Kabbalistic Geometric Meditations

Esoterism, Geometric Meditations, Judaism, Metaphysics, Star

In my weird little hermetic pamphlet, Geometric Meditations, the stanzas illuminating the star diagram follow a regular pattern. Three levels of indent indicate three levels of reality across three dimensions of being.

First, a dimension is named.

Within that dimension, we encounter reality in a particular way, within a polarity of behind and beyond.

And this encounter is given in a modality of immediate presence.

I now believe that each element of this pattern corresponds to one of the Four Worlds of Kabbalah:

The dimension itself is Atzilut, the realm of pure emanation.

The polarities are Beriyah, the realm of intelligibility.

The structure of encounter is Yetzirah, the realm of ideal form.

And the raw present is Assiyah, the realm of the actual.

Prop

Biography

If you need someone to go into orbit around you, and prop up whatever image of yourself that you’re trying to maintain, I’m your man. I have a lifetime of training in that art. I know how to intuit the persona you’re trying to be, and to improvise exactly the alter-ego most useful for pulling it off.

Sadly and very inconveniently, beneath that useful exterior I am unable to stop being who I actually am. Some have pushed too hard, and I’ve broken character.

Mandy Patinkin is an amoral idiot and a terrible Jew

Politics
My response to a fellow Jew who claimed that Mandy Patinkin’s “anger was palpable and rightly so”:

His anger is not justified. His anger is morally perverse and more than slightly stupid. It is an actor trying to play the part of the angrily prophetic “good jew”, to win approving applause from Israel’s enemies.

Here is the plain truth: If Hamas were to surrender and return the hostages, the war would end immediately. But Hamas has not surrendered, and they still hold hostages.

Hamas only wants Israel to stop fighting only to enable it to recover, rebuild and make more attempts to annihilate Israel, or at least punish its citizens for the crime of existing. It doesn’t even pretend otherwise, and it doesn’t have to, thanks to the moral bankruptsy of Progressivism.

Now I’m going to challenge you to think critically for yourself instead of passively accepting the “critical thinking” narrative you’re being fed by your trusted sources. What made enemies of the Jewish people so evil and despicable was NOT that they fought the Jews until they were defeated and unable to fight back. That is simply fighting a war to victory. If you recall, this also describes how the Allies fought in WWII. They didn’t make peace with the Germans and Japanese once they were temporarily unable to continue their plans to dominate the world. No! — the Allies demanded unconditional surrender. That is what Israel is doing, and it is what they SHOULD be doing.

Here is really what made the enemies of the Jewish people so evil and so despicable: The Nazis and the like attacked peaceful Jews who were not fighting them. They wanted the Jews to no longer exist.

And this, of course, describes Hamas, not Israel.
I suggest that playing the part of the good Jew should be the opposite of what this silly “angry prophet” wannabe is doing.

Being a good Jew is to insist that people stop attacking Israelis and to insist that they live in real peace — with no long term plans whatsoever to annihilate Israel.

Is that really so unreasonable?

Sadly, the sacrifice demanded at the altar of Progressivism’s golden calf is reason itself. One must conform to the attitudes and feelings and beliefs dictated by the editorial staff of whatever overclass propaganda vehicle one subscribes to — the less reasonable the better. The tastiest sacrifice of all, though, is Jewish self-respect.

And then, as if this weren’t plenty, I wrote a follow-up. My friend expressed concern that Gaza was exacerbating antisemitism and anti-Israel sentiment worldwide. I responded:

Antisemites always find reasons to have the attitudes they’re going to have, anyway. They blame everything on Jews, so it should come as no surprise that their own antisemitism is also the Jews’ fault.

But wow — it really helps their case when “the good Jews” agree with them. Progressivist loudmouths keep throwing that in my face when they insist that “antizionism is not antisemitism.” They know Jews who hate Israel and who agree with them about everything, so clearly this has nothing at all to do with Jewishness.

Of course Progressivists are unprincipled to the core, and don’t remember all that stuff they said in the BLM days about internalized racism of black police officers who did a lot of the violence they decried as racist. Nor do they remember all their claims about the impossibility of overcoming 400 years of racism. They’ve somehow magically removed 2000 years of antisemitism without even trying, and they know they are not antisemitic, because they don’t feel antisemitic.

One logic applies to them and another to everyone else. When it comes to progressivists, there is one principle and one principle alone : Progressivists, and Progressivists alone, decide everything, arbitrarily, in accordance with their momentary whim, and nothing anyone else says matters.

Progressivism has been betraying liberalism for years, and now it is betraying the Jewish people. Every time I think Progressivism has hit bottom it finds new lows.

