Two realms of truth, one above soul in the realm of absolute truth, the other below soul in the real of objective, relative truth — converge in the highest understanding.
Category Archives: Kabbalah
Crossing design with Kabbalah
I’m meditating on design-related expressions I have coined. These ideas orbit a central concern, which makes the difference between a project that is for me and one that is not.
- Practical fantasy — The idea that our favorite tools project a world around us — a potential story-field — and within it, ourselves as protagonist. Within a practical fantasy tool use is an enworldment creating/sustaining ritual.
- Precision inspiration — The intentional pursuit of epiphanic re-enworldment through design research. In precision inspiration a new possibility of enworldment is found through productive conflict among existing enworldments — those researched and those doing the research. What results opens radically new possibilities for designed artifacts and the enworldments they seed and project. A key point to precision inspiration is that it inevitably involves traversing the aporic liminal void between enworldments and suffering the dread intrinsic to such traversals.
- Pluricentrism — I was calling this polycentrism, but I am now using polycentrism only to describe the emergent being of a dynamic interaction among multiple agential centers as viewed from the third-person perspective as a system. But each agent within a polycentric system still experiences and acts within the system from its own center, and this is what pluricentric means. A designer who seeks to cultivate a living polycentric system must consider it pluricentrically, so each center experiences particilation as worthwhile and chooses to participate in a way that makes the polycentric system flourish as a whole and for each and every participant. Any system approached from within from multiple points is approached pluricentrically. Service design is designed pluricentrically and engineered polycentrically.
- Enworldment — This is the projection / crystallization of reality as given to a soul in some particular faith-state, which is a stable dynamic set of enceptive capacities. Think of enworldment as the consequence of lived faith — the pragmatic maxim concretely lived out.
- Instaurationalism — This is the name for design reasoning — a reason that knows and practically accommodates the reality that reality exceeds truth, but that truth can expand its capacities if it follows reality beyond its current limits of comprehension. It is a half-joking but fully serious portmanteau of instauration (discover-creation) and rationalism.
- Synetic design — This comes from the phenomenon of synesis — or understanding as togethering. A phenomenon is spontaneously taken as together (con- + -ceived) as a gestalt, together in common with other understanders, united by common understanding.
- Bullshit-chickenshit. — This is the antithesis of practical fantasy. Bullshit is impracticable fantasy posing as an attainable possibility. Chickenshit is practice without any desirable, meaningful outcome. Most of what happens in corporations is “bullshit-coated chickenshit”. This is what is meant by the pejorative “corporate”.
Service design should, theoretically, be the greatest opportunity to do the kind of work at the heart of all these ideas.
Unfortunately, in practice, the kind of organization that needs and can afford service design is usually in crisis precisely because it misconceives its business in ways that make such work impossible. The aporic void is impassible because powerful people use power to suppress aporia and the anxiety it induces.
For the last couple of years, and especially the last year, I have been connecting these design concepts to Kabbalah.
Kabbalah gives them my design-informed ideas stability and coherence. Design experiences and the concepts and vocabulary I have developed to cope with the uncanny, unnerving and harrowing aspects of design (as well articulating the inspiring, ecstatic, fulfilling rewards of design success) provide me experience-nearness and concrete cases to substantiate otherwise abstract Kabbalistic ideas.
The enworded, enworlding artifacts are what are given in Assiyah.
The enworlding synesis happens in Yetzirah. Corporate bullshit and chickenshit happen in Yetzirah, too, when a feeble, dying Yetziratic collective (corporate) being lacks the courage to give up the ghost, and cranks out lifeless objectivity that nobody can care about or believe in. Precision inspiration is the sokution, but it is not for the faint of heart.
Polycentrism is the manifestation in Assiyah (third person) of pluricentric being (first person) in Yetzirah.
Precision inspiration transpires against the background of oblivion — from which inspiration irrupts ex nihilo in epiphanic moments of creative revelation or revelatory creativity, in other words, instauration. Radical design effects instauration ex nihilo.
