re-enworldments, and this is the exnihilist enworldment of ever-possible enworldment.

And the infinite world? The more present we are to what is present to us, the more real its omnipresent reality is to us as ground, and the more important our belonging within it grows.

Let me make this even more plain, and more practical. Let us root this in actual events in the actual world.

Most of the time we must adopt one subject – and its objectivity – as the sole valid subject.

Subjects are complex. We all contain multitudes. In addition to the subjective universals assumed to be shared by all human beings (Husserl’s famous “lifeworld”), educated people are taught to understand the world scientifically, mathematically, historically, politically, fictionally, legally, economically, etc. to varying degrees. And all these subjects are coordinated within a sort of ideal collective “supersubjectivity” within which we situate our own partial understandings, as we socially participate in organizational life. In our organization, some things are known best by us and other things make partial sense to us. Other things we ignore and leave to others.

Any organization has a supersubjectivity, and it determines the intra-subjective order within its social being. A university is an example of an unusually expansive, deep and explicitly structured supersubjective organization. Unless an organization is some kind of tyrannical cult dominated by one genius and limited to that one person’s subject – (and trust me, such places do exist) – an organization’s supersubjectivity transcends the subjectivity of each person who participates in it. But it is real, and it guides the reasoning and reasoned actions of an organization.

Problems arise though if the supersubjectivity of an organization is unable to effectively address the subjectivities that the organization attempts to serve with its offerings (its systems of interconnected services and products). The organization’s way of making sense and responding puts it at odds with its customers. Other problems arise if the organization’s way of making sense and responding is so similar to its competitors that its offerings have little or no compelling differentiation. And yet other organizations have pockets of self-oblivion inside their own walls, subjects who have become alienated from the supersubjectivity of the organization in which they operate, playing no role in the overall organizational understanding, but compelled to perform tasks directed by others.

In these cases an organization might seek help from designers. Designers, if they know what design actually is and know how to do design – (and trust me, this is a live “if”) – work to understand the multiple subjects who participate in the common actuality of an organization, receiving, delivering or supporting its offerings, but who experience, understand and respond from different subjective centers. Designers seek better understandings capable of doing better justice to the subjects who constitute the supersubjectivity of the organization.

By doing better justice to the subjects who constitute the supersubjectivity of the organization, designers address the three problems mentioned above. They find a higher-order supersubjective understanding in which customers are fully understood. The responses, informed by these better understandings, make customers feel understood and cared about, and this better understanding is innately compelling and often differentiating. And if an organization is wise – (another live “if”) – it will involve internal alienated subjects, often front-liners, who were poorly understood for the same reasons customers were.

But these changes to supersubjectivity are not easy, and this is a source of constant pain for designers. It is an intense and radical pain, but it is a good pain, a labor pain. Any change in supersubjectivity potentially changes the intersubjective order and hierarchy of the subjects who constitute it. And the pain is felt long before the final change state comes into view, because this change state transcends both the subjectivities of each person in the organization and the supersubjectivity as a whole. The whole organization suffers a collective “dark night of the soul” on the way to its transformative insights that reveal its opportunity to serve in radically better new ways.

And if an organization is led by people lacking awareness of realities beyond its own actual world, given by its own supersubjectivity – with the leadership’s own subjectivity fortuitously positioned at the pinnacle of the subjective hierarchy – these leaders will be perplexed by a focus on subjectivities (what are those? How do you objectively define, measure and track a subject?). The subjects get reduced to data objects. If designers speak of experiences, the experiences are also reduced to objects – the artifacts and events that get experienced. Perhaps subjects are mainly emotion-things person-things have, plus distortions (prejudices, biases and confabulations) or distortion-things to perception-things person-things have. Such people believe design research will give them objective data about people, and cannot even comprehend the possibility of research changing a subjective state – neither their own, nor that of their organization. If they are made to apprehend this incomprehensible possibility, they feel apprehension, perplexity, angst – and often become aggressive.

This confinement to the actual world, and the systematic efforts made to manipulate, control, leverage and monetize the actual world, are symptomatic of a supersubject known as technik, and it is common to all technocratic systems including managerial capitalism and socialism.

