Category Archives: Works
Belimah again
Reading further in Scholem, I just came upon that miraculous word belimah. Here is what Scholem says about it.
Various peculiarities of the terminology employed in [Sefer Yetzirah], including some curious neologisms which find no natural explanation in Hebrew phraseology, suggest a paraphrase of Greek terms, but most of the details still await a full clarification. The precise meaning of the phrase Sefirot belimah which the author constantly uses and which may be the key to the understanding of what he actually had in mind when speaking of the Sefirot, is a matter of speculation. The second word belimah which may be taken to denote or to qualify the specific nature of these “numbers” has been explained or translated in accordance with the theories of the several writers or translators: infinite Sefirot, or closed, abstract, ineffable, absolute Sefirot, or even Sefirot out-of-nothing. If the author of the book wanted to be obscure, he certainly succeeded beyond his wishes.
The gift-rooted organization
The problem with technicity is not that it interprets purposeful action in terms of instrumental chains of in-order-to.
In even the best circumstances, most action is instrumental — performed in order to make it possible to do some other thing.
The problem with technicity is that the in-order-to never terminates in positive intrinsic value. It either continues on and on and eventually peters out in futility, or it forms a closed logical loop, or it reveals only negative goals.
Technicity asks leading Why questions. It asks Why with an expected instrumental answer: Because. “Because” means “in order to.”
But ultimately, Why is not a question answered with because. The reverse is true. Because is answered with Why.
Unless the instrumental in-order-to terminates in a Why with no because other than itself, a person is morally ungrounded. Why is only “Because I love it.” Why is only “Because I am here for this.” Why is “When this Why is present to me, I am who I am.”
Why is spontaneously felt value. Why is intrinsic. Why is experienced as answer, not question. When Why is present, we have no reason to ask why. If we are moved to ask why, this indicates that whatever we are doing is ungrounded from Why. When Why is present we say “This is why…”
Much of our Why is rooted in some kind of giving that we are born to do. Why do I exist? I exist to give specific kinds of gift to people who value it. The Why is only actualized when someone values what we give, and receives it as a gift.
The rest of our Why comes from receiving gifts from others, which in turn activates their Why.
Why is actualized in such exchanges of value.
Now some of these exchanges are purely instrumental. This is unavoidable, and not even a bad thing — as long as the instrumental chains are grounded in Why.
This grounding can be analyzed. This is what we are trying do when we ask ourselves “Why am I doing this activity?” or “Why am I doing this job?” or “Why am I working for this organization?” And sometimes this analysis succeeds and reconnects us with our Why. We close the circuit, and feel the flow of Why moving through us again. All the instrumental in-order-tos receive a charge of “worth it”. But we must do this analysis this outside the enframing of technicity, or we must at least allow it to lead us beyond technicity, to a meaningful terminus where Why is an answer, not a question.
Value exchange is the medium of service. But at the very root of value is essential gift: the terminal Why of each person, which is the true taproot of everything good in this world.
Organizations which tap into people’s essential service — which provide opportunities to people to give their gifts and find people who will value and receive them — who will provide their people with services they need to support the giving of their gifts — where they receive other people’s gifts and in valuing and receiving them actualize them as who they are as people — such organizations become charged with value. They are beloved, charismatic, charged with meaning.
But this is unusual. Such organizations are rare, and they must cultivate, maintain and grow their networks of value exchange, and take seriously their moral grounding — their rootedness in gift. When designers discuss design ethics, this should be front and center. This is the very core of design ethics.
But most designers are as technicity-dominated as their masters. Most “design ethics” is concerned with using design methods to achieve the standardized set of technocratic objectives, unusually avoiding unfairness, injustice, oppression or ecological disaster.
Designers have a deeper positive goal. To arrange and shape our shared world so that we naturally, spontaneously want to serve, protect, repair, enhance, honor, ornament, love this world like our own child.
To fix the myriad technical problems of the world we must first love our world enough that we want to fix them, and cannot abide leaving the world broken.
Designers are responsible for treating our general societal nihilism problem.
