Category Archives: Esoterism
Metaphysical 3D glasses
Before 2016, I characterized my religious attitude as exoterically (ethically) Jewish and esoterically (metaphysically) Taoist. Then I began studying Kabbalah, and learned “esoteric Hebrew”, carefully translating it into “esoteric Chinese”.
Now esoteric Hebrew has become second natural to me. It is so second-natural that I now understand in it without any need to translate back and forth. I think in Kabbalah.
However, I still sometimes find value putting on my esoteric 3D glasses, with one lens Kabbalistic-colored, the other Taoist-colored, so I can look at ideas common to both traditions, and enjoy the parallactic special effects of exaggerated depth.
All this rambling preamble, just to say:
In Assiyah are ten-thousand things.
In Yetzirah are ten-thousand everythings.
In Beriah are ten-thousand traversable nothings, dividing everything from everything.
In Atzilut is infinitesimally articulate infinitude.
Removing the 3D glasses, and speaking more compactly:
In Assiyah are myriad objects.
In Yetzirah are myriad subjects, each an enworldment.
In Beriah are myriad traversable oblivions, dividing enworldment from enworldment.
In Atzilut is infinitesimally articulate infinitude, the source of all oblivion and enworldment.
Bright blood
The weirdest, best insight I learned from Nietzsche is that our hierarchy of values more or less determines our faith and that this hierarchy guards itself through prohibiting questions. Defy those prohibitions, interrogate settled matters closed to inquiry, and all kinds of uncanny things happen. Valuing is inseparably soul-forming and world-forming. Any significant change in value hierarchy transfigures self and world together: a reborn I in a re-enworlded world.
If you are nodding along and think you already know and agree with this — has it ever occurred to you that many of these prohibitions are good and necessary and ought to be upheld? Most obedient young radicals have not. Nor have they had the courage to question — let alone challenge — anything outside of those pre-defeated values our own dominant value hierarchy demand that we ritually re-interrogate. We obediently perform the rebelliousness we are expected or compelled to perform, and rage against whatever exceeds the strict and narrow limits of our radical thoughts.
But back to value hierarchies. Within a range of diversity (a quite narrow, and necessarily narrow range!), each of us values different things. Some of it is circumstantial (we have deficits and gluts of goods) and some is essential (our taste prioritizes goods differently). And this is why we exchange value. We have too much of one good and too little of another. A situation creates momentary need of a good that makes other goods in our possession or capacity relatively dispensable. We find it easy to generate a good that others desire but cannot generate themselves. We sense ineffable sacred importance in one good and are unmoved by other goods held sacred by others. So we enter into exchanges.
If these exchanges are mutually beneficial, and conditions are such that they dynamically stabilize, an organization comes to life. Its lifeblood is the value, inhering like oxygen, in the myriad goods exchanged. The need for exchange — the needs and wants, the surplus and abilities — makes the goods circulate through exchanges — and causes an organization to live and act and to have real, living being. And we who participate — who act, who are acted upon — have actancy within our organization.
Reading Charles Stein’s extraordinary The Light of Hermes Trismegistus, I just learned a new word, thumos:
We are no doubt familiar with how English verbs are proxy for actions expressed either in the active or the passive voice, roughly approximating the difference between acts that one performs and those that happen to one. But there are actions where neither of these voices seem to apply. An action might not be the product of a person’s willful agency and still not be something that passively happens to him or her as if through an impersonal chain of causes. Poetic inspiration is a case in point. A number of recent authors have discussed the middle voice where it proves useful in the analysis of natural and linguistic phenomena because neither active nor passive constructions seem adequate. …
The Greek and the hypothetical Proto-Indo-European language have, in addition to an active and a passive, a middle voice that, among other things, expresses the inspiration of the Muse and would be used wherever it seems that a god impels, instigates, induces, or inspires some action. The Homeric-Hesiodic dialect expresses the instigation of such action by saying that a god strikes the person in the thumos — an “organ” in the middle of one’s body that is activated in this manner. If Eros strikes, one falls in love; if Mars, one is impelled to rage, violence, or courage in combat; if Hermes, deeds of mind, cognition, planning, cleverness — all the devious and ingenious devices of the Hermetic character. The consequence of being struck in the thumos by the god is clearly not the work of one’s independent free will, but it is also not entirely a passive reaction to an external force. The god is not entirely external to one’s psyche, and yet he is external to it, too! … Zeus might actively strike your house with his lightning bolt, but the striking of one’s thumos is not quite like that. When Eros or Hermes touches this organ, it is the most intimate of phenomena. Often translators are forced to use such locutions as “love was awakened in his heart” — as if the response were passive. But it isn’t passive. It is an arousal at the very root of one’s powers of action; it is that which is not quite you but which activates what is active in you as you.