Talking at my designer friend

Design, Esoterism, Judaism, Metaphysics

An edited version of a comment to a friend at work who is reading Campagna’s Magic and Technic:

My concern with the state of service design is this: The whole power of design is that it goes to the rough ground of apeiron — to true material, as opposed to scientistic thought-about material — as a way to circumvent the wordworld of social construction that many people inhabit and mistake for reality.

At a certain velocity and altitude of generality, we lose contact with the apeironic ground and detach into the realm of pure form (subtle plane / yetzirah).

It seems to me that this is happening to the field of service design, just as it happened to UX when it underwent radical acceleration, standardization and metrification under the Lean Startup regime. As we work at ever increasing velocity, to think and communicate more explicitly in the compulsively quantifying, abstracting, operationalizing language of management, as the time we have for reflection shatters into tinier and disarrayed shards, we become alienated from designerly ways and the kind of contact design makes with unprocessed reality.

Under technicity / technik / technic this always happens. A Marxist, of course, will blame it on capitalism (and that is partly valid) — but it is important to remember that Marxism is at least as technicity-dominated as capitalism, and equivalent alienations happen under their order as well. In fact, Marxism is even more alienated, as its aggressive-compulsive breaking with the past severs it from vestigial non-technic attitudes that remain in capitalism and provide minor relief.

Capitalism and marxism are puppets on the right and left hand of the same technicity puppeteer, who stages a bloody, century-long Punch and Judy tragicomedy.

 

Misfinition

Judaism, Philosophy

I have a reading group that meets on Sundays. We initially formed to read Buber’s I and Thou together, then we attempted Rosenzweig. Now we are reading Daniel Matt’s Essential Kabbalah, a compilation of beautiful passages from Kabbalists, one after another — including this one by Rav Kook:

The essence of faith is an awareness of the vastness of Infinity. Whatever conception of it enters the mind is an absolutely negligible speck in comparison to what should be conceived, and what should be conceived is no less negligible compared to what it really is. One may speak of goodness, of love, of justice, of power, of beauty, of life in all its glory, of faith, of the divine — all of these convey the yearning of the soul’s original nature for what lies beyond everything. All the divine names, whether in Hebrew or any other language, provide merely a tiny, dim spark of the hidden light for which the soul yearns when it says “God.” Every definition of God leads to heresy; definition is spiritual idolatry. Even attributing mind and will to God, even attributing divinity itself, and the name “God” — these, too, are definitions. Were it not for the subtle awareness that all these are just sparkling flashes of that which transcends definition — these, too, would engender heresy.

Yesterday, when we were discussing the mismatch between human thought and God’s infinitude — repeated in many passages, expressed here by Kook with “Every definition of God leads to heresy; definition is spiritual idolatry” — I coined a word for this most fundamental of category mistakes: misfinition: the attempt to define and thus render finite what is essentially infinite.

But this is not the only place we make this category mistake. Whenever we try to make any subject — who is, by virtue of subjecthood vis-a-vis ourselves, both transcendent and non-finite — into a finite object of knowledge, we commit a minor heresy.

And we cannot stop doing this when our mind compulsively tries to grasp and comprehend and have whatever it touches. Wherever we find ourselves engulfed, integrated, involved, environed — we cannot resist the temptation to once again grab the garden by the fruit and consume it, so we can have it as our own property. We do this even to our own subjectivity, and when we do, we are narcissists.

It is in its undefinability that every subject is created in the image of God.

A clarification on ethnicity vs identity

Politics

Ethnicity is our participation in an ethos and our belonging to it.

Identity is how we conceptualize that belonging.

But we can misconceive identity and become hopelessly confused about it. This is what has happened to Progressivists.

The way Progressivists conceptualize identity has nothing to do with actually participating in or belonging to any ethos — including those with which they identify.

What Progressivists know least of all is that the only ethos a Progressivist can belong to is Progressivism — and Progressivism alone.

There are no intersections with Progressivism, only within it.

The moment someone begins to participate in the Progressivist ethos — when they start to belong to it — they lose their ability to participate in their former ethos. They no longer belong to it. They no longer represent it. Their old ethnicity has been traded in for a Progressivist-issued identity, which authorizes and obligates them to “speak as” a member of their former ethnicity — but, in truth, the only speaking they can do post-conversion is ventriloquizing Progressivist formulas.

The Progressivist ethnicity is oblivious to all participatory being — including ethnicity — so they have no idea what they belong to. If they weren’t oblivious to ethnicity, they’d recognize that Progressivism is their only genuine identity, and the identities they list as theirs, which they mistake for the elements of their self-constitution are only Progressivist furniture. Their being is possessed in full by Progressivism.