Because nihilism is the inevitable result of ungrounded technicity.
This is why designers are morally obligated to transcend technicity, even while working within it.
If designers “go native” and adopt technicity in order to function better in technicity-dominated environments, we have not only lost our meaning as a profession, but we are betraying our collective and individual Why. Our lives will become utterly meaningless and the world will become worthless.
We’ll become mechanics who fix and tune behavior extraction machines, and we will generate nihilism, instead of meaning.
Indeed, we currently suffer a nihilism pandemic. This mass nihilism is caused by ubiquity of technicity, and mass service to behavior extraction systems.
Let us now look at Business as Usual organizations, not only as the root cause of nihilism, but also as commercially unwise, from a business perspective.
The less people are given opportunities to give their own essential gift to others who need it, want it, value it, love it, the less they are themselves in a world in which they belong. They become alienated from the people and organizations who reject their essential service while extracting from them behaviors that have nothing to do with who they are.
That kind of behavior extraction is expensive. It requires constant monitoring. The behaviors are ones the person does not want to perform, so they are likely to stop doing the specified behaviors if they can get away with it. They require surveillance to ensure the behaviors are produced in the right quantities and within specified tolerances.
This kind of monitoring is expensive. Doing work in a way conducive to monitoring introduces overhead. At minimum the work must be “instrumented” for generating behavioral measurements. But generally, a monitored human resource is also required to spend much of their day providing “visibility” to those to whom they report. They produce activity reports of various kinds. They must demonstrate value in progress reports, self-assessments, periodic performance reviews and other meetings. and create appearances that suggest productivity to anyone watching them.
But then behaviors must be controlled. First and foremost, they must be motivated externally, through various positive and negative factors. — “carrots and sticks”, as they say, referring to donkey driver methodologies. This is a euphemism for bribes and blackmail, which motivate by fear and greed. Many companies (most?) rely on money to motivate desired behaviors. This is an expensive way to fuel an organization. So socially-acceptable intimidation and bullying supplement the positive motivation. Market forces establish not only fairly consistent pay across employers, but also consistent levels of intimidation and bullying. Teachers, for instance, as a profession, expect a higher level of systematic abuse than designers. But most people expect some reasonable amount of surveillance and coercion from their management. It seems normal.
(If all this sounds totalitarian, that is because BAU orgs are miniature totalitarian states. At heart, totalitarianism is technicity taken to extremes of purity and magnitude.)
But again, why shouldn’t an organization selfishly choose to be totalitarian?
Because such organizations are repellent. They are manifestly meaningless. Nobody chooses them unless they are deprived of alternatives, or are trapped (“locked in”) or are forced to.
Organizations rooted in value — let’s call them “gift-rooted organizations” are inspiring within and without, attractive, radiant. They have genuine brand value that goes far beyond mere brand recognition or just trust.
Dang. Out of time.
To be continued.
Designerly nothingness
Complaint litany of an alienated designer:
This work harnesses none of my essential energies, but saps my will by extracting and utilizing resources I lack.
This work refuses my essential services while demanding from me what I do not have to give and, in fact, need to receive from others.
This work does not move me forward in my personal project. Indeed, it does the reverse: In pulls me backwards, by enslaving me to the very forces I feel called to challenge and overcome.
Regarding these forces I believe should be overcome — these forces we are forced to serve when our work feels most forced — they belong to an enworldment which Heidegger called “technicity”.
Technicity is essentially the utilitarian instinct driven to extremes.
Technicity creates an interminable chain of “in order to”.
In technicity we are all chained to “in order to”, and become links in that chain, with no purpose except to serve someone else’s “in order to”, who, in turn serves another’s “in order to.”
At the heart of technicity is one monomaniacal question “What is it for?”
This is true not only of “What?” and “How?” questions — even, and especially, questions of love and value. So when technicity asks “Why?” it only knows how to mean “What is it for?” And when technicity asks “Who?” it only knows how to mean “What is it for?” This is where the nihilistic damage happens
Design is a different way to work. It approaches questions of value and relationship as outside the realm of use. It provides a terminus for the chain of “What is it for?” It is for the sake of itself. It is useless and I love it for no reason other than love. Je ne sais quoi. Even tiny mustard seed sized specks of irrational love bring desirability to life.