Thumos is the mythical organ of actancy — present but missing, like Da’at in the sefirot.
What does thumos do? I will venture that it governs intuitive participation in transcendent being. It receives and responds as an organ in a superpersonal organism. That superperson (egregore) might be, for example, an organization. Or some other enveloping being, like a friendship or marriage. (“In true love it is the soul that envelops the body,” says Nietzsche.) Or… a faith.
Regarding actancy, I learned the word actant from Bruno Latour.
What is a force? Who is it? What is it capable of? Is it a subject, text, object, energy, or thing? How many forces are there? Who is strong and who is weak? Is this a battle? Is this a game? Is this a market? All these questions are defined and deformed only in further trials.
In place of “force” we may talk of “weaknesses”, “entelechies”, “monads”, or more simply “actants.”
…
No actant is so weak that it cannot enlist another. Then the two join together and become one for a third actant, which they can therefore move more easily. An eddy is formed, and it grows by becoming many others.
Is an actant essence or relation? We cannot tell without a trial (1.1.5.2). To stop themselves being swept away, essences may relate themselves to many allies, and relations to many essences.
…
An actant can gain strength only by associating with others. Thus it speaks in their names. Why don’t the others speak for themselves? Because they are mute; because they have been silenced; because they became inaudible by talking at the same time. Thus, someone interprets them and speaks in their place. But who? Who speaks? Them or it? Traditore — traduttore. One equals several. It cannot be determined. If the fidelity of the actant is questioned, it can demonstrate that it just repeats what the others wanted it to say. It offers an exegesis on the state of forces, which cannot be contested even provisionally without another alliance.
If Actor-Network Theory (aka ANT, sociology of actants) is a social science, service design can be seen as its technology, although vanishingly few designers go beyond knowing about Latour, usually via a forced trudge through We Have Never Been Modern in grad school.)
Service design was the first explicitly polycentric design discipline. It is concerned with forming durable arrangements of value exchange among people, mediated by “things” in the broadest possible sense — both, human and nonhuman, alike, considered actants — interacting within an organization and around the organization within its ecosystem of customers, partners, competitors, regulators and other stakeholders.
The systematic interaction of actants, each participating as its own experiential-agential center within the system gives rise to a polycentric order — which service design views as an emergent order with its own kind of being: a service.
But no service is known from “a view from nowhere”. It is always experienced by someone, from some point in the system, holographically (the image of the whole subsists in each of its parts. Each participant in the service is a jewel in the Net of Indra, which experiences and acts from its own node. This multiple view-from-within is what could be called pluricentricity.
Service design is concerned both with the third-person / objective polycentricity of organizations and services and the myriad first-person / subjective pluricentricity of actants within organizations and services, and how polycentricity and pluricentricity mobiously, thumocratically (!) interform one another.
I’ve said before that I worship the distributed God. God’s distribution, of course, saturates all being equally, but to finite beings like ourselves it is concentrated in souls, the nucleus of which is thumos.
When I think about value exchanges I associate it with the circulation of the divine light in the sefirot.
