Category Archives: Everso
ASCII sigil
The Mercury symbol emoticon, an abstracted caduceus — used to mark a localized omnipresence of Hermes — also precisely represents the great triad, earth-man-heaven.
+0(
- “+”, plus sign: the four directions. Earth.
- “0”, zero: positive absence, enabling finite cyclical life. Man.
- “(“, open parenthesis: Enveloping transcendence. Heaven.
The dome of heaven is even faithfully everted!
It is a static symbol, articulated grammatically, and, at the same time, a symbol sentence, collapsed into a gestalt. It is true and authentic ASCII sigil.
This must be handset and printed. Digital ASCII art pressed into wood pulp by Gutenberg’s crusty invention, conveying truth before and beyond words, chronologic blasphemy.
Intellectual sacrifice
From Charles Stein’s Light of Hermes:
Mathematics as sacrifice: one sacrifices one’s woolly fantasies for the orderliness of collective positivity. But the sacrifice is only satisfied or completed when the entire mathematical project becomes a noetic mandala and one’s sacrifice is of one’s phantom apparencies only as requiescent unto Being. What one believes or supposes to be real is accepted only in so far as it can be relieved of its ontological positivity which it offers up to unique, undivided Being itself.
My interpretation of this passage: Mathematics is a kind of tradeoff, or exchange. Give up personal, idiosyncratic, intuitive knowing and in return, receive a more disciplined, shared, public knowledge. But this tradeoff is only an intellective gain if we fully understand — (I would argue in a different, everted mode of metaknowing) — that all these various ways of knowing, these subjects (each with their own special objectivity) together belong (as all things do, including ourselves) to Being, who can be approached numerous ways but never reached and possessed in the form of positive knowledge.
In this everted metaknowing we situate ourselves… as comprehended by infinitude. And it is our situation we comprehend, not the comprehension itself. — This is suprehension: everted metacomprehension of comprehension.
Mathematics is one sacrifice to public life.
Another is exalting liberal democratic order above our own policy preferences and passions. Out of loyalty to our way of self-governing, we champion another citizen’s right to slander what we hold sacred, or we uphold a law we abhor because that law was established lawfully.
Jewish law is yet another. It is beyond silly to refuse to eat a cheeseburger in order to be neurotically certain we are not accidentally eating a baby goat that was cooked in its own mother’s milk. But we decided this matter together and that sacralizes the decision and makes it the furthest possible thing from silly. (This being said, I do not observe this particular prohibition.)
But I gladly make Judaism’s highest and most sacred sacrifice — the sacrifice that replaced the bloody, smoky, visceral Temple sacrifices, and founded rabbinic Judaism in the wake of the destruction of the first Temple and subsequent Babylonian bondage. This is the sacrifice called Machloket L’Shem Shamayim — sacred conflict.
In Machloket L’Shem Shamayim, we vigorously argue our side against another, while suprehending that a higher truth always and eternally transcends my side and yours. I’ve heard this expressed as “The argument itself is truer than either side.”
Above our own certainty is agreement, but not mere compromise for the sake of practicality, but dedication to Being who permanently transcends any single truth, and ultimately all truth.
Those mystics who sneer at liberalism, believing they are wise to it, and in fact superior to it, demonstrate by this attitude that they are not even equal to liberalism — much less to their own religious tradition.
Higher sacrifices are sublimated Golden Rule, carried far beyond rule of computation, law or ideal — the metaprinciple of principle.
I, like you, am finite and limited in some unique way.
I, like you, am limited, but situated at the I-point heart of the world, which is one enworldment.
I, like you, cannot help but believe what seems most true to me.
If we can know this together we can dwell together in holy irony of comprehension within suprehension.
The fruit is restored to its orchard.
Protected: Subjective multistability
Pearls and Shells, reinvocation
In earlier invocations of the “Pearls and Shells” anomalogy, the pearlescent element, nacre, insulated the subject from the object and environment, and allowed these not-self beings to peacefully neighbor or environ the self.
This individuating substance was imagined to be mind: We coat whatever realities we cannot incorporate into our own selfhood with intelligibility. Mind helps us cope with not-self, also known as alterity.
The earlier anomalogy goes like this: An oyster inhabits an existence suspended between two alterities. The first alterity, the outer alterity, is the all-encompassing ocean. The second alterity, inner alterities, is whatever particles from the ocean get inside the shell with the oyster. The oyster responds to both alterities the same way. It secretes its own selfhood, its mind-nacre, and coats the offending alterity, layer upon layer, until the alterity is smooth, lustrous and undisturbing. The particles are painted smooth and round and become pearls. “Good fences make good neighbors.” Now the oyster can live side by side with these irritants, because they are comprehended with nacre. The ocean, too — the dread source of all irritants and inexhaustibly teeming with existential dangers — is coated with layer upon layer of protective nacre. It is painted on all sides, repainted, innumerable times until it is thick, smooth and protective. The oyster coats the ocean with nacre, and the inner surface of the shell, the mother-of-pearl lining makes the ocean habitable for the oyster and its treasure-house of pearls.