The orbital center: Keter d’Beriah.
Haloed dread.
The faith in the pregnant oblivion, the everpossible miraculous birth, the heart of the exnihilist soul.
Olamot
I understand the Olamot (the four worlds) topologically.
What is given in Assiyah, the world of formation is anything that can be perceived, conceived and contained within the grasp of comprehension. This includes objective abstractions and all content of imagination. All content is Assiyah.
What is given in Yetzirah is all acts of formation — perception, conception or comprehension. Whatever subject contains objective content — however it does the containing — is Yetzirah. Yetzirah is active concavity: capacity for forming.
What is given in Beriah is the ground of differing formations. Between containments, objectivities, ontologies — between revelations of radically different enworldments — is inconceivable nonworldment, which we experience as dreadful void — abyss — from which ex nihilo revelation and creation irrupt.
What is given in Atzilut is the infinitely meaning of the absolute One, whose light floods in through whatever accepts its place within it, whatever no longer envies it and has shed its apotheotic ambitions.
Kabbalah is the practice of receiving all that is given.
Assiyah is objective, and that includes not only material objectivity (Malchut d’Assiyah) but all intentional objects, every possible object of any possible subjective operation. Only Assiyah can be thought about objectively — that is, in terms of definable objects of thought.
Yetzirah is subjective, and that includes not only (or primarily!) personal subject but all scales of subjective formation. Yetzirah is always and essentially participatory, and that participation enworlds and forms within an enworldment. Yetzirah is participatory enworlding.
Beriyah is what is given through sheer absence between enworldments. It is the ground of all enworlding and the truth of that ground, the truth that every objective world is enworlded. At its highest is the truth that between enworldment and enworldment lies dreadful, inconceivable nothingness from which enworldment proceeds ex nihilo, that something entirely beyond enworldment (enworldments, subjects and objects) is the condition of enworldment. It is, for us, the ex nihilo from which all revelation irrupts, by which we intuit creation ex nihilo.
Atzilut is the mystery beyond and behind Beriyah that transmits itself through the three lower worlds and gives worlds life and purpose and infinitude of possibility within absolute One.
Protected: Everso hymn
Protected: Some eversions
Quantlocked
Altruism without intuition of transcendence is sentimental idolatry.
An intuition of transcendence requires consciousness of being conceived, comprehended, enveloped, embraced by layer upon layer of interlapping, ever-magnifying magnanimity approaching one soul of infinite magnitude, at once both absolutely one and infinitely plural. Chokhmah and Binah proceed from the principle of immanence the possibility of One within an infinite absoluteness with nothing beside it to give number meaning.
Without two, one is meaningless. Lurianic Kabbalah solved the riddle of One without two, by positing a prenumeric duality of infinity and nothingness, which makes a miraculous duality out of nonquantity: Ztimtzum.
Poor, lucky humans! Thrown into a world peopled with numerable objects, we know nothing (literally) of the truer everted word from which we emerged — our omniscience everted to the purest ignorance!
So when we hear “infinity”, we cannot help but hear it as a quantity of limitless addition — more heaped upon more, across time, moment heaped upon moment. Infinity, however is a quality preceding quantity, which contains within itself one possibility, which for us, is our sole actuality: quantity.
And when we hear “nothing”, we cannot help but hear it as the absence of a quantity — zero. But nothingness is not an absence of something, it is only the divine innovation of relative absence of infinity — the possibility of finitude, manifested first as obliviousness. It is a patch of shade in infinite light in which all is pre-articulately infinite, and finitude is latent possibility. To understate this, almost-but-not-quite-infinitely (“myriadically”) it is as articulate a “thing” as a ripple across a spark of a flame in the heart of a zillion overlaid suns. (Indians have thousands of years head start on any of us, attempting to indicate qualitative infinity to finitely-bound human minds.)
With infinity and nothingness, we now have two. And from two the quantity one can be derived.