(“Enlist every ounce of your bright blood, and off with their heads!” In Tarot, the letter shin is associated with Judgment. And here the Kahnemaniacs lose their last shred of patience. “Barnum!” Yes. But before you start stoning me with your cognitive bias accusations, ask yourself this: Do I know my own faith? We certainly know what our peers accept as true. We know very well what will get us ostracized if we voice doubt. Some of us know what we can successfully argue and defend. But do we know what truths we would bet our life on? I suspect not. No, no: We’re all post-truth now, especially those of us who insist on truth. We all suffer spurious ideas for the sake of identity. None of us believes three quarters of our “beliefs” and maybe least of all the ones we get emotionally worked up over. We think we’ve “done the work” of overcoming our biases, but we have not overcome the fact that we harbor extreme cognitive bias toward where our biases are and aren’t. We are blind to where our justice itself is most glaringly unjust, and if we refuse to acknowledge this… well, that is blindness doing blindness. If we are honest, which we are not, we will acknowledge that we have already sold ourselves out to pay admission to our social class. We are intellectually and spiritually insolvent. We have no personal integrity to preserve. So why not indulge the Barnum effect for the sake of serious, joyous play? Witness: if we are hospitable and entertain ideas that entertain us, we may receive invitations to higher worlds. The invitation is addressed to our thumos, and we accept with “hineini”.)
Liberal saint Richard Rorty famously taught “Anything can be made to look good or bad, important or unimportant, useful or useless, by being redescribed.”
I want to redescribe design to make it look and feel spiritually important.
And I want to redescribe the spiritual to manifest its pervasive presence in the ordinary,
And I want to redescribe both together to accentuate our duty to shape our world and invest ourselves in it so the world manifests its spiritual provenance and destiny.
We are responsible for forming a world we can care about and willingly serve.
)O+
Emanation?
If we understand that subjectivity and objectivity are preceded by something that is neither subjectivity nor objectivity but being that is both and more than both, how do we refer to such superjectivity? A Kabbalist might suggest “emanation”.
Notes on design esoterism
Ontopologically, Beriah sur-prises what Yetzirah variously com-prises as objective content in Assiyah.
Neither Beriah nor Yetzirah is something that can be comprehended.
Yetzirah comprehends by one of myriad formational, enworlding principles. Yetzirah is not itself comprehensible, for the reason that sight cannot be seen.
Beriah comprehends (envelops) comprehension through observation of difference among enworldments, even differences across recollections of observations. Beriyah is even less comprehensible than Yetzirah, for (to make an anomalogy) Beriah is transcendent sensus communis among all possible Yetziratic enworldments, against and within the limitless Oneness of Atzilut.
And every Yetziratic enworldment is some particular social sensus communis regarding the human lifeworld.
And the human lifeworld is Assiyah — the perceptual sensus communis of human perception.
To understand all this inside-out and outside-in, backwards and forwards, to-to-bottom and bottom-to-top, and to know it by heart, soul and body, and therefore internalize and, more importantly, spontaneously externalize its pragmatic consequences, is to “suprehend” what transcends, yet grounds, comprehension.
(Suprehension is the whatless therefore of pregnant oblivion.)
Concepts concerning Beriah are not a conceptual grasp of Beriah, but derviations across differences. Another anomalogy: Light emanated within Atzilut is transmitted by Beriah, refracted through Yetzirah, then reflected upon Assiyah — and only upon reflection can a truth be grasped, indirectly.
Design esoterism seeks to dissolve the Axial regime and its domain divisions, in order to resanctify what has been secularized. Religion is disinvented, exvented. Methods are ritual. Tools are ritual objects. Organizations summon responsible collective beings.
Esoterism wants to materialize.
Lord, truly we have come to the end of this kind of vision of heaven.
Exnihilism is at the heart of it.
New ex nihilo irruptions from Beriah are preceded by intense apprehension. We let go or lose grip on our Yetziratic social sensus communis and ascend into aporia, where, on all important matters, our intuitive reach exceeds our cognitive grasp. But this loss “opens the hand of thought” so new forms can alight on our open palms — a new as-yet-solitary social sensus communis.
Materialized magic
A service is a collective, intelligent being.