The nacre substance is the same in both alterities, and its function is the same — insulation, protection, self-preservation. What differs is the topology — the situating curvature. Pearls are convex and are comprehended by the oyster. The shell is concave; it comprehends the oyster. Flip your shell inside-out — that is, evert it — and you will find yourself holding a pearl. Evert a pearl, and you will find yourself held within a shell, or rather, the shell will find you held within it.
Lately, I have noticed that my thinking has moved to a new standpoint.
The next invocation of “Pearls and Shells” goes like this: Perhaps the nacre with which we paint the defining boundaries between selfhood and otherhood is not mind, but something beyond mind that conditions and enables it. Perhaps nacre is the principle of “not” — nihilitude.
Nihilitude belongs to infinitude, and is inseparable from it. Nihilitude generates and sustains finitude within infinitude, without disturbing the all-inclusive purity of infinitude with even a trace of exclusion. Indeed, exclusion of nihilitude from infinitude would be an abhorrent exclusion.
Perhaps nihilitude is the substance the ocean self-secretes into itself in order to allow a spark of itself to be an oyster, liberated to be not-the-whole-ocean, through imprisonment within a mother-of-pearl vault. The vault fills with ten-thousand pearls, each of which, touched by the oyster’s tender midas flesh, is counted among its pearly hoard.
As behind, so beyond. And so thrice-present between.
Protected: Scrappy thoughts on metanoia
Protected: As aleph, so tav
Psych everso
Psychology is how a materialist copes with transcendence. Realities barely within the soul’s reach but well beyond its grasp — including the soul itself — are flipped inside-out, everted, into objects and stuffed inside each individual’s mind.
Everything-sized souls, everted, become minute, and are sealed inside the physical body — ghosts who haunt our physical frame.
And the membrane of nihilitude that insulates each self from infinitude, everts into a vacuum of interminable finitude, endless stacking of spaces, times, subjects.
When wind blows through this ghost, it disturbs our sense of reality, but we know that it originates in the unconscious and terminates in delusion. So it is for psychologists.
Protected: Key to “A Painter Paints a Painting of a Painter”
Looping in on exnihilism
To put it differently (but still topologically), what would be the opposite of a metaphysics of surprise? — its everse?
The everse of a metaphysics of surprise would be a metaphysics of comprise — a belief, explicit or implicit, in our own capacity to comprise the absolute in some ultimate theism, pantheism, theory or praxis. It is the root category mistake that reality, even truth, can be comprised — a comprehensible everything.
Divine surprise, the ex nihilo irruption of light — not from darkness but from blindness — from the oblivion-veiled infinite — annihilates the faithless faith of nihilism.
Now absence of evidence of impending meaning can never again be taken as evidence of its absence. The scotoma of hopelessness is its herald. Exnihilism.
Protected: Tzimtzum and exnihilism
Protected: Everso hymn
Protected: Some eversions
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.
An insincere exhortation
This is easier to say than to believe, so please allow me to say something true — from the head and not yet from the heart true — with aspirational sincerity:
We should stop exalting individual genius. The epoch of this ideal ended years ago.
The future belongs to a capacity to participate in transcendent supraindividual genius — to consciously play a part in conceiving something inconceivable to any solitary person, and to feel fitting gratitude for all gifts exchanged to bring the possibility to actualization.
Around a seminal spirit is a wombinal soul.
Gratitude is owed, but gratitude will not be collected until it is freely given.
Protected: Prometheus Centrifuge
Return to the fold
Aporia is intolerable for individuals.
But groups gripped with aporia is inescapable, all-pervasive, all-encompassing hell.
What immediately transcends the aporia-gripped mesoperson (the all-too-divisible “individual”), is yet another aporia-gripped macroperson.
No where to go. No escape. No hope.
Collective aporia is experienced as anomie.
Anomie dyspires violence: scapegoating, persecution, war, and collective suicide.
A collective can be two, three, a dozen, a gross, legion, myriads…
A collective can be a shattered individual person.
The sole way out of anomie is a return to within: principled integrity.
Metanoia is necessary but insufficient.
Teshuvah alone — echad — is sufficient.
Everso.
Even a two-millennia-old collective aporic — a mutating being at war with itself, spasmodically oscillating between perverse antiworld-religiosity and revolutionary anti-religious worldliness — can return to the fold.
Kabbalistic everso
I spent all day Monday (Dec 22, 2025) printing two Sefirot pieces — one safely orthodox and one riskily extra-orthodox (or maybe postorthodox, but probably flat-out wrong).
Now I want to sanctify what I printed by using it to say impossible things.
For years, I’ve been working out a topological conception of modes of knowing. The topology can be expressed clearly in Kabbalistic language. Apologies for the repetition of recent posts. I’m rehearsing. I might fold Everso and Exnihilist Manifesto together into a short Kabbalistic text.
Natural knowing is cognitive comprehension (etymologically “together-grasping”) and conception (“together-taking”) of finite forms, defined as something against an indefinite field of everything else. Object: ob-ject “thrust-before”.