Qualitatively, we pre-count, Infinite, Void, Two, One, Zero and now the quantities one, two, three and onward to myriad (the indeterminately large, incorrectly called infinity by quantlocked minds), and backwards through negation, starting with zero, to negative one through negative myriad.
Zero is a shadow cast by a shadow. Zero is the shadow of nothingness, and nothingness is the shadow of infinity.
Our best access to nothingness is witnessing ex nihilo revelation, against which infinity is dimly intimated.
I was winding up to say something, but I cannot remember now…
…
Oh.
Altruism is the false transcendence of the quantlocked soul.
It knows something important is out there, but its faith can acknowledge only what its stubby mental fingers can grasp and cognize. We grab a garden by a berry, cram it in our pie hole, and strut around like little gods, like we created that garden by consuming it.
Its world is objects, comprising littler objects, composing larger ones. Itty-bitty subatomic objects heap up to make, vast, vast supergalactic objects.
Ah, sahib, it is objects all the way down and objects all the way up. Is the very tallest heap — taller even than the famous tower of Babel — is the megaultraobject named “God”. Do you believe or disbelieve in the megaultraobject? Such is the debate endlessly rehearsed by quantlocked theologians vs quantlocked atheists.
Ah sahib, until we learn to evert infinity and nothingness, and both together, and both apart, it is religious category mistakes all the way down and all the way up.
Altruism grasps Eden by the fruit and bestows upon it all kind of divine benevolence, without inhabiting the transcendent enveloping relationship that gives such benevolence meaning. The fig-leaf of moral vanity, the strutting about of “I am good, selfless person” gives it away. It is godless aping of divinity. Meaningless charade of ethic in vacuous ethos.
The only altruism that matter is magnanimity, the serving of ever greater scales of selfhoods, who are themselves ever greater scales of selfhoods, across whom is transmitted an unbearably bright trickle of divine light from the heart of Ein Sof.
This is my current intuition of Kabbalah — a spark of inspiration I have received as a gift via Am Yisrael, to whom every Westerner and anti-Westerner owes gratitude, whether or we acknowledge or refuse to acknowledge it.
And those who seek redemption from gratitude through murder — by cross, by sword, by theological contortion or atheological politicization — only compound their debt with criminality.
Rome’s murder — blamed on Jews, with despicable cowardice — was redemptive only in its own decaying collective imagination.
No convexity — whether statue, book, man, ghost or concept — is a permissible object of worship — by virtue of its form.
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.
Topology of mystery
Metaphor: A human mind has both armspan and handspan. The armspan embraces reality itself in an all-embracing, enworlding faith. Within this faith, a handspan grips givens in an ontology and corresponding objectivity of objective truths.
Absolute truth is, with respect to human minds, concave. It is the truth surrounding and surprising the total comprehension of every enworlding faith and all perceptually, conceptual, comprehensible givens within it.
We sense this concavity most at the limits of objectivity, where the reach of mind exceeds its grasp, where comprehension fails. Apprehensive intuitions of incomprehensible givens mark the boundary.
But this concavity also permeates the comprehensible. In truth, it is the very essence of comprehension, and it is this concavity which molds the convexity of each given within whatever objectivity a particular ontology embraces in understanding.
The human mind knows objective truth, not because reality is objective, but because our minds are objective, and when we try to know, we grasp mental objects by their defined outer edges.
The objective mind embraces and grasps. We comprehend only the convex givens our mind can comprise and hold together in its all-embracing, all-gripping mind. Whatever embraces and grasps the mind itself is by nature and structure, incomprehensible.
And when we try and fail to comprehend some comprehensive given beyond the enworlding arm-span, we encounter mystery.
The theological category mistake treats subject as existent object. It cannot help but misconceive mystery as heavenly objects hidden behind a veil. It projects object where the given is not object-form.
Psychology carries theistic category mistakes into atheism, attempting to sate the human need for mystery, without fulfilling it. Psychology misconceives mystery as unconscious ideas submerged beneath the surface of consciousness. But there is no object “there”.