A service exists polycentrically as a being with multiple agential centers whose interactions generate a new agential center who cannot be reduced to any one of its constituent centers.
Yet, at the same time, each of the constituent agential centers continues to experience and participate in the service, from its respective center. So services are also pluricentric.
The pluricentric experience motivates and directs various forms of participation in the service, which affects the polycentric being of the service as a whole, and ripples through the pluricentric experiences and responses of each participant.
A simple example to demonstrate how these terms complement: A marriage, like a service, is a polycentric collective being. The marriage has its own being, irreducible to the being of either spouse. However, the marriage is also pluricentrically given to each spouse. (And if the couple has a baby, the polycentric being of the family shifts its center to embrace its newest agential center, and this shift is experienced pluricentrically by each spouse. The marriage itself has changed, and effort is required to maintain its continuity.)
All people have experiences of polycentric and pluricentric being, but very few people can conceptualize it or navigate it as the kind of being it is. Many of us use vague romantic terms like vibes or spirit or feel or mood or culture to indicate an ethereal presence within a group, organization or region.
?Esoteric types believe they can interact directly with this kind of ethereal presence, bypassing its materiality. ? I believe this has drastically limited the effectiveness of the esoteric arts. But ignoring supraindividual polycentric being has also drastically limited the effectiveness of subject-blind social engineering — or at least its effectiveness in producing anything fit for human participation.?
I need to wrap up, so I will conclude with Kabbalistic abbreviation:
A good service lives across worlds:
Assiyah makes a service materially actual and effective.
Yetzirah makes a service alive and meaningful.
Beriah makes a service serve good.
Philosophical ethnomethods
I got annoyed by a friend who had an intuitive epiphany concerning ontology and announced the inadequacy of all prior conceptions of ontology.
The annoyance was not about the content of the epiphany, nor about the challenging of any sacred definitions. I am not all that invested in any particular definition of ontology, because ontologies are (according to my meta-ontology) manifestations of an enworldment. This makes me an ontological pluralist, at least with respect to the domain of philosophy.
What bothered me concerned the domain of philosophy — the ethos of philosophy and the ethics that govern and sustain it. Or we could say, the game of philosophy and its rules. Or we could say, the social being of philosophy and the ethnomethods by which participants in philosophy make sense to others, and by which others make sense to us. These are all flavors of what I mean when I say “enworldment”.
Philosophers absolutely can, and should, propose new conceptions of ontology. The most radical ontology will necessarily entail meta-disputing the being of ontology itself.
But these alternative conceptions are philosophical conceptions of philosophical concepts and, as such, are subject to philosophical scrutiny.
In mysticism, one can bluster about making exalted gnostic claims of ineffable knowingness.
In philosophy, we make proposals, demonstrations, arguments, analogies, and the like.
Philosophy is done with others, within the ethos of philosophy, according to the perpetually contested ethical norms of philosophy — and whoever scorns these things should not pretend to philosophy at all.
Whenever mysticism does that infuriating thing it always does — running around comparing itself to philosophy and finding philosophy’s attempts to articulate, convey, or share its intuitions inferior to its own inchoate, felt intuitions — not only is it not doing philosophy, it is not really doing mysticism anymore either.
Rather, it is doing what mature mystics warn neophytes about when they say that esoteric thinking is dangerous. The danger of unguided esoterism is hubristic spiritual inflation, and the aggressive double-ignorance that comes with it — the endemic curse of youth.
This general subject always brings to mind a cold line from Borges: “Like every writer, he measured the virtues of other writers by their performance, and asked that they measure him by what he conjectured or planned.”
Dreamers dream. Writers write. The difference between a dreamer and a writer is that the writer writes those dreams so others can read them and join them in the dream. Dreamers dream of writing and being read.
Now that I think about it
A broken faith is experienced by the faith-breaker as revelation of a new meaning with a new story.
One tells a revisionist story that invalidates the old story by which one lived. “I mistakenly believed x-story, but I can see now that y-story is true, and was true all along.”