But under the iron reign of technicity, design is reduced to an alternate toolset for problem-solving. And that problem is, of course, “how do I do x, in order to do y, in order to do z, in order to…” with no “because I just love it” anywhere to be seen.
Design is far too expansive to fit inside the narrowness of technicity, in any of its contemporary forms.
Of course — obviously — it does not fit inside corporate capitalism.
But neither does design fit inside managerial Marxism, which is the only viable mutation of Marxism in a mature industrial or senile postindustrial world! Your revolution, once inspired by material dialectic, has expired by it. It has been exnihilated by the fundamental fact that we are situated inside a dialectic with no exterior. We are always at the conclusion of an endless journey we are only now beginning.*
And, most relevantly to you, neither does it fit inside a technocratic administrative state, or a mini-state (a leaderless, overmanaged, micromanaged organization, or a macro-state (a leaderless, overmanaged, micromanaged global economy), or — most importantly of all, a nano-state (a leaderless, overmanaged, micromanaged individual soul).
Design, properly practiced, attaches uses (“usefulness”), qualities of use (“usability”), use for businesses (“viability”), uses of technology (“feasibility”) in service of something higher, which is beyond the grasp and even reach of techniques and technologies — something that bears no fruit except a totally useless “I love this.”
The technicity world shovels this quality into the inadequate lust-adjacent category “desirable.” Lust is erosless urge to possess, as opposed to love which is transcendent, erosful pursuit of belonging. “Lovable” is a better word than “desirable”.
Note: * Hegel, Marx, and all other pseudo-prophetic avatars of Prometheus — all those who foresee inevitable futures as if they preexist behind some temporal curtain — seem oblivious to the fact that there is only nothing there to see. There is only the boiling chrome of nothingness.
They miss the insidious subtlety of nothingness. As if nothingness would be so hamfisted as to hide itself beneath something we can see. They think nothingness would marked itself with something so blatant as a shadows?
No, no, no — the surface of nothingness is reflective. If we stare into it, all we see is our own self. And to an omniscient soul, everything and everyone beyond omniscience is nothingness… So they look out at the nothingness of another and see only who they are. Thus “accusation in a mirror”. If in that mercury pool, we see racism, hate, intent to annihilate, genocide! — something to fight to the death. The designated nobody, the persona non grata, bears the sins of the judge and jury. Rememver this whenever a radical bays for blood. Technicity sees its own sins everywhere it looks.
In Soviet Russia, abyss stare out from you.
It is all in our choice of nothingness. Whether we think it explicitly, or simply live it out intuitively, designers must choose, now and perpetually, the pregnant nothingness of exnihilism. The designer who looks out into the world and sees no option but to sell himself into indentured servitude in the factories and towers and nowheres of technicity, will remain a designer only in title.
Protected: Triad trouble
Fertile overlap
I work in the overlap between design and philosophy and religion as I understand them.
Design is the intentional formation of hybrid systems — systems of interacting objective parts and subjective participants. While an engineered system of objects is complete prior to human participation, a hybrid system of subjects and objects is incomplete until the subjective participants actively take part in the system.
Philosophy is one species of design intended to transform a person’s capacities for various forms of givenness. It enables a person to perceive, conceive or receive as given, what otherwise is imperceptible, inconceivable or otherwise submerged in oblivion.
Religion is the attempt of a finite being to fully participate as a finite being within infinite being.
The overlap between design and philosophy and religion as I understand them can be called enworldment.
Protected: Abnormal is the new normal
Material, medium and goal
Philosophy is a design discipline whose material is language, whose medium is enception (capacity to take as given what is given), and whose goal is actualization of ideal enworldment: inhabiting reality freely received as an infinitely valuable gift.