Mystery needs a new topology. Mystery is what we experience when we try to comprehend as convexity what comprehends us within a transcendent concavity.
Mystery hides itself in plain sight, in seeing, and intimates its presence inaudibly, in the silence of hearing. Mystery conceals itself in the pervasive oblivion of ex nihilo creation-revelation, fermenting, sparkling everywhere all at once, always, to all, in perpetual irruptions of minute epiphanies.
Positive metaphysics is objective projection into the incomprehensible comprehending everse of objectivity. Negative metaphysics is awareness of the futility of comprehending the comprehending incomprehensible.
Mystery can be suprehended through everted objectivity — through subjectivity properly understood.
In the light of subjectivity properly understood, personal subject and an academic subject are subjects in the same sense of the word.
Protected: Wombinal souls
Sense, common and uncommon
Common sense is our “sixth sense”: the sense of an objective world of objects intuited by the concerted perceiving of our five senses.
Each of us has this kind of intuitive common sense. Each person’s intuitive common sense overlaps significantly with that of every other. We tend to notice and focus of the differences, but they stand out precisely because they are anomalous.
Most intuitive common sense is shared, and to the degree it is shared it is taken as universally recognized givens of reality.
These universal givens of reality provide a second meaning of common sense — social common sense.
Social common sense is founded on the necessary assumption that our intuitive common sense gives us the same world, a world common to each and all of us, a world of objects we all know commonsensically.
Social common sense is the basis of all community and communication. We assume we all share common sense of a common world, and it is on this basis that we can communicate with others in our community.
The necessary assumption of common sense is so necessary that it rarely occurs to us to question it. We simply believe it and act on it. Let us call necessary assumptions behind belief and action faith.
And when we do question common sense, even in our questioning, we continue to assume common sense. We address others in our community and communicate with them in the faith that they will understand what we claim to question. This is “performative contradiction” and is symptomatic of “bad faith”.
(But the degree of universality of alleged commonsense universals is a contestable matter. We can, do and should challenge, test and debate norms of social common sense.)
Common sense is our immediate home, however imperfect, unsteady, contestable and ramshackle, and we must never attempt to abandon it, or pretend that we have escaped it.
We can certainly expand this commonsense home, however. Every culture, large of small, does precisely this. Upon the most common ground of social common sense shared by all human beings, each culture grows and builds (to varying degrees of cultivation and construction) ramifying, diverging common senses.
And this is one of the most intense sites of contested common sense universality. The boundary between natural and second-natural is blurry, broad, squiggly and often faint.
And here we come to the supernatural. Every culture until very recently (and even this exception is questionable!) has treated a supernatural reality as part of common sense, though each approached, related to and spoke about supernatural reality differently.
What do we do with this? Does the supernatural belong to the universal common sense or to the extended common sense of particular cultures? Is the supernatural only an artifact of the second-natural — perhaps an inevitable artificiality?
(Eventually, I need to develop a two-fold definition of transcendence, paralleling the two conceptions of common sense. Transcendence can refer to what transcends what is immediately given to our own being. Nothing is more ordinary than this transcendence. Past, future, substances, distances, self-possibilities, the reality of other people — these all transcend the present and immediate. But most people, when referring to transcendence mean realities beyond the totality universal common sense gives us. Below is a messy sketch, which will need serious rewriting.)
I am inclined to understand transcendence as another kind of common sense implied by the very existence of intuitive and social common sense.
We do not normally receive sensations as mere sensations. We necessarily take sensations as perceptions of reality — a reality that transcends mere sensation. We immediately make sense — an intuitive synthesis — of our perceptions, in the form of transcendent being, perceived in common by our senses (in intuitive common sense) that is shared by others (in social common sense).
But also, intuitive common sense is not univocal or perfectly continuous.
The more attentively and sensitively we cultivate and expand our common sense, the more we detect disturbances that suggest that there is more to reality than we perceive and understand. And when we attempt to make sense of these disturbances, the more surprising they become.