Technik precludes design even as it attempts to use design to further its dominance.

Design’s essential purpose is ascending from actual reality (and its systems) to subjective enworldments (and their divergent givens) in order to instaurate higher-order enworldments capable of reshaping actual reality in ways that reenworld us together in a shared world in which we all fully belong.

The technik-bound “design expert” serves this preclusive exploitation of design, and pretends to advance design while alienating and enslaving it. And such design experts are exactly as apprehensive, perplexed and aggressive toward real design as any other technocrat.

I grew up in a pseudoreligion that despised religion so profoundly that it denied any difference between its own parodic counterfeit and the real thing. It refused to acknowledge any essential difference, because it denied the very reality of “the difference that makes a difference.” “No, no,” it said, “All religion, despite its divine delusions, has a purely sociological function; and the only difference is that we know it, while our theistic inferiors do not.”

I know this move, and so I know exactly what pseudodesign is doing when it claims that its own managerial engineering is design and can dispense with the subjective essence of the craft.

“Design constructs object-systems of touch-point-objects, service-delivery-actor-objects and service-support-actor-objects (linked by processes, constrained by policies, enabled by technologies) that service-receiver-objects have good perception-objects, feeling-objects and thought-objects about — which motivate desired behavior-objects that drive objective business results.”

Do I care about design because of all the esoteric realities that emerge as givens in design work?

Do I care about esoterism because it helps me understanding the uncanny realities that irrupt into the deepest, most consequential design work?

I think both concerns are rooted in a common faith — a faith which long predated articulation, belief or practice, which drew me forward toward something mysterious and infinitely important, and continues to do so.

Therapeutic oracle

Esoterism

I have an unusual approach to oracles: I bracket all thaumaturgic practice, and focus solely on the descriptive languages embedded in the oracular system.

The question of whether chance-based methods produce meaning or randomness is an important one, but it is an important question toward which I practice fastidious incuriosity. I keep the symbols and the interpretative methods, and ignore the oracle production techniques.

Let us call what is left of an oracular system when oracle production techniques are stripped away “oracular languages”.

Two oracular languages I have studied and value for their powers of spiritual description are I Ching and Tarot.

Both describe, in different ways, spiritual situation: the situatedness of some situated being within some situating being. Or alternatively the situation of some spiritual participant who participates in a specific way in some partially-known whole.

Of the two, I Ching seems to have the most grammatical precision, and I have a clearer understanding how it works. But this might be insufficiently informed, because I have spent very little time studying Tarot spreads, which are unmistakably grammatical. I Ching might have sharper mathematical structure, where Tarot might have more linguistic complexity that makes its structure harder to grasp. As I write this I feel that I believe that this is the case.

I am saying all this because I have an idea for a therapeutic application for oracles. In principle it could work with any oracle which claims to provide a snapshot of a present situation with a futural trajectory, which, unless I am mistaken is what both Tarot and I Ching claim. Each claims to be a snapshot of a scene. In the shot, frozen in mid-action is some occurrence. Some of the image is stable and some of it is obviously in motion. Some of the image is foreground, and some of it is background.

Imagine an image of a high school football game. A player is in mid-jump reaching for the ball, and it seems possible but not certain that he will catch it. Behind him is a player on the opposing team who is mid-lunge, and clearly a fraction of a second from bringing him down with a tackle. Other players from both teams scramble in the periphery. Behind this action are cheerleaders who are frozen in hope. Behind them is a blurry crowd. The scene is lit by stadium lights and a drizzly mist is in the air. The helmets might be wet.

Nothing in this image moves, but the image is of motion, and we can anticipate how it is likely to continue. This is what oracles communicate.

An I Ching medium will say that the coins or yarrow stalks work like a camera to pick up or respond to or configure (in Charles Stein’s sense of the word) the subtle realities in play in the situation in question, and make it legible to those making the inquiry.

A very brief account of how these situations are captured in the parlance of I Ching.

The I Ching describes a situation by a hexagram of six lines, or yao.