Protected: Rejohanine rejoinder
Punchline
All pranking aside, the “Bubbler” faith is my own faith. The inconceivable-from-here being is Atzilut, but Beriah scrubs the eternity spotless every nanosecond of every day with a cloaking coat of nihilude, leaving us collectively, personally, and intuitively finite, both in the underheaven of Yetzirah and down here in the actual, factual earthiness of Assiyah.
Scholem on originality and tradition
A somewhat lengthy passage from Scholem’s Major Trends, interspersed with comments of my own:
“The Mystic,” says Charles Bennett in a penetrating essay, “as it were forestalls the processes of history by anticipating in his own life the enjoyment of the last age.” This eschatological nature of mystical knowledge becomes of paramount importance in the writings of many Jewish mystics… And the importance of cosmogony for mystical speculation is equally exemplified by the case of Jewish mysticism. The consensus of Kabbalistic opinion regards the mystical way to God as a reversal of the procession by which we have emanated from God. To know the stages of the creative process is also to know the stages of one’s own return to the root of all existence. In this sense, the interpretation of Maaseh Bereshith, the esoteric doctrine of creation, has always formed one of the main preoccupations of Kabbalism. It is here that Kabbalism comes nearest to Neoplatonic thought, of which it has been said with truth that “procession and reversion together constitute a single movement, the diastole-systole, which is the life of the universe.” Precisely this is also the belief of the Kabbalist.
Yes! We know what creation ex nihilo means because, if we are alert to workings of oblivion, we can catch revelation ex nihilo in the act. And if we understand the relationship between time and eternity we can see that the distinction is only immanently relevant and not nearly as distinct as our language suggests. With an adequate conceptual repertoire and language to support it, it all manifestly instauration ex nihilo.
But the cosmogonic and the eschatological trend of Kabbalistic speculation which we have tried to define, are in the last resort ways of escaping from history rather than instruments of historical understanding; that is to say, they do not help us to gauge the intrinsic meaning of history.
Really? I detect a hint (remez) of irony here.
There is, however, a more striking instance of the link between the conceptions of Jewish mysticism and those of the historical world. It is a remarkable fact that the very term Kabbalah under which it has become best known, is derived from an historical concept. Kabbalah means literally “tradition”, in itself an excellent example of the paradoxical nature of mysticism to which I have referred before. The very doctrine which centres about the immediate personal contact with the Divine, that is to say, a highly personal and intimate form of knowledge, is conceived as traditional wisdom.
Kabbalists differ from those whose explosive insights break their bonds with their people (or, redeem them from what they mistake for bondage), in that Kabbalists maintain gratitude for the tradition that brought them to where new givens may be received, and they also reinvest what they receive back into the tradition, revivifying it. Others smuggle that irrupting life out by rebottling it in novel containers.
The fact is, however, that the idea of Jewish mysticism from the start combined the conception of a knowledge which by its very nature is difficult to impart and therefore secret, with that of a knowledge which is the secret tradition of chosen spirits or adepts.
It is arcane knowledge. It is inconceivable to a person unprepared to receive it, so even if it is given in the most direct way, it is taken wrong — mistaken.
Jewish mysticism, therefore, is a secret doctrine in a double sense, a characteristic which cannot be said to apply to all forms of mysticism. It is a secret doctrine because it treats of the most deeply hidden and fundamental matters of human life; but it is secret also because it is confined to a small élite of the chosen who impart the knowledge to their disciples. It is true that this picture never wholly corresponded to life. Against the doctrine of the chosen few who alone may participate in the mystery must be set the fact that, at least during certain periods of history, the Kabbalists themselves have tried to bring under their influence much wider circles, and even the whole nation. There is a certain analogy between this development and that of the mystery religions of the Hellenic period of antiquity, when secret doctrines of an essentially mystical nature were diffused among an ever growing number of people.
It must be kept in mind that in the sense in which it is understood by the Kabbalist himself, mystical knowledge is not his private affair which has been revealed to him, and to him only, in his personal experience. On the contrary, the purer and more nearly perfect it is, the nearer it is to the original stock of knowledge common to mankind.
Yes. Here at the radical depths to be radically original and to be radically innovative diverge radically. (Sadly, this is not my original insight. I learned it years ago from a friend.)