We arrive at another order of transcendence, beyond the scope of ordinary intuitive common sense.
It is a common sense born from aporias, ruptures, epiphanies and rebirths.
Perhaps we could call it “uncommon sense”. Some of us, in order to communicate it to our community speak of it objectively, because that is the law of common tongue. Some of us ritualize it because ritual participation is closer to its truth. We indicate, evoke, invoke… all given indirectly, but taken directly — grasped objectively, evertedly. We do our insufficient best, and sometimes communion accidentally occurs despite the communication.
The irruption of uncommon sense is disturbing, sometimes distressing and sometimes even devastating, but if it completes and consummates itself, it is always worth the ordeal.
What seems to be disease and death and annihilation in nothingness is ultimately revealed to be labor pangs of new life. Indeed, it is through these ruptures that meaning enters the world, ex nihilo.
Indeed, anyone who suffers this kind of common sense death only to be reborn into a better uncommonsense common sense can no longer see nothingness the same way. Nothingness is eternally pregnant ayin. Nihilism is no longer possible. One is an exnihilist.
It is because of the disturbing, but vivid and vivifying supernature of uncommon sense, and the need to connect it with intuitive and social common sense, in order to circulate meaning throughout the world and bathe the world’s tissues with purpose that I am religious.
Not spiritual. Not merely mystical. Socially religious. Jewishly religious.
And design is how I put my religious life into practice.
Design! Jewish! Not religious!
Not to you. Not yet.
Structural account of the Sefirot
Another (edited) passage from Schaya, published here for future reference:
Malkhut, the ‘lower mother’, is from the cosmological point of view what Binah, the ‘highest mother’, is from the ontological point of view; like the latter, she is on the one hand the ‘mirror’ and on the other the ‘prism’ of divine emanation. On the one side she sends back to the ‘king’, Tif’eret, all the radiation she receives from him through the intermediary of his act, Yesod; and she is thus eternally united with him, her “husband”, who in turn is infinitely united with the ‘supreme crown’, Keter Elyon. On the other side she projects the influx of the ‘king’ out from the causal or Sefirotic unity and thereby creates the cosmos; and in her cosmic manifestation she herself ‘descends, as immanence, into the created being in order to connect him with his transcendental source.
However, in considering these attributes and principal modes of activity of Malkhut, we have not yet answered the question as to what it is as substance. Now it is not a distinct substance, but rather the undifferentiated, uncreated principle of all substance which in no way emerges from the infinite and indivisible unity of the creative causes: this principle envelopes them and is yet hidden within them, like ‘very pure and imperceptible air. What is this ‘air’ which is not breathable in the same way as the air which surrounds us? It is avir, the universal ‘ether’, the quintessence of the four subtle or celestial elements and of the four corporeal or terrestrial elements. And what is the ether itself? It is none other than the infinite receptivity of the divine ‘intelligence’: Binah. ‘The father (Chokhmah) is the spirit hidden in the “Ancient of days” (Keter) in whom this “very pure air” (identical with Binah) is enclosed.’ The universal ether envelopes the intelligible emanation of Chokhmah from the moment of its first emergence from the ‘ancient of days: ‘it unites with the (spiritual) flame issuing from the (supreme) and brilliant lamp’ and follows it in the whole course of its descent towards cosmic possibility and throughout the cosmos itself.
‘Above’, the ether is the infinite receptivity of Binah, by virtue of which God reveals himself to himself; ‘below’, it is the cosmic receptivity of Malkhut, which becomes concrete in creative substance. In other words, that which is pure receptivity in Binah and creative contraction in Din [Gevurah] becomes cosmic emptiness in Hod and finally undifferentiated and causal substance in Malkhut. This process of principial ‘substantialization’ has its positive point of departure in Chokhmah, whose luminous plenitude is manifested by Chesed, and which, having received its universal form from Tif’eret, is manifested by Netsach as the life of the worlds, which Yesod communicates to Malkhut, the substance.