Think of the hexagram as a statement. Each of the six yao is a unit of meaning, analogous to a word. But in the I Ching, both sentence structure and vocabulary is mathematically rigid. It is more like a mad libs fill in the blank than a real sentence, with each blank, or wei, bearing a fixed significance within the whole sentence, and the words that fill in those blanks being limited to four. The syntactic location of these four words, however, gives them different meanings.

Let’s start with the four word vocabulary, the yao.

  • Yang denotes action, positive closure, light, clarity, resistance, resolve, conscious awareness, all of which in I Ching philosophy are manifestations of the essential reality underlying these qualities, yang.
  • Yin denotes receptivity, negative openness, darkness, concealment, yielding, questions, unconsciousness and unknowing, all of which are manifestations of the essence, yin.
  • Changing-yang denotes yang which has run its course, and is now transitioning to yin.
  • Changing-yin denotes yin which has run its course, and is now transitioning to yang.

Grammatically, each of the six wei of the hexagram is occupied by one of these four yao — yin, yang, changing yin and changing yang. Obviously, there are myriad gradients in this cycle, but I Ching divides them into four categories. As with any sentence, the meaning of the whole lives in the relationships among the parts.

A hexagram is constructed of two trigrams — a lower trigram that describes the situated being, the subject of the situation, and the upper trigram, the enveloping being in which the subject participates and in which the subject is situated. The hexagram gives the structure of each and puts them in relation.

The trigrams also have a set structure. They are read from bottom to top.

  • Earth wei describes the objective character — the What or That or Is — firm or malleable, settled or unsettled, noticed or undetected, in the situation.
  • Man wei describes the participatory character of the situation — the How or Can the doing or being done to — active or passive, strong or weak, directed or diffuse, in the situation.
  • Heaven wei describes the value character of the situation — the Why or Ought or better or worse or beautiful or ugly — giving moral purpose or resistance, vividness or faintness, unification or diversity, in the situation.

So the complete hexagram describes situations by giving us (from bottom to top, so reverse from this list)

  1. Lower earth wei — the What of the situated subject
  2. Lower man wei — the How of the situated subject
  3. Lower heaven wei — the Why of the situated subject
  4. Upper earth wei — the What of the situating being-context
  5. Upper man wei — the How of the situating being-context
  6. Upper heaven wei — the Why of the situating being-context

One last note: any hexagram with any changing yao is understood to lead to another hexagram. The changing yaos are developed to their changed state. So a hexagram with a changing yang in the lower earth wei leads to a hexagram with yin in that same wei.

I’m out of time, so I need to wrap up too fast.

The therapeutic opportunity is in the lower trigram, because it is only here that we have some degree of direct control over the present situation.

The kind of influence we have in this lower trigram is rate of change. We can push or slow each yao’s development toward its next stage. But we cannot reverse it.

  • Yin can remain yin, or it can be willed toward changing-yin.
  • Changing-yin can be willed to remain changing-yin, or it can be allowed to develop into yang.
  • Yang can remain yang, or it can be willed toward changing-yang.
  • Changing-yang can be willed to remain changing-yang, or it can be allowed to develop into yin.

Each yao in the lower trigram can be willed or left to develop naturally.

We can look at future hexagrams that might develop from the current one, changing none, all or some combination of the three in the line of development, again, by selective acceleration and deceleration of yao, the constraints being 1) only the lower trigram can be changed, 2) only rate of change can be influenced and 3) development cannot be reversed.

Returning to our image. We can slightly change the football player’s rate of forward motion by extending his hands, or easing back on his forward stretch. But he’s going forward at some range of motion and there is no use in attempting to reverse it. The ball and the other players are going to respond to the player, so his control is indirect. The crowd, the stadium, the weather and the lights are entirely beyond immediate control. Perhaps cheering and booing will follow, but that is later.

The goal is to focus on influencing only what can be influenced, only within the range of possible change, and accepting as given constraints what cannot.