Broken faith says: “Now that I think about it…” and proceeds to reverse hero and villain, angel and devil, love and hate, virtue and vice, sacred vow and vile enslavement — producing wave after wave of estrangement. Whoever was closest is cast out with the most violence.
A person of weak faith, who lacks social and relational structures to hold them in a steady psychic state is always teetering on the edge of betrayal. Whoever is friends with such a person on one day might meet only an enemy and a ghost the next.
And, by person, as always, I mean any cohesive psychic unit — an individual, a family, a sub-culture, a people, a nation, an inter-national class. Personhood is scalar.
Dialectic transcendence is a whole other kind of change. In it, oppositions are not simply reversed but sublated within higher-order truths. It is not just metanoia, it is t’shuvah.
Whyness, Whatness and Howness
Intellection gives us supraformal absolute truth (of Beriah) toward/from the Absolute (of Atzilut) to which objectivity-forming subjects (Yetzirah) and objective truths (Assiyah) can be more or less faithful.
Of course, subjects can also be more or less faithful to material reality, and this determines their scope and degree of practical effectiveness.
The modern era has maximized the scope and degree of practical effectiveness in material reality. Its scope is maximized to total universality, and its degree of effectiveness is maximized to total control. It has traded off all considerations of intellection, to such a degree that few are aware of intellection as a possibility of knowing.
Even fewer actualize their intellective mode of knowing.
Fewer still coordinate intellective and rational knowing.
Fewest of all coordinate intellective, rational and practical knowing.
Whyness, Whatness and Howness.
Intuiting-what knows what of is, knows what of can, knows what of ought.
Intuiting-how does how of can, does how of ought, does how of is.
Intuiting-why cares why of ought, cares why of is, cares why of can.
Every explicit understanding is rooted in tacit intuitions.
Intuiting-what grounds fact, method and ideal, and without it, there is perplexity.
Intuiting-how grounds ability, grace and technique, and without it, there is faltering.
Intuiting-why grounds value, taste and purpose, and without it, there is indifference.
Every vital culture must converge Whyness, Whatness and Howness in its collective being. If it fails to do so, each member of its culture will suffer confused perplexity, ineffective faltering or depressed indifference. Or the culture will fragment into factions who maximize one or two and sacrifice the third.
Design at its best is a method for converging Whyness, Whatness and Howness.
Unlike many professions it is not a collection of techniques (What-How) methodically deployed to achieve defined goals. Design discovers its goals as it works, and its most important goals are given to intellection as the Why of the work.
Christopher Costes is right: Design is the heir of magic.
Study as religious practice
It is easy to confuse study about religious practice with sacred study — study that is itself religious practice.
This is especially true if one’s primary source of spiritual experience is other than sacred study.
One can pray or meditate or take drugs or just spontaneously enter an altered consciousness, and have extraordinary ecstatic experiences. But just as ordinary natural experiences can be interpreted in a multiple ways, each with its own validity and tradeoffs, these extraordinary supernatural experiences can be interpreted multiple ways. And all interpretations, whether natural or supernatural, belong to some specific faith, some specific subjectivity manifesting as its own form of objectivity.
Study as religious practice is an indirect conditioning of the subject of faith through the activity of interpretation, which is not only literal acceptance of the material, but literary “sense-making” construction (and deconstruction) experimentation, hermeneutic crystallization (and dissolution) and mystical influx.
The material studied can be texts or they can be firsthand experiences, ordinary or extraordinary. But in such study focus transcends the factual material, and concerns the subject manifested in the changing objectivities. The medium is the faith, and it is the message behind and beyond religious study. The material matters, too, but as substantiation and as a principle of acceptance and rejection of understandings.
If we approach our experiential materials this way, even our most ordinary experiences can be sacralized, infused with meaning. The significance of extraordinary experiences is that they can challenge our faiths, and invite change.
The danger of psychology, materialism and similarly literal faiths is that they equip us to explain away phenomena that invite transformation of faith.