Again, whoever views their own ethnicity in the glaring identitarian light of Progressivism, immediately ceases to belong to that ethnicity.

In my last post, I mocked the term “Latinx” — a truly dumb word used only by folks who’ve defected to Progressivism and therefore have no legitimate claim to speak for real Latinos.

In that post, I claimed the “x” stands in for their new unconscious ethnicity.

But I missed a vicious dad joke opportunity, which I must now remedy.

The real problem with the “x” suffix is…

…it should be a prefix.

Even simpler: The minute you view your ethnicity from the identitarian schema of progressivism you’ve lost that ethnicity and are no longer in any position to represent it. You’ve defected to a new denatured global ethnicity: Progressivism. The customs of your new ethnicity demand obsessive categorization of all persons into identities, and then viewing persons, including yourself, as Platonic manifestations of these categories. Everyone who still participates in your former ethnicity will see that you have become alienated from the identity you imagine yourself the spokesperson for, but you won’t care, because in your nightmare you are awake and they are the ones who are still asleep.

The Progressivist ethnicity

Politics

Progressivists talk endlessly about identity, but rarely mention ethnicity. Why?

I’ll tell exactly why: because Progressivism is itself an ethnicity – but one that denies it. Progressivism has its own ethos, its own moral code, its own culture. But it conceals all this behind a universalist veil.

Progressivists sincerely believe they have transcended ethnocentricity through their awareness of ethnocentricity, that they have effectively addressed bias through awareness and careful technical neutralization of bias, that their dissection of their own privilege with their razor-sharp – but single-edged – critical tools has enabled them to identify and renounce all privilege. Their belief that they’ve overcome naive realism allows them to exercise it in its purest form. The result is an unacknowledged, thoroughly denatured ethnocentricity masquerading as moral objectivity.

To become Progressivist, one must trade in one’s former lived ethnicity for a Progressivist-certified identity.

That identity has little or nothing to do with the lived ethnicity it purports to represent. The identity functions more like an identification card to present to fellow Progressivists, to inform them of your rank and function within the ethos.

When a Progressivist “speaks as” an identity, this is to show one’s ID card, which authorizes the card-carrier to enjoy the privileged access to objective truth and morality to which all Progressivists are entitled – that is, other Progressivists will assign validity to what is said – plus whatever special perquisites one’s identity within Progressivism affords.

But that is the outside view. Viewed from within, one has awakened to their true condition. It is a conversion. It is political salvation. “I was blind to my privilege – but now I see!”

But what they don’t see is the blindness they’ve adopted in exchange for all their new apparent insights. It is blindness to the fact that Progressivism is an ethnicity that displaces all other ethnic participation. And it is blindness to the possibility that one might still be blind where one suspects it least, where it matters most – in one’s own most deeply held moral convictions.

To clarify the difference between Progressivist-assigned identities and authentic ethnic participation and belonging, we need new language.

The term “Latinx” offers a model.

Studies show that very few Latinos or Latinas outside academia use it. Most actively reject it. “Latinx” marks someone who has traded their ethnic belonging for a Progressivist-issued identity.

Progressivists believe the “x” signifies indeterminate gender. But I propose that it signifies severance – a cut, a disconnection from the culture it claims to represent.

The “x” marks what must remain unknown. Because if the convert were to name their new ethos, they’d be bound – by their own principles – to renounce the power it gives them. But that power is the entire point of the new identity. The “x” conceals the new ethnicity behind a mask of moral transcendence. The “x” is an ignorance that is strength.

So let all those who identify as Latinx be called Latinx, as opposed to whatever ethnicity they once participated in.

And let’s also let Progressivists who identify as Black be called Blax.

And so on: Jewx, Gayx, Womynx, Asianx, Muslimx, etc.

And if Progressivists complain – as they certainly will – we can chalk it up to cultural difference.

Moral misappropriation

Ethics, Judaism

Jewish prophets innovated speaking truth to power.

It was Jewish monotheism — worship of the one God above all, to whom all must answer — that, for the first time in human history, distinguished goodness from political power. Only this world-transcending authority authorized a righteous man of God to rebuke a king.

And speaking truth to power on behalf of the powerless — this, too, was a Jewish invention.

Before the Jews, there was no distinction made between might and right, and the powerlessness had no moral standing or significance.

This moral vision has been so thoroughly appropriated by modern leftists that they take it for granted, and no longer recognize its source. And when these leftists step on the neck of “zionist” Jews, allegedly in the name of justice, they do so standing on the shoulders of Jewish giants.