In a way, this is similar to how I approach Enneagram. Most choices can be analyzed in terms of choices between integration or disintegration. As a 5, I can be pretty sure I’m making a worse choice if I am moving toward 7 (more freedom and pleasure) and a better choice if I am moving toward 8 (intuitive mastery, mission and unsparing destiny). This method gives similar guidance by identifying the most possible options and giving specific strategies for accelerating or braking, and taking all less possible strategies off the table. We can’t reverse changing-yang into yang without committing the mystic’s sin of “turning around” and becoming inert columns of salt or forgetting ourselves in shadows.

There is a ton more to develop, but sadly I must end here.

Picking up again (August 11, 2026)…

Multiple variations to this approach can be taken.

All approaches start from an established hexagram. This establishment might be done by traditional oracle, using yarrow or coins. My preference would be to conduct a deep interview with the advisee to collect a description of the situation sufficient to link the description to a hexagram. Let us assume for the purposes of the method that, however we do it, we have, as our point of departure, a valid hexagram, accepted by both advisor and advisee.

In all approaches there is a “natural” future hexagram, where all changing yao are assumed to follow their course and ripen into the opposite. In the natural future hexagram all changing-yin becomes yang, and all changing-yang becomes yin. This depicts the trajectory of the situation if will does not intervene. This is what is given in a traditional I Ching reading.

But in this approach different willful interventions are considered in order to steer toward a preferred future.

Willing consists of holding back or slowing changing-yin or changing-yang and preventing it from becoming its opposite in the future hexagram. Or it involves pushing young yang or young yin into a changing-yang or changing-yin, respectively. In other words, willing a rate of change: either slowing change-in-progress or speeding stability toward change.

Let’s call any intervention willed development, and any non-intervention natural development.

  1. Things are left alone to develop naturally. (The natural future hexagram is the likeliest future.)
  2. The yao in the lower earth wei is willed.
  3. The yao in the lower man wei is willed.
  4. The yao in the lower heaven wei is willed.
  5. The yao in the lower earth and man wei are willed.
  6. The yao in the lower earth and heaven wei are willed.
  7. The yao in the lower man and heaven wei are willed.
  8. The yao in the lower earth, man and heaven wei are all willed.

Each of these eight potentially change the future reading. They may yield a different future hexagram, or they may change a stable line in a hexagram into a changed one.

Variation one: The advisor looks at all possible future hexagrams. There are eight options.

  1. All lower yao are permitted to develop naturally toward the future hexagram. (This is the predictive aspect of a traditional reading).
  2. All lower yao are held back. The flow of fate is slowed so the present hexagram applies also to the future. The effort is primarily focused on changing yao, preserving the remaining yin in the changing-yin, or yang in changing-yang, without attempting to reverse course.
  3. The yao in the earth wei is modified. If it is a changing line it is slowed. If it is young yang or young yin it is pushed to changing-yang or changing-yin, respectively.

This is where variations present themselves. I’ll cover three:

We can brute force it. We can work out the eight futures, read through them and interpret them into possible outcomes. Then we compare the outcomes, and select one. We then focus on the specific yaos requiring willful intervention, and what that entails.

We can take a preference-first (ought-first) approach. We start with the natural future. The advisor hears the advisee’s response to that future, inquires into what aspects of it are desirable or undesirable. The advisor interprets which yaos seem to require willful intervention, and selects a future hexagram reflecting these interventions, repeating the process if necessary with different interventions.

We can take opportunistic approach (can-first). We start with the natural future. The advisor then interviews the advisee on perceived levers of change. What aspects of the situation seems controllable to them, given available personal or environmental resources. The advisor interprets these levers into intervenable yaos, and selects a future hexagram reflecting these interventions, repeating the process if necessary with different interventions.

Of course, all this raises a whole new set of practical questions. How does one actually intervene in each lower trigram wei, and, per each what does willing each yao entail? For example, how does one go about pushing a young yang yao in the heaven wei into changing-yang?

This will need to be addressed later.

Alchemical design

Design, Esoterism

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

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

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

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

In alchemy not just any material will do.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Radical design is alchemy.

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

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

This is the artifice of design.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Why philosophize? To recapture reality!”