Spiritual programs
Half the people I know believe that religion as we have it today is sheer nonsense and that spirituality is a fanciful free-for-all — just psychological play done for the pleasure of it.
The other half thinks that religion is wisdom that was originally revealed whole, but subsequently lost — an ancient treasure squandered, that we must now recover, before something dire happens.
As always, I disagree with everyone.
I think religion is institutionalized spirituality, with all the advantages and disadvantages entailed by institutionalization. When I say institutionalization, I mean something more like scientific institutionalization, enabling systematic challenge, response and progress, more than what spiritual-but-not-religious haters of “institutionalized religion” mean.
Indeed, individuals dabbling unassisted in spiritual matters would be as advanced as individual physicists could accomplish — each working in isolation, starting from scratch with their own theories and homemade laboratories. Or imagine amateur physicists watching hours of YouTube videos about the history of natural philosophy and using them to launch their own programs of physics research.
I think religion and spirituality refer to realities that can be understood or misunderstood. I think these realities are not comprehensible in objective terms. They require different intellective modes that few of us engage when we “seek truth”.
An idea to entertain: different religions are analogous to the research programs of Imre Lakatos, with their own lifecycles of birth, ascent, flourishing, decline and dying out, and their own technological innovations, meaning, literally, technique systems, a.k.a. methodologies.
The resemblances among religions are due partly from borrowings across traditions (which is how a spiritual research program is preserved) but also because the truth they pursue is the same and these traditions only thrive and endure insofar as they succeed in that pursuit.
But that truth pursued is not essentially objective. That truth includes objectivity, but transcends objectivity, subjectivity and all distinctions between object and subject.
Symbolic degradations
Symbolic experience is intensely intuitive — pre-cognitive.
What we do with these experiences, however, has everything to do with how we cognize. And that “cognitive how” is determined by how our intuitions are organized as organs in a spiritual organism.
Such spiritual organisms are souls, and the soul’s organic functioning is faith.
This organic faith-functioning of souls, though, is known solely by its fruits — the objects of faith: belief, language, action, style, preferences, etc.
Those unable to understand upwards from object mangle everything symbolic and try to make symbols signify downwards. Downward into literalism, into explicit beliefs, into physicality, into body — into irreversible downwardness.
The same thing that makes a “jihadist” make literal war on neighbors who seek peace — is the same thing that drives those seized by the upward call of Androgyne to instead lie down under the knife on an operating table — is the same thing that compelled human sacrifices — is the same thing that makes a psychologist imagine a world of suppressed, submerged subconscious beliefs as the wellspring of myth — is the same thing that makes charlatans use the celestial maps to navigate sewers and to conjure chaos from sacred order in order to sell mumbo jumbo to the gullible.
When an alchemist’s metaphysic knows only the lowest physicality he is cursed with the Midas touch, compulsively turning whatever gold he touches into cash.
Obscurity ensues
There is a time to make sense to others, and a time to make sense for oneself.
To every thing there is a season, and a time to every purpose under the heaven:
A time to be born, and a time to die;
A time to plant, and a time to pluck up that which is planted;
A time to kill, and a time to heal;
A time to break down, and a time to build up;
A time to weep, and a time to laugh;
A time to mourn, and a time to dance;
A time to cast away stones, and a time to gather stones together;
A time to embrace, and a time to refrain from embracing;
A time to seek, and a time to lose;
A time to keep, and a time to cast away;
A time to rend, and a time to sew;
A time to keep silence, and a time to speak;
A time to love, and a time to hate;
A time for war, and a time for peace.
After 14 years of relative stability, I am changing again.
I cannot understand, integrate and develop radically new ideas and translate them into terms accessible to sane, intelligent people. That happens later.
For now, expect relentless obscurity.