To use the expression of the Kabbalist, the knowledge of things human and divine that Adam, the father of mankind, possessed is therefore also the property of the mystic. For this reason, the Kabbalah, advanced what was at once a claim and an hypothesis, namely, that its function was to hand down to its own disciples the secret of God’s revelation to Adam.” Little though this claim is grounded in fact — and I am even inclined to believe that many Kabbalists did not regard it seriously — the fact that such a claim was made appears to me highly characteristic of Jewish mysticism.
This may look like sacred charlatanism, but it is what Charles Stein calls configurative truth. The only way Adam can be is through our own configurative acts of knowing.
Reverence for the traditional has always been deeply rooted in Judaism, and even the mystics, who in fact broke away from tradition, retained a reverent attitude towards it; it led them directly to their conception of the coincidence of true intuition and true tradition.
And those who did break with tradition — those who stole the gifts of tradition — were left with an incomprehensible debt “they know not”, and though they have obsessively tried to drown their guilt it with blood — figurative, transfigurative and, all-too-periodically, literal blood — they cannot wash the stain from their thieving hands.
Choose your nothingness
Choose your nothingness: pregnant nihilitude or dead nihilism. Halo or hood is the choice we face.
No belief is good or bad. No truth can badge swipe you into heaven.
The content of belief or disbelief has no intrinsic moral value.
Belief content does, however have moral significance, because belief signifies the faith by which (by whom) a belief is believed.
To put it in Scholem’s words, belief content has “spiritual physiognomy”. Behind the facial contours of beliefs is a faith who does the believing — who intuits, feels and responds not only to truth, but to realities who challenge truth.
Faith is not only moral or immoral — it is morality per se, per esse.
What you believe is amoral. How you believe has moral valence. Why you believe is morality itself. Why animates How; How shapes What. What reflects How by the moving light of Why.
What you believe is an ambiguous symptom (again, a physiognomy) of Why and How, from which — from Whom — belief content grows and lives and bears practical fruit.
To say it more plainly:
One chooses a holy and eternally pregnant nothingness from which creation and revelation irrupt ex nihilo.
Or one chooses a blankly nonexistent nothingness into which all things come to naught.
Depending on which nothingness you choose you will live in exnihilism, or undie in nihilism.
One’s everything follows from one’s choice of nothingness.
Gone native
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.
Where was I?
A subjective gestell shift effects an objective gestalt shift;
being eternally anteceding and transcending subject and object shifts;
being, subject-object, subject and object, dissolves, coagulates, recrystallizes;
the dissolutive-coagulative span, however, is masked by oblivion of chaos;
now sublimates as now, with nothingness between.
(From the depths of this oblivion, by the way, a meditator does not decide to observe that next breath. And now, where was I?)
Protected: Instaurational outburst
Protected: 0 – 380AD
Exnihilist maxim
We look for meaning, and all we see is nothing. But this is exactly what meaning always looks like the instant before it irrupts out of nowhere ex nihilo, flooding the world with divine importance.
“But this time is different!”
Of course it is.
This time is always different, and in this respect, it is always the same.
If I ever get this maxim into a form that can penetrate real existential despair, and at least pry it open, if not dispel it, I will letterpress a zillion copies and leave them everywhere.
Alive to craft
Most of our making is construction. We build systems of meaningful units, glued together with logic and causality.
We do precious little craft.
In fact, we do not even know what craft means.
We are dead to craft.
Because we are dead to craft, the material world is dead to us.
We are cursed with a midas touch. Whatever we touch turns to word. On contact with our skin, words to turn to more words — words about words — entire universes of words — packing inward, denser and denser, within our word stuffed suits.
We cannot touch the world. We cannot feel anything against our skin, except the texture of text. Words have woven themselves around us, webs, cobwebs, soul mummies, whited cocoons.
We can speak fluently about galaxy clusters, theories of relativity, subatomic particles, but we have to sit down with a computer to figure out what love is. We understand how things happen in supercolliders, distant laboratories, radio telescopes, but our own kitchen table, and the things sitting on and around it? It is all inscrutable epiphenomena.