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

The Sapir–Whorf hypothesis, can be simplistically stated in a diamond-terse Basque saying and its negative corollary:

“What has a name is real.”

“What lacks a name is unreal.”

What is meant here by “real” and “unreal” is relative to us in our first person plural.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Hanging with Sellars

Esoterism, Kabbalah, Metaphysics, Philosophy

Willfred Sellars said:

The aim of philosophy, abstractly formulated, is to understand how things in the broadest possible sense of the term hang together in the broadest possible sense of the term. Under ‘things in the broadest possible sense’ I include such radically different items as not only ‘cabbages and kings’, but numbers and duties, possibilities and finger snaps, aesthetic experience and death. To achieve success in philosophy would be, to use a contemporary turn of phrase, to ‘know one’s way around’ with respect to all these things, not in that unreflective way in which the centipede of the story knew its way around before it faced the question, ‘how do I walk?’, but in that reflective way which means that no intellectual holds are barred.

My live question: Understand how? Hang together how?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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. But as the paths ascend, they converge, until they meet at the summit. The lower divergent understandings of the tradition are exoteric. The higher, convergent understandings are esoteric. The higher and deeper an esoteric understanding, the more it understands its own tradition as one of multiple possible paths to transcendent unity.

I was raised Unitarian-Universalist. This idea of one summit with universally valid paths from diverse points of departure resonates with both U’s of my childhood brainwashing and with the universal tolerance gospel it preached. Perennialism, though, 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. The preachers of universal tolerance tend to unilaterally define the boundaries and norms of universality prior to doing any toleration, and will not abide any intolerable beliefs or deviations from its toleration rulebook. Thus, it excludes from dialogue anyone who might teach it anything it is not already prepped to relearn. Perennialism offered valuable modes of understanding inconceivable from within the narrow rigor of objective thought.

Integrated into Perennialism, however, are some doctrines that I cannot accept. The first of these doctrines is that no new legitimate traditions are possible. This appears to me to be a corollary to the Islamic belief that Mohammad is the last prophet. Guenon and Schuon, the fathers of Perennialism were both Muslim converts. Another doctrine is the eschatology of the Fall from God, which accounts for why no new traditions are possible. According to this belief, the world and humankind has fallen too far from God to receive any new traditions, and must therefore adopt an established one. Another doctrine is that only through prolonged strict submission to one of the valid religious traditions can esoteric realization be achieved. Because each path reveals its truth successively only through walking it, and at the foot of the path we are largely ignorant of what we are doing and where we are going, the early steps entail some suspension of personal judgment. Perennialists, though, seem eager to push suspension of judgment beyond provisional trust required for any deep existential learning into blind faith that keeps following authority until the initiate finally arrives where truth is seen. The principle is not wrong in theory, it is just a practical matter of degree, and to my liberal sensibilities, Perennialism not only permits, but virtually demands authoritarian politics.

Today I had an epiphany. Perhaps these Perennialist doctrines about esoteric truth are Perennialism’s own exoterism. Perhaps the troubling eschatology, historiosophy and practical prescriptions are not essential to the core esoteric doctrine. They are compatible, but that does not mean they are integral or necessary. I do not reject any of them entirely or finally, and it is possible that what makes them necessary might yet be revealed to me as I progress. But from where I stand now, these ideas seem like a horizontal connecting belt across converging but as-yet-unconverged exoteric paths, which ought not be confused with a crowning convergence at the summit.

I’ve said it before, so pardon the repetition, but that once glamorous prefix “-post” has gone musty.

But post- carries real meaning. It signifies the dialectical “right but not right enough”. It acknowledges both a debt and a departure.

I am indebted to Perennialism for insights that unlocked some of my best modes of understanding. But that debt will not be repaid in the currency of uncritical submission. I might trust, but I will never suspend my personal judgment, and anyone who asks for suspension of personal judgment is not to be trusted. Anyone who demands it should be fought.

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.

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(

What is richness?

Design, Esoterism, Hermeneutics, Judaism, Polycentered design, Polycentrism, Shit theory

I cannot stop thinking about Christopher Alexander’s essay “A City is Not a Tree”.