In this way, all the Sefirot descend’ from Keter, in perfect co-emanation and co-operation, and are finally concentrated in Malkhut and manifested by Malkhut in the cosmic mode.
However, as we have seen, if one wishes to remain close to pure and superintelligible truth, there can be no question of anything having emanated or being distinct from the supreme, the only reality, the ‘One without a second’.
I have been looking for a structural account of the Sefirot, analogous to the obscure relationship between the typological description of Jungian/MBTI and the Jungian functions which combine to produce typological effects, or the yaos of the double-trigrams that combine in the hexagram descriptions of the I Ching. I’ll need to return to this and study it closely.
Metapretty
A beautiful passage on beauty from Leo Schaya’s The Universal Meaning of the Kabbalah (spellings edited for consistency with Kabbalistic vocabulary used elsewhere on the anomablogue):
The essential principle of divine beauty is the identity of the absolute (ayin) – which excludes all that is not itself — and of the infinite (ein sof) — which includes all that is real; it is the unity of the more than luminous darkness of non-being with the dazzling plenitude of pure being, the supreme and most mysterious of unities, which is revealed in the saying (Song of Songs 1:5): I am black, but comely. This essential principle of divine beauty, from which radiate both the pure truth of the only reality, eclipsing all that is not it, and at the same time unlimited bliss in which each thing swims as though in a shoreless ocean, is nothing other than keter, which encloses all the polar aspects of God, eternally and without distinction. When keter reveals itself, its infinite and unitive aspect is expressed by chokhmah and by chesed, while its absolute or exclusive character is manifested by binah and by din [gevurah].
These two kinds of antinomic emanations are indispensable in view of creation; we have seen how, in order to create, both rigorous truth and generous bliss are necessary; or, in other words, measure in all things, judgement of their qualities, universal law on the one hand and on the other the unlimitedness of grace, giving rise to all life, joy and freedom. And in order that these two opposites, in which are concentrated, in one way or another, all the divine aspects, may be able to produce the cosmos, there has to be, not only absolute identity ‘above’ between these two, but also their interpenetration and existential fusion ‘below’. This fusion or synthesis of all the revealed antinomies of God, which can be summed up in the two general terms ‘grace’ and ‘rigour”, takes place in tif’eret, ‘beauty’. In tif’eret, the rigorous truth which God alone is, differs in no way from his mercy which unites everything with him. In God’s ‘heart”, the eternal measure of things is as though dissolved in the incommensurability of his redemptive grace. When divine beauty is manifested, grace crystallizes mysteriously in the created ‘measures’ or forms and radiates through them, leaving the imprint of its author on the work of creation.
It has been a few minutes since I’ve written an exclamation and star in the margin of a book. *!
Holy words.
I needed a taste of bliss this week, and I am grateful for it.
A side note on Schaya’s The Universal Meaning of the Kabbalah. This is the only major work on Kabbalah from the Traditionalist/Perennialist school (Guenon, Schuon, Coomaraswamy, Burkhardt, Cutsinger, etc.).
I was exposed to this theosophy early in early adulthood, and despite early incapacities to comprehend it (or, rather, my early incapacity to reduce all intellection to comprehension!) and despite my animosity toward its reactionary retro-rigidity, I cannot shake my deep conviction that the problems I have with Perennialism are not with its truth, but my own understanding.
I read this book with extreme, respectful caution. Another passage from this book:
Grace and rigour are essentially one, that One who rules over all things and who, according to the Zohar (Beshallah 5Ib), is comparable to “…a king who combines in himself the balance and harmony of all attributes, and therefore his countenance always shines like the sun and he is serene because of his wholeness and perfection; but when he judges, he can condemn as well as acquit. A fool, seeing that the king’s countenance is bright, thinks that there is nothing to be afraid of; but a wise man says to himself, ‘Although the king’s countenance shines, it is because he is perfect and combines benevolence with justice. In that brightness judgement is hidden, and therefore I must be careful.'”