Let us call this kind of objective understanding Pshat, the subject who understands in this mode Nefesh, and everything given by this kind of understanding Assiyah. Assiyah is a world of convex objectivity — material or nonmaterial — physical, psychic, conceptual, ethical, etc. In Assiyah, even subjects have objective form.
Objective form as opposed to what? This, precisely, is the problem. Few people transcend Pshat, in order to have something with which to compare it — mainly artists, poets, mystics, philosophers, literary connoisseurs and weirdos.
To transcend Pshat we must apperceive our acts of perception, conception, comprehension, and our failures to conceive and comprehend, and our changes in perception, conception, comprehension. The grasping of comprehension and the receiving of conception are not forms that can be comprehended or conceived, but rather formative acts, which participate in one of myriad possibilities of formation.
Formation is known only indirectly by the forms they produce. They are trees known by their fruit. They are media known by their content. Behind all objectivity — “thrust-beneath” it, “under-standing” it — is subject.
Let us call this kind of understanding Remez, the subject who understands in this mode Ruach, and everything given by this kind of understanding Yetzirah. Yetzirah is a world of concave subjects, each an ontology with its own objectivity.
Expressed topologically: Forms are convex; formation is concave.
Transcending form altogether (both form and forming) is the supraformal ground of form and forming, which enters awareness when formative modes destabilize and recrystallize, and entirely new givens are revealed ex nihilo. New givens are received in a luminous flood of meaning and wonder. Reality is profoundly strange and infinitely meaningful.
What is pragmatically comprised by the word “everything” is surprised by more-than-everything.
Let us call this kind of understanding Drash, the “subject” who understands in this mode Neshamah, and the more-than-everything given by this kind of “understanding” is Beriah. Beriah is a world entirely beyond subjectivity and objectivity — the ground of both and neither.
The luminous influx of meaning is Sod, the “subject” who receives it is Chayah, and it emanates from Atzilut.
Protected: Excruciation
More on Scholem’s seventh aphorism
The following are three emails about Scholem’s seventh aphorism, and about Biale’s apparent misunderstanding of that aphorism. I’m posting them mostly for myself, because there is some good clear thinking here, if you know the context.
Email #1:
I think what you are saying is true, but I am not sure you are saying anything true that is not well known within Kabbalah.
Microcosmic/macrocosmic analogy is assumed by all Kabbalists. And one of the core struggles of Kabbalah is the incomprehensibility of its most essential and consequential insights. Scholem indicates this problem in his aphorisms, from multiple angles. Students of Kabbalah quickly learn to release the mundane expectation that they can cognitively grasp anything important beyond the objectivity of Assiyah. Beyond Assiyah only cognitively indirect methods of intellection work at all. I think even Biale knows these things, and the unreliability of his commentary comes from something else I haven’t yet pinned down.
Rereading Scholem, I do not believe he is denying the truth of Plotinus, but rather denying that emanationist accounts of the Olamot “do” what Kabbalah set out to do. A pat explanatory model — and worse, a model objectively graspable — replaces a within-outward, first-person experiential account of one’s layered and (cognitively) elusive relationship with the One. In other words, Scholem is making a procedural, not substantive objection.
So, the emanationist model may very well be true (that is where I have recently arrived), but accepting of it, without doing the spiritual and phenomenological work of arriving at it via actual participation and reflection cheats the Kabbalist of Kabbalah’s best fruits, which are not theoretical constructions, but influx of incomprehensible divine light. This gift is received precisely through doing the work of aware participation — not by reaching the conclusion and possessing the answer.
Ironically, my earlier rejection of emanationism came from having not completing this work for myself, and from not recognizing the links between my incomplete “everso” theme and Kabbalah.
Email #2:
To clarify, I think Biale’s commentary completely misconceives Aphorism 7. Biale does, in fact, seem to treat the problem as substantive doctrinal disagreement. In doing so, he flies off in the wrong direction and both obscures and accidentally demonstrates Scholem’s point. He treats Kabbalah as objective metaphysical information that can be more correct or less correct, or reach more correct or less correct conclusions. Ironically, this is precisely the “misfortune” Scholem is indicating in this aphorism. No wonder Biale calls the aphorism “obscure”. Its meaning is entirely eclipsed by Biale’s confinement to objectivist cognition!
Email #3:
Actually, maybe I can pin down Biale’s problem.
To me, Biale seems a scholar with a lot of academic knowledge about Kabbalah, but who lacks Kabbalistic knowledge of academia’s objectivist limitations.
Objective knowledge — that is, knowledge of what is experienced and comprehended objectively — is effective only within Assiyah. But the entire point of Kabbalah is to transcend Assiyah. So if one tries to build systems of objective knowledge about Kabbalah, this knowledge might be true as far as it goes, but it is useless for progressing as a Kabbalist or for representing the most crucial insights Kabbalah offers.
Biale seems unaware of this truth — a truth of Beriah.