The specific theme that is emerging as most important to me is this idea of a designed thing’s capacity to accommodate multiple perspectives, as intrinsically valuable.

A functionalist might see such accommodation in terms of versatility. A functionalist would say that each accommodation signifies benefit to another segment of person.

But I think what Alexander is saying is very different from that. The accommodation of other subjects is part of each person’s experience of common things.

When many different kinds of people love the same thing in different ways, this thing is experienced as richly valuable. It is charged with possibility and the presence of others. It gathers an aura of transcendence about it, which signals to us that we are neither alone as individuals nor as like-minded parts of a collectives. We feel the truth that ours is only one finite enworldment among many others who regard the same things as valuable, but in many different ways. These enworldments overlap, and this feels like life — vibrant, full of possibility, adventure, potential sources of inspiration. The palpable density of overlaid heterogeneous valuing is what we mean when we say something feels rich or vibrant. It has a halo of inexhaustible moreness around it.

This is why organizations which belong to many people in many ways feels vibrant. With each new perspective and practice that finds its own opportunity to serve in this organization, the organization gains a new kind of value.

Conversely, an organization dominated by one logic will feel flat and standardized and harder to value, if not oppressive to some degree. Homogeneity is imposed — one expertise and one standard methodology is applied to every problem. It is hooded with a sense of constriction. Worse, as members of the organization try to bring their own uniqueness to the work — try to make the organization their own their own by contributing their own sensibilities — and find that whatever does not conform to the monologic of the organization is unvalued, or even discouraged or prohibited a sense of futility and alienation sets in. One cannot own the organization in a new way. Each employee must resign themselves to renting a defined role — they will never own any place in such an organization.

Consequently, the organization has the same artificial, stilted corporate feel as Alexander’s artificial city. It doesn’t matter the size or legal status of the organization. It could be privately owned and have only twenty or so members. It will feel corporate. And all attempts to add style or whimsy will come off like all phony corporateness: a bullshit coating for a bunch of mechanical meaningless chickenshit.

A lattice-form organization, valued — even loved — in common, in myriad divergent ways, from within and from without, will be haloed with a vibrant, living, compelling brand.

An organization is not a tree. It is especially not an org chart.

Years ago, a friend of mine showed me a screenplay he was writing. It felt morally flat to me. Every character did they only thing they could morally do to. There was only one moral interpretation of the story. My advice at the time was to build more ambiguity into each character, so we are unsure of whether their actions were moral or not.

I am realizing now that I was looking for moral and narrative richness in that story. It needed to accommodate multiple readings. ?

And what made the famous short story “Cat Person” was so fascinating was its moral multistability. I found out after reading it, that the author’s ethical assessment differed from mine, which only made it more impressive.

A story is not a tree.

A reader should feel their own freedom to bring themselves to the reading, and to read themselves into what they read.

Politically, I have described myself as a militant pluralist. That is because I want public life to have richness. That means we cannot impose one moral logic upon public life. There must be room for disagreement, debate even conflict. The only thing that is not debatable is imposition of one’s political will while refusing to debate. This is especially true if in the name of harmony, or safety, or comfort, or even “diversity”, that everyone be forced to conform to the same ethical stance on what one group believes to be an undebatable, nonnegotiable matter.

Neither society nor culture nor polis is a tree.

Whoever seeks to impose a tree upon society is totalitarian, however, benevolent their intent.

When a text or tradition is so densely accommodating that innumerable people over millennia can read that text in myriad intensely meaningful ways, that text gains value with each new insight. The sheer density of insight makes that text glow with a blindingly bright halo of holiness, especially when readings diverge but the text becomes more beloved in collision of interpretation — sacred argument.

The attempts of theologians to find the one correct meaning desecrates the text and the infinite being who is the subject(s) of the text. The infinite being is reduced to finite idol.