Walter Benjamin quoting Stanley Eddington, made this same point:
I am standing on the threshold about to enter a room. It is a complicated business. In the first place I must shove against an atmosphere pressing with a force of fourteen pounds on every square inch of my body. I must make sure of landing on a plank travelling at twenty miles a second round the sun — a fraction of a second too early or too late, the plank would be miles away. I must do this whilst hanging from a round planet head outward into space, and with a wind of aether blowing at no one knows how many miles a second through every interstice of my body. The plank has no solidity of substance. To step on it is like stepping on a swarm of flies. Shall I not slip through? No, if I make the venture one of the flies hits me and gives a boost up again; I fall again and am knocked upwards by another fly; and so on. I may hope that the net result will be that I remain about steady; but if unfortunately I should slip through the floor or be boosted too violently up to the ceiling, the occurrence would be, not a violation of the laws of Nature, but a rare coincidence. Verily, it is easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for a scientific man to pass through a door. And whether the door be barn door or church door it might be wiser that he should consent to be an ordinary man and walk in rather than wait till all the difficulties involved in a really scientific ingress are resolved.
Bruno Latour, crypomarian ethnographer of Sciencestan, said this:
When the debate between science and religion is staged, adjectives are almost exactly reversed: it is of science that one should say that it reaches the invisible world of beyond, that she is spiritual, miraculous, soul-fulfilling, uplifting. And it is religion that should be qualified as being local, objective, visible, mundane, unmiraculous, repetitive, obstinate, sturdy.
…
Religion does not even attempt to race to know the beyond, but attempts at breaking all habits of thoughts that direct our attention to the far away, to the absent, to the overworld, in order to bring attention back to the incarnate, to the renewed presence of what was before misunderstood, distorted and deadly, of what is said to be “what was, what is, what shall be,” toward those words that carry salvation. Science does not directly grasp anything accurately, but slowly gains its accuracy, its validity, its truth-condition by the long, risky, and painful detour through the mediations of experiments not experience, laboratories not common sense, theories not visibility, and if she is able to obtain truth it is at the price of mind-boggling transformations from one media into the next.
What is it to be alive to craft?
How does the world feel on our fingertips when we remove the thick mittens that control our hand movements?
We feel what material suggests. We are medium. We, our instruments, the being coming are fused in medium.
My eye, my hand, the pencil in my hand, the vibration of pencil tip against paper tooth, that trace of graphite my pencil leaves, the form on the paper, the urge for a line here, a shading there, my eye and my heart — they are inseparable. Words, memories, stray emotions drift about discreetly. They know not to get in the way. Something comes into being through the work, among the converging materials, borne on media.
An unknown goal draws the present toward its desire. This is how it is to craft.
In craft we are alive to reality. In this state, we receive reality, take it in, incorporate it, grateful for what is given. We finally know that we do not need much, only a handful, but this handful makes us and the world real. Without that, there is nobody present to possess a retirement fund the size of the entire S&P.
Do you feel the unreality of what you take for life? Do you suspect you are living in a simulation? Entertain the reality that it is true. You are living a simulation — and this lingering suspicion is your last tenuous contact with reality.
Our being streams out into the world around us. Every soul is nebula-shaped and its ethereal arms radiate to the ends of the cosmos. The world streams into us, and its tendrils convey light and life from oblivion, the benevolent mask of infinitude. The streams crisscross, interweave, and each brightly knotted nexus is someone.
Meditation on meditation
We sit in meditation awaiting spectacular apotheotic experiences. This distracts us from receiving the incessant gift, offered, re-offered, again and again: the insight of distraction. Who, exactly, decided to seek spiritual orgasms, flashing divine lights, the face of God? Who, exactly, decided to depart the seated now to revel in magical ambitions or to struggle with past sufferings? And who, exactly, summons us back to now, to feel the faint tickle of breath on nostril and lip, the aching or vibrating body? Nobody did. Nobody does. It is the same nobody who flees the here and now and sees me from a nonexistent elsewhere, most minutes of most days, between birth and death.