If you want to understand modern antisemitism, Mary Douglas’s forward to Marcel Mauss’s The Gift offers an important insight:

Charity is meant to be a free gift, a voluntary, unrequited surrender of resources. Though we laud charity as a Christian virtue we know that it wounds. I worked for some years in a charitable foundation that annually was required to give away large sums as the condition of tax exemption. Newcomers to the office quickly learnt that the recipient does not like the giver, however cheerful he be. This book explains the lack of gratitude by saying that the foundations should not confuse their donations with gifts. It is not merely that there are no free gifts in a particular place, Melanesia or Chicago for instance; it is that the whole idea of a free gift is based on a misunderstanding. There should not be any free gifts. What is wrong with the so-called free gift is the donor’s intention to be exempt from return gifts coming from the recipient. Refusing requital puts the act of giving outside any mutual ties. Once given, the free gift entails no further claims from the recipient. The public is not deceived by free gift vouchers. For all the ongoing commitment the free-gift gesture has created. it might just as well never have happened. According to Marcel Mauss that is what is wrong with the free gift. A gift that does nothing to enhance solidarity is a contradiction.

And if you think a freely-given gift generates resentment, that is nothing compared to a stolen “gift” that the “recipient” wants to possess as their own natural birthright, theirs to have without any debt of gratitude.

We see this in right-wing supersessionism, and in left-wing appropriation of the Jewish invention of social justice, which is really just post-religious christianoidal appropriation of vestigial spiritually-unrooted moral attitudes.

Materialoid idealists

Philosophy

To think a lot about matter, to use the language of physics as your “final vocabulary”, to force all ideas to ground themselves in scientific truths before they are accepted as valid — none of these mental operations makes a person a materialist. It makes the the person an idealist who uses materialist concepts and language to construct a mental world. It makes them a materialoid idealist.

They think the mental model of the world inside their head is a faithful duplicate of the real world, and whatever they deduce about their mental world is necessarily true of the real world. They might say “I might be wrong”, but their doubts are epistemological, when they should be ontological. They misconceive what truth is.

Materialoid idealism is a kind of anti-religious fundamentalism.

Like all fundamentalisms it is collective-solipsistic.

Like all fundamentalism, it appropriates language meant to orient us to a reality of which we are a part, in which we participate, but which transcends us and reduces it to a set of ideas that fit neatly inside one’s own understanding, that is our own property, which we worship as supreme.

Fundamentalism is ideoidolatry.

Materialoid idealists are scientistic fundamentalists.

There is a weird sort of hostile consanguinity among fundamentalists. It’s like “honor among thieves” — an adversarial kinship among folks who live in opposition to one another but who operate at the same plane of existence. It is why debates between theists and atheists never go anywhere. They are self-reassurance rituals, that outside the us-versus-them, there is nothing.

This kind of person has two kinds of hate.

There is the ordinary comprehensible hate of fellow fundamentalists who believe the wrong things, who worship the name and notions of Allah or Jesus instead of the name and notions of Feynman or Marx.

Then there is the deeply anxious uncomprehending hate of aliens whose beliefs and practices simply make no sense at all, and which bring up all kinds of visceral, sincere but ineffable unpleasantness.

The second hate is so much worse that fundamentalists will set aside their shallower hate and ally against it, however much it exposes how little they actually care about the positive ideals they go on and on about to justify their true negative ideals.

Real materialists interact with materials, their thinking is a response to difficulties they encounter in the course of these interactions, and what they come to believe about materials are ideas that effectively guide their interactions.

The cartophiles

Fables, myths & parables, Philosophy

Many of us are like lovers of maps and mapmaking who have never traveled outside our own room. We pore over our maps and draw up our own atlases, but we have never seen any place that wasn’t presented to as an image as flat as a map. Our maps are made out of words, and even images are midased into hieroglyphs when touched by our wordeyes.

Techne + logos

Design, Etymology, Metaphysics, Philosophy

Etymologically, technology implies service-dominant logic!

techne- — craft.

-logy — speak, tell.

Technology is the explicit tip of craft. Technology is explicit know-how.

Originally, technology was not the product of explicit know-how, but rather, the system of explicit know-how that enables production.

In that intellectual deformation Heidegger called technik/technicity, the industrial faith of engineering, all relations are frozen into commodifiable things.

And no, Marxists, this is not capitalism. Or not only capitalism; it is you, too. Your own ideology is dominated by technik, which is why wherever you overthrow capitalism you replace it with something even more industrial and soulless.

This problem is deeper than economy, deeper than the question of who owns and controls the means of production, deeper than our methods of production. It cuts all the way down into how we conceive materials, how we approach them, how we relate to them.