Kabbalistic reflections on Guenon
Guenon:
The Self is thus the principle by which all the states of the being exist, each in its own proper sphere, which may be called a degree of existence; and this must be understood not only of the manifested states — whether individual, like the human state, or supraindividual, in other words whether formal or formless, but also, though the word “exist” then becomes inadequate, of the unmanifested states, comprising all those possibilities which, by their very nature, do not admit of any manifestation, as well as the possibilities of manifestation themselves in their principial state; but this Self subsists by itself alone, for in the total and indivisible unity of its innermost nature it has not, and cannot have, any principle external to itself.
This one-sentence passage is very dense and of the highest importance, so I want to break it down into its elemental components, and connect them with Kabbalistic concepts, which are rapidly becoming my native tongue. My own Kabbalistic connections will be italicized and parenthesized.
- Self is the universal principle. By the principle of Self all other states of the being exist.
- There is no principle by which Self exists. Self is the principle of all principles.
- States of being exist in various degrees of existence, which may regarded as spheres. (In Kabbalah, these spheres are articulated into “four worlds”, Olamot.)
- The human individual state is formal. The supraindividual state is formless. (In Kabbalah, the formal and individual world is Assiyah. The formless, supraindividual world is Yetzirah.)
- Manifested and unmanifested states is a different distinction from formal and formless. So far, we have spoken only of manifested states which can properly be said to “exist” (again, the actual world of Assiyah and the formational world of Yetzirah. Now we are transcending to the unmanifested worlds of Beriah — creation — and Atzilut — emanation).
- Of the unmanifested states some do admit of manifestation and are the possibilities of manifestation in their principial state. (The former is the world of Beriah, which manifests by principle and in its lowest Sefirah — Beriah Malkhut — creates the highest Sefirah in Yetzirah — Yetzirah Keter — from which the world of Yetzirah manifests, via the Yetzirah Sefirot).
(Those unmanifested states that do not admit of manifestation are only of Atzilut, but not of Beriah. These are pure ineffable mystery, for the sake of which All is, and we feel this for-the-sake-of whenever anything matters to us. When we say “God is love” the truth of this statement is charged by Atzilut, and beyond Atzilut, Ein Sof.)
I have what might be an unusual understanding of Yetzirah is essentially supraformal, because it forms, but is not itself form, just as seeing sees but is not seen and hearing hears but is not heard.
I’ve come to understand the Sefirot of Assiyah as attempting, in human objective terms, to represent the worlds above, but by uppaya (skillful means to teach transcendent truths inexpressible in the terms of the present faith-state of the learner).
We try to indicate the forming of Yetzirah by the conceptual forms of the Sefirot Yesod, Hod, Netzach, Tif’eret, Gevurah and Chesed. Those are formal indicators of supraformal manifested being, formal fruit by which we know the tree of formation.
(The Hod-Netzach pair in Assiyah, incidentally, is the locus of uppaya.)
By my understanding The subtle (or astral) plane is not Yetzirah itself. The subtle plane is only these non-material objective entities that belong to the Sefirot who objectively represent Yetzirah.
The entire point of my weird term “enception” is to establish a distinction between capacity to form, formation and form, capacity to conceive, conceiving and concept! A capacity to form — to conceive or perceive — or most generally, to receive (the literal meaning of the word “kabbalah”!) is created from Beriah, manifests in Yetzirah as a action — forming — and then actualizes in Assiyah as forms, concepts, sensibly recognized (perceived) material objects, etc.
So an enception is the analogue to the faculty of sight, hearing.
Without the requisite enception, one remains oblivious to what one would otherwise receive. When a person exclaims “I was blind, but now I see!” this is the annunciation of enception. It is by this — disoblivion, anamnesis — that we experience Beriah.
And it is by this that we can never again take nihilism at face value. Everything can, at any minute irrupt from oblivion and bathe the world with overwhelming meaning. Nothingness is where this meaning enters, and so nothing is no longer an argument against anything. Exnihilism annihilates nihilism!
None of this is meant to suggest these worlds are not metaphysically real, only that our attempts to make them objective is uppaya.
Reification is different from objectification. This Kabbalistic ontology hyperreifies and disobjectifies the worlds beyond Assiyah.
Protected: Fidelity to faith
Next print?