This distrustful trust is the essence of transcendent orientation. It can also appear as a humble hubris, or any number of cheap, priceless paradoxes.
Antiromantic
In the four worlds, literary truth stands below philosophical wisdom.
That this rings heretical in the modern, postmodern, postpostmodern ear, is firm evidence of its truth.
Temperance
The essence of tradition is practice oriented by keen awareness that others have gone further than we have.
We can always situate I within All, but that All is situated within Nothing. All is perpetually All-but-not-All-enough, and this is wisdom learned the hardest way, by being right, not not nearly right enough, over and over and over again, painfully, until temperance develops.
Whatever I say about Kabbalah is provisional and personal. My words are meant as testimony, not verdict. Whenever I make proclamations, I do so provisionally with concern bordering on dread.
This might go without saying, but I’ve learned the hard way that what goes without saying cannot go without saying and must be repeated forever, like a prayer or declaration of love: Check your own trusted sources and your own experience and exercise your own self-sovereignty.
Ex Halo
Keter d’Assiyah is the boundlessness of space and time.
Keter d’Yetzirah is the infinitude of enwordments.
Keter d’Beriah is the pregnant nihilo from which creation and revelation irrupt between enworldments.
Keter d’Atzilut is boundless beyond being.
Instauratio
One face of all is material.
This material is not a materialistic material of science, politics or society.
This material is the stubborn resistance and graceful pliability of the world around us. It is the world we inhabit, in and among whom we live, in and with whom we participate as part, and to whom we belong.
One face of all is spirit.
This sprit is not the spirit of spirituality, religion or culture.
This spirit is awareness and oblivion, revelation and veiling of what matters most — infinite value in which all life, ourselves included, is rooted, on which all value subsists. Value is love.
Between these two faces is self — materially given, spiritually receiving, spiritually giving, materially shaping.
This self is not the self of psychology, economics or romanticism.
This self instaurates. The self discover-creates and makes sense of everything. It create-discovers and makes inspired works. This self is instaurated. As the self makes sense of everything and makes inspired works, the self begins to make inspired sense.
Instauration of material and spirit is instauration of self.
This self is singular and plural, I and We. Any singular self, of whatever scale, from intuitive spark to universal solidarity is e pluribus unum.
Material, self and spirit are traditionally known as Earth, Man and Heaven, the Great Triad.
Translating it for my family: Assiyah-Yetzirah, Yetzirah-Beriah, Beriah-Atzilut.
The concerted effort to convene Earth, Man and Heaven for the betterment of the world, with no attempt to reduce any one to any other, nor to allow any one to dominate or predominate over any other — but rather to find the right momentary constellation for present place, the present selves in the present time — this wants a name, but whatever has a name invites lust and conquest.
Perhaps the name “design” was as good a name as any.
Metareform Judaism
Ultimately, I see Judaism not as an original revelation of an absolute truth, but as an initiatory constitution (covenant) and an initiating thrust toward relationship with an inconceivable, incomprehensible Absolute. The present of Judaism is suspended between from and toward. This is radical Reform Judaism.
One of Adonai’s favorite rebukes is “stiff-necked people”. Plato also wrote about stiff-necked people:
Imagine human beings living in an underground, cavelike dwelling, with an entrance a long way up, which is both open to the light and as wide as the cave itself. They’ve been there since childhood, fixed in the same place, with their necks and legs fettered, able to see only in front of them, because their bonds prevent them from turning their heads around. Light is provided by a fire burning far above and behind them. Also behind them, but on higher ground, there is a path stretching between them and the fire. Imagine that along this path a low wall has been built, like the screen in front of puppeteers above which they show their puppets.
This is just how we are, we humans.
Sometimes we need to de-fascinate our eyes, unfasten our heads, loosen our necks and look from side to side. We might even turn around to see what is going on behind the backs of our heads. And once we get used to a stationary 360-degree view, we might stand up and walk around. We might even interact with the things around us. Some of those things might be other people, and here it might occur to us to converse with them and enlarge our understanding. Finally, we might summon enough courage to go full-on peripatetic and start feeling for exits, openings and entrances to elsewhere and otherwise.