Marxists turned the contents of Hegel’s idealism upside-down, without ever inverting his idealist metaphysic. The content was churned inside the unmoving container of mind, which remained, as it always does in such ideologies, “its own place”. It is an idealist metaphysics that thinks its thoughts about matter and thinks all this thinking gives it the object of its thought.

Such “materialism” never receives the blessing of material’s apeironic smile. “Typical man,” she says, “always confusing your ideas about me with me.“

Truth strata

Philosophy

However much the content of our philosophies claims relativity, constructionism, or ephemerality, the act of making such claims indicates universal absolutes. It appears to be a performative contradiction.

Is this a restatement of the same argument we’ve all heard — that relativism self-refutes, by making a non-relative assertion? Yes and no. The content is the same. But here, we are doing something different.

We are not refuting or negating the relativist claim, but rather indicating a transcendent tendency of thought — a self-transcendence that leaves strata of thought-modes in its wake.

The claim of relativity establishes a new mode — one that is not itself relative.

And the recognition of this modal establishment constitutes yet another mode.

Some truths are relative, constructed, and ephemeral. Others are less so.

And some truth is absolute, universal, and eternal. The evidence of this final kind of truth is most conspicuous when we attempt to deny its realness.

Representational eclipse

Metaphysics, Star

Heraclitus:

One should not act or speak as if he were asleep.

The waking have one world in common, whereas each sleeper turns away to a private world of his own.

Representational thought — our system of beliefs about the world, meant to mirror reality — is a prolonged, elaborate waking dream.

When we are “absent-minded”, interacting directly, intuitively with the world, without mediation of words, we are three-fold present: in time, in place, in self.

This is true even though wordless action, performed without inward “written instructions” leaves no linguistic “paper trail” in our memory. “Words, or it didn’t happen.”

Psychologists and other wordworlders call this wordless immediacy “the unconscious”, the misnomer of misnomers. Words know only words.

There is nothing wrong with a sheer veil of dream, but when dreams grow opaque and eclipse life beyond dream, we will know truths, but we are oblivious to anything beyond truth. Then when we say “it is objectively true” and we say “it is real” we mean the same thing.

Hemlock candidates

Biography, Fables, myths & parables

One thinker believed he finally discovered the absolute truth, and became a total asshole.

A second thinker arrived at one of many possible conceptions of truth — but it was a conception of such vast scope, clarity, usefulness and inspiration that anyone who understood it was in danger of mistaking it for the absolute truth — and  that thinker became an even worse asshole.

Subject of study

Philosophy

When I read esoteric texts — texts where the content is not immediately understandable, for instance philosophy, sociology, theology, hermeticism — and work hard to understand the content I am reading, the primary goal of the effort is not to understand the content. That is a secondary goal.

The primary goal is to experiment with new subjectivities. With esoteric content I must make changes to my own subjectivity in order to comprehend what is being conveyed. To understand means to change myself into a subject capable of comprehending the material.

But these changes to myself extend beyond the content, to my overall experience of reality. I find myself noticing different things and finding them significant in new ways. My aesthetic tastes change and see beauty and repugnance in different phenomena.

Each change makes experiential tradeoffs. Some things get sharper, clearer and more important. Other things become fuzzier, cloudier and lose significance. Existence as a whole takes on new tones and flavors. I’ve read things that make reality seem hopeless and not worth the trouble. I’ve read other things that make reality seem deeply tragic, essentially painful but infinitely valuable.

Most of all, the overall effect of all this subjective change has highlighted realities that never change. These alone seem true to me.

And what most people around me regard as “the truth” seems an artifact of some truly unfortunate subjective states they never chose, but to which they are loyal, not out of love but lack of alternatives.

The crafty animal

Philosophy

We understand ourselves better when we conceive of ourselves as beings who craft. Our meta-understanding of understanding — our conception of how understanding happens — becomes more comprehensive and pragmatically sound when we root it in craft.

If you are acquainted with the history of laboratory science, you know that modern science dawned with the material crafting of scientific experiments.

Yes, humans think, we observe, we use language. And we understand important things about ourselves when we understand ourselves as thinkers, observers and speakers. But when we try to put these things at the center of our existence, we lose something essential about our being and our understanding of being, and all resulting notions suffer from disastrous detachment from infinity.

Not so with craft! Craft preserves material as what it truly is — not infinitesimally small particles or all-encompassing expanses or energy or space-time continua or anything the mind a divine physicist can conceive — but rather, the purest and most protean apeiron.

I’m game for the philosopher’s eternal mad libe: The human being is the _____ animal.

The human being is the crafty animal.