Protected: Kabbalistic notes
Keter – Da’at
Everso and the four worlds
I understand that most of my recent philosophical focus has concentrated in Yesod-Malchut within the world of Beriah, which corresponds with Keter-Da’at within the world of Yetzirah. This is where the plurality of Yetzirah’s forms converge and are constrained by the supraformal Absolute.
(The closest thing we can have to “absolute truth” are truths which are faithful to the supraformal Absolute as they grasp whatever content they comprehend. We can clearly and consistently comprehend all kinds of forms, but only some of these help us maintain our roots in transcendent reality. Many, in fact, sever these roots, in order to grasp more comprehensively, clearly or consistently. This is what Technic systematically, methodically does, in fact.)
Prior to this, I focused on Yesod-Malchut within the world of Yetzirah and Keter-Da’at of the world of Assiyah. This is where the “Everso” eversion occurs. This is where subjective potential “concavity” manifests in actual grasping of “convex” objects of experience — where intentionality finds intentional objects. Those material objects we call “objectively real” are the entities of Malchut in the world of Assiyah. And the truths we call “subjective” are, in fact, the imaginative and emotional objects of Yesod, Hod, Netzach, Tif’eret, Geverah and Chesed. The purely conceptual, abstract objects of modern philosophy reach up into Beriah and Chokhmah within Assiyah. Modern theology extends to Keter within Assiyah.
Assiyah is objective top to bottom, and even what it calls “subjective” (meaning “nonmaterial”) is, in terms of form, objective.
Yetzirah, though essentially formal, is formation — the act of forming — the How of formation. We cannot understand formation in direct formal terms. New terms — new How and new What — are needed to get at this level of truth. The Tree of Yetzirah is known by its objective fruits in Assiyah. Yetzirah conceives and enwords, and manifests an enworldment of Assiyah.
When it seems that we inhabit different worlds, this is because we enworld Malchut by different states of Yetzirah.
And when it seems that some of these worlds are nihilistic, alienated and alienating (or to themselves, uncompromisingly scientific, rigorous, and fully in touch with objective reality) and others of these worlds are saturated with meaning and divine light (or to others subjective, irrational, fantastical, retrograde, woowoo or dogmatic), this is because some enworldments are focused solely on Assiyah, where others are focused primarily or exclusively on Beriah.
Judaism tries to enworld transparently between Beriah and Assiyah. A transparent Yetzirah is angelic, in its proper sense. A Yetzirah that attempts ultimacy and autonomy (from Beriah) is ideological.
Yetzirah, alone with Assiyah, without Beriah, seems pluralistic. The question is only what conceptual systems — Kuhnian paradigms — can adequately organize our material actualities so we can understand and control matter.
Things get considerably more complex and constrained if we consider the subjective effect of our paradigms. Do they flood reality with meaning, beauty and hope, or do they drain it of meaning and drown us in despair? This is a function of Yetzirah’s relationship with Beriah. Now the question is whether our conceptual systems organize our material actualities together with a relationship with the Divine One of whom we are an organic part.
One way I have expressed this is that, since the Enlightenment, we have focused exclusively on the What and the How of our experience, and bracketed the Why. Scientific method excludes all Why considerations. Liberal-Democracies proceduralize public life, and relegate all meaning to the private realm of home, business and faith community.
This moment in history witnesses a popular implosion of nihilism. It seems most people cannot find meaning in the condition we’ve created for ourselves — the enworldment of Technic, the enworldment that capitalism and communism alike enworld and inhabit — both uncritically, unconsciously and with pseudo-divine omniscience.
The everted present
Ray Cummings: “Time is nature’s way of keeping everything from happening all at once.”
“…And,” someone adds, “space is nature’s way of keeping everything from happening everywhere all at once.”
“…And,” another offers, “self is nature’s way of keeping everything from happening to everyone all at once.”
Presence is God’s way of distributing Godself through time space and consciousness.
But within God, everything does happen all at once, everywhere to everyone.
Adonai echad.
The present is the Absolute everted within Itself.