It is my belief (an insuffiently supported one) that service design should intentionally design lattice-form services. Current service design practice creates inflexible lifeless pre-structures. It tries to construct artificial organizations, and whatever life in an organization survives, is due only to shortcomings of service design method. It is a little bit like Bauhaus designs. Their charm and warmth come from limitations of fabrication to achieve the precision they sought. Likewise, all most technocratic business management. Businesses succeed despite their management. If managers had the transparency and control they really wanted, the organization would be drained of all richness, and people would hate their surveilled, controlled lives. And indeed, management is getting better at doing what it thinks it’s supposed to do, and we are all suffering as a consequence.?

That is my perspective on my field. But can my field accommodate it? Are they “ready to hear it?” Probably not…

Cosmic collapse inspo

Autobiography, Esoterism, History, Philosophy, Religion

I have momentarily shifted attention from Scholem’s Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism to Dodd’s Pagan and Christian in an Age of Anxiety. Both books discuss the human condition after the fall of the Second Temple, in the years between Marcus Aurelius and Constantine. This was also the time when ideas emerged that would eventually converge, coalesce and crystallize into Kabbalah.

Why this book? Because that time feels uncannily similar to now. It was a time of political instability, social dissolution and personal alienation. It was a time of intense, pervasive anomie. Public life could no longer serve as a source of meaning. The few who sought meaning, sought it within themselves and in small communities of others who did the same. The rest lived lives of quiet, noisy or violent desperation, delusion or predation.

This was the time that developed new forms of religious culture which have become so second-natural to us that we find it difficult to conceptualize religion or culture any other way. It dominates even our imaginations. And I think this time resembles that one in that both are ends of apparently eternal orders suddenly revealed as mortal, fragile, rapidly expiring. The main difference is that what is ending now, is what started then. I am — at least in my own imagination — recollecting our cradle from our deathbed, remembering how that cradle was, too, a deathbed. The books I am reading now are intellectual histories of that time, that give samples of how some of the seminal geniuses of the time experienced, interpreted and responded to a cosmos in collapse.

I suppose you could say I’m collecting cosmic collapse inspo and “best practices”.

Gone native

Autobiography, Design, Enworldment, Esoterism, Philosophy, Trefoil

What does it mean to “go native”?

According to Karen O’Reilly, “The term ‘going native’ refers to the danger for ethnographers to become too involved in the community under study, thus losing objectivity and distance.”

She (or whoever writes her abstracts), continues:

Going ‘native’ as a derogatory term associated with the rhetoric of colonialism. The continuing problem of what is now termed ‘over-rapport’. The lure of acceptance and its implications for lack of distance. ‘All but the dissertation’: the problem of never getting enough distance to be able to write it all up. Balancing distance and empathy, and the role of reflexivity in the participant observation oxymoron.

Design has its own ways of experiencing, understanding and participating in human life. It differs, often radically, from other ways of experiencing, understanding and participating — for example the ways of a business executive, an engineer or a marketer.

Let us call these ways of understanding and participating “enworldments“. Enworldments extend far beyond perspectives or “worldviews”, because they are practical, material, instrumented, environed, linguified, and, perhaps above all, ethnomethodic.

Participation in an enworldment reconfigures our own sense of reality, and it can temporarily change us as people. This is why in some settings we feel natural and say things like “I feel like myself”, where in others we feel subtly off, or awkward, or unnatural, or even estranged from ourselves. We feel this way until we return to a more comfortable setting. Sometimes we are born into an alien enworldment, and find our place — and with it, ourselves — later in life. A lot of romantic longing is for a person with whom we feel at home. But even if we do find a home, if we go back to our alien place of origin, we can re-lose ourselves within hours, and find ourselves once again the pissed-off alienated adolescent we worked so hard to outgrow.

Enworldment is a powerful force, and if we are insufficiently aware of enworldment and its uncanny workings, it is almost automatically overpowering.

This is why I spend hours every morning reading weird philosophical books instead of chasing industry best practices in design journals and Harvard Business Review.

I do this because I have a strong sense of the importance of design’s own enworldment. By understanding it deeply, thoroughly and extensively, I can hold it more firmly and preserve it even when I immerse myself in other enworldments, as I must in order to work effectively as a designer.