Welcome to Beriah!
A great many religious people today, seeking religious intensity within their traditions, believe that they have found it in activism.
And indeed, they have found something.
But what they have found is the furthest thing from God. They have found collective misapotheosis in totalizing ideology.
They believe they are taking their faith to the streets, when in fact they have imported the street into their sanctuaries.
Their escape from illusion is an intoxicating delusion. Their spiritual awakening is the climax of a collective ideological dream.
Chuang Tzu never said:
Once Chuang Chou dreamt he was a butterfly, a butterfly flitting and fluttering around, happy with himself and doing as he pleased. He had awakened from the delusion that he had ever been Chuang Chou. He realized that it was his duty to make everyone around him “do the work” required to wake up to the fact that they are butterflies dreaming that they are people.
I look forward to the day that Reform Judaism turns to its proper from-toward present and, overcome with teshuvah, grinds up and drinks its political ideoidols.
Protected: Russian reversal metaphysics
She was already root
Reading Lou Andreas-Salome this morning I made an obvious connection that I’d missed.
Two facts are characteristic of the problem of the erotic: First of all, that eroticism should be considered as a special case within the sphere of physiological, psychical, and social relations, rather than independently and separately as is often the case. But secondly, that it once again links together these three kinds of relations, merging them into one, and making them its problem.
Rooted since the beginning in the substrate of all existence, eroticism grows from a soil that is ever the same, rich and strong, to whatever height it grows, whatever the immensity, the space occupied by the marvelous tree in which it flowers — subsisting — even when that soil is entirely overrun by edifices — below them, in all its primeval, obscure, and earthy strength. Its immense value to life consists precisely in the fact that, capable though it is of imposing its hegemony widely or of incarnating noble ideals, it has no need to do so, but can draw a surplus of strength from any humus, adapt to serve life in any possible circumstance. Thus we find eroticism associated with the almost purely vegetative functions of our physical being, bound closely to them, and even if it does not become, like these functions, an absolute necessity of existence, it continues to exert a powerful influence upon them. That is why, even in its elevated forms and manifestations, even at the topmost point of the most complex ecstasies of love, there remains in it something of the simplicity and profundity of its origins, always present and ineradicable — something of that healthy gaiety which experiences the life of the body — in the specific sense of the satisfaction of the instincts — as always new, always young and, so to speak, like life itself in its primitive sense. Just as all healthy beings rejoice at awakening, or in their daily bread, or in walking in the fresh air, with a pleasure that is constantly renewed, as if at a joy that is born anew each day, and just as the beginnings of neurosis can often be accurately diagnosed in the fact that these daily joys, these fundamental necessities, become tainted with “boredom,” with “monotony,” with “nausea,” likewise, in the existence of the erotic, behind and beneath the other moments of happiness that it entails, there is always present a happiness which, hardly felt and impossible to measure, man shares with everything that, like himself, breathes.
I cannot help but recall a simple, startling line from Rilke’s “Orpheus. Euridice. Hermes.”
She had come into a new virginity
and was untouchable; her sex had closed
like a young flower at nightfall, and her hands
had grown so unused to marriage that the god’s
infinitely gentle touch of guidance
hurt her, like an undesired kiss.
She was no longer that woman with blue eyes
who once had echoed through the poet’s songs,
no longer the wide couch’s scent and island,
and that man’s property no longer.
She was already loosened like long hair,
poured out like fallen rain,
shared like a limitless supply.
She was already root.
Kabbalistic Nietzsche
The symbology I internalized close-reading Nietzsche maps harmoniously — neatly, even — to Kabbalah. Maybe I will write a Borgesian review of a fictional book by a mystic of unknown tradition named Ronald Challah, titled The Kabbalah of Zarathustra — a Zohar-parody commentary on Thus Spoke Zarathustra.