My philosophical work prevents me from going native and forgetting why I do what I do.

It prevents me from going native in the corporate world, even if the leaders of my own organization, or even the thought leaders of my whole industry go native in the corporate world and forget the whole reason design matters.

For indeed, this has happened to service design, and much of the rest of the design world.

Service design has gone native. Service design is now as soullessly corporate as every other corporate function.

We put so much effort into learning the world of business management and engineering, and the management of engineering and the engineering of management that we have forgotten design’s transformative mission and we have become part of the machinery that grinds humans down into fungible resources. We have forgotten design so thoroughly, we are oblivious to the fact that we are just business consultants with briefcases full of new management methods. We just know we don’t love our jobs anymore, and that we have little besides fear and duty driving us through each joyless, dispirited man-day, and man-month between this calendar date and the terminal milestone, retirement.

We no longer even have an inspired alternative to offer.

We no longer provide ourselves the conditions needed to do design work. We work long hours, chop up our days (and souls) into the same tiny 15 and 30 minute chunks, juggle the same inconceivable mass of disparate details, glue the disparate details together with the same logical and logistical glue, talk the same endless talk as any other cog on the Chaplin machinery.

And deprived of conditions to design, we stop designing. We talk and talk instead of doing iterative trial and error . We write long reports instead of prototyping. We adopt a QA model of quality, and think we have done something right when no nitpicker can accuse us of doing something wrong. Consequently, our outputs are nothing anyone could love. We construct vast systems of parts with totals that any accountant or procurement officer must admit equals precisely the whole.

We are hired to grind with higher efficiency and effectiveness, because that is how we sell ourselves when we meet our clients where they are. We call what we sell “design”. But we are no longer judges of what is or is not design.

Service design has gone native. We are corporate.

Our only remaining contact with design is with an emptied word.

And the forgetful shake their heads knowingly at those of us who still remember who we are and why we design.

When a field goes underground, it does so like a seed under winter soil. The kernel preserves itself alive under snow, frost, frozen mulch and decay, until conditions for growth return with the spring.

It is easy to store and retrieve What. It is documented fact.

It is a little harder to record and reactivate How, if know-how is lost. But How can be relearned step by step.

But Why, once lost, is nearly impossible to summon back to life, when feel-why is lost.

Why must be cultivated, kept alive, matured, propagated, and at times hidden and protected. When we lose Why we also lose our ability to sense its absence, except as phantom ache where love once was.

Navel gaze

Autobiography, Esoterism, Kabbalah, Letterpress

A simple blind spot demonstration reveals the scotoma, a patch of pristine sightlessness where the optic nerve joins the retina, at the very center of our field of vision.

Most people will walk away from the demonstration excited to have discovered that the object occulted by blindness was actually there all along, hidden, now revealed. The revelation is the image.

Some will be astonished at the ground of revelation: the nothingness from which a concealed image could be revealed, ex nihilo. Precisely because nothing was present, nothing was missing.

It is out of this same nothingness that moral shocks issue.

It is like this: I am absolutely right, and my wrongness is inconceivable. Then a word or gesture or expression strikes me, and a judgment is issued, directly from the scotoma at the heart of my soul — precisely where my one finite self conjoins with infinite One. My guilt, my repentance and my spontaneous urgency to atone conceive themselves ex nihilo.

And now comes an ontological aftershock: A new world is given: a world where nothingness is the furthest thing from dead absence, but living, omnipresent more-than-everything, vibrant with anticipation of inconceivable surprise from an inexhaustible source.

Astonished at this nothingness — this nihiltude from which more revelations can irrupt any moment ex nihilo — we are unable to take nothingness as dead absence, but rather as nihilitude, eternally pregnant with unborn possibility.

This can happen to anyone at any moment.

The scotoma at the heart of sight is the navel of perception, and the optic nerve is the umbilical cord. This a navel worthy of eternal gazing.

(To say it in Kabbalah: where Chokhmah penetrates Binah is an unseen infinitude, which can, nonetheless be seen, and this seen unseeing is called Chesed.)

I will be letterpress printing scotoma revelation cards very soon.