All posts by anomalogue
Ontological membranes
Nihilitude is the active ingredient of relevance, or, rather, of irrelevance.
And so nihilitude is also the essence of abstraction, of focus, of all selective attention of thought.
Why suppress what is real but irrelevant? Why selectively focus (and filter) attention? Why read abstract order into (or, more accurately, leave myriad alternative orders unread from) the “blooming, buzzing confusion” of chaos surrounding us?
It is a necessity of maintaining finite being. An anomalogy: To hear any signal in radio frequency noise, we must tune a radio receiver to one narrow band of frequency, instead of listening to the white noise of the full range of frequencies and enjoying all the signal simultaneously like some kind of god. We do it for the same reason living organisms have skin, and organs have membranes. Any being that desires duration encloses, shelters, clothes, envelopes itself within semipermeable boundaries, holding itself in dynamic balance between openness, closure and carefully controlled disclosure — between dissolution, consumption, digestion, dissipation and insularity, stagnation, isolation, starvation, asphyxiation. (Tif’eret, the principle of balance, the spinal essence of being within greater being, linking sole with crown).
Nihilitude is ontological membrane. It is the horizon, the far side of every object, the receding undersurface, the back of one’s head, the thing you’ve never noticed, and the imperceptibility of your own perception.
An enworldment is what emerges when some finite aspects of reality emerge from nihilitude. The enworldment “projects” (through subtraction of all else) a schema or template of definite beings. Nihilitude flows between each definite thing, each object of experience, a “not”, against which it is defined — literally, de-finitized.
Whatever prevents the schema from crystallizing (finitely manifesting its continuity within infinitude) is coated with nihilitude, and drowned in irrelevance — tuned out, set aside, downplayed, explained away — or submerged in nihilitude, and is so irrelevant that it is never noticed. It drowns in oblivion.
Nihilitude makes possible a holistic organic understanding needed by a living being. A soul, in order to persist as a soul, must spontaneously perceive and conceive real entities (givens) as whole units – gestalts — and spontaneously perceive and conceive these given wholes as themselves belonging to higher order wholes. Simltaneously it also perceives and conceives these units of being as constituted of lower order whole units, not only objective (third-person) entities, but also first person subjective beings within and exceeding that of one’s I or another’s thou. Sketchy genius Arthur Koestler called this kind of order of nested wholeness “holarchy”. Souls are holarchic.
But souls can, with effort, non-spontaneously connect whole entities with others in order to construct truths. It can argue, figure out, analyze and construe knowledge. This is what is called “constructed truth”. The basic units of such knowledge remain spontaneously perceived and conceived ideas, but the way these givens are combined are not.
Constructed knowledge must be memorized and recalled in order to be known in any particular moment. When they are not in active recollection the knowledge exists as data and rules of recombination. Constructed truth laboriously rebuilds bridges across gaps of nihilitude, linking fragmentary clusters of knowledge with one another. Sometimes construction links objects in ways that obscure rather than illuminate their continuity. The more the construction obscures rather than reveals the continuity among given entities the more force of will and artifice is required to sustain it. It is a the kind of artificiality that gives the word “artificial” its connotations of unnaturalness.
But sometimes constructions reveal, rather than obscure, continuity. Something “clicks’ and a layer of nihilitude clears away, admitting new givens traced out by the constructions.
These are not only intellectual motions, like what we do when we dance along with a philosophy book or choreograph ideas of our own. They can also be physical movements — physical dances, moving from some steps to feeling the rhythm and grace in response to music — or perceptual pattern-finding — like perceiving the animating beauty in art or noticing natural patterns or forms in nature and suddenly experiencing continuity between one’s own nature and the environing nature to whom one belongs as a natural creature. Between two people it can be finding rhythm flow and rapport, and becoming swept up in a literally animated conversation. This is the intimate congeniality of thought and life beyond thought.
This heterogeneity is one reason why the? term enworldment is preferable to worldview or perspective or other ontologically-limited or reductive terms — even ontology. Enworldment concerns the entire field of being, not only thoughts or thoughts about being.
Being rises from oblivion and shows itself, often reconfiguring what is spontaneously given, smashing artificial constructions, submerging (de-emphasizing) givens that had been relevant, and pushing irrelevant given into the foreground. And this also often requires new constructions capable of bridging gaps in this new reconfigured landscape — this new ontological archipelago rising from an ocean of oblivion, new faith-moved mountain ranges. This is the experience of conversion.
Some conversions convert the converted soul to a metaphysics where conversion and its revelations ex nihilo are an ever-present possibility, especially when this possibility is inconceivable.
Let us name this conversion to permanent possibility of conversion, irrupting precisely from the inconceivable oblivion of nihilitude. Let us call it exnihilism.
…to be continued… refinements, exrensions… application to design…
Infinity versus myriad
I’ve probably said this a zillion times, but it is worth repeating: Myriad is a pretty way to express indeterminate magnitude — uncountably many. Originally, myriad meant ten-thousand, and in pre-digital times ten-thousand was, for all practical purposes, uncountable. Computers have since blown out the limits of countability. We need something much larger, now. For this purpose, I like “zillion” quite a bit. Zillion is technically a fictional number, which pushes it beyond the limits of quantity into a quality of uncountability, and which gives it an attractive goofiness and some substantial functional advantages over myriad.
The widespread use of infinity as a quantity is, metaphysically speaking, incorrect. Infinity is beyond the domain of quantity.
What most people mean when they say “infinite” is indeterminate. But because within their particular enworldment there is no need for metaphysical infinite, it makes no internal difference.
It does, however, close off all thought that might lead beyond this understanding. But that is actually a feature, not a bug.
In third grade, when I was chain-reading every Oz book in the Morrison Elementary Library, I learned that the land of Oz was protected by the Deadly Desert. Set foot on it, you yourself dissolve into sand. Later I learned that Hades is moated by obliviating rivers, each annihilating some aspect of selfhood. In The Hero With a Thousand Faces, Joseph Campbell observed a universal pattern in myths and fairy tales of thresholds at the start and end of the hero’s journey that dissolves and reconstitutes the hero.
The hero’s journey, Campbell’s meta-myth, sheds important light on what these stories are really about: transformational experiences. They involve leaving this world, entering a new world, the hero undergoing ordeals and overcoming profound challenges that fundamentally and inwardly change the hero, and then the hero returning to this world with new insights and gifts for the people still on this side of reality.
Soul and place are intimately connected, and this is because enworldment dissolves the subject-object dichotomy. A new enworldment always entails a reborn subject, and a new subject always reenworlds itself.
But this is not a painless change. “Leaving this world” is always a kind of death and an entry into something inconceivable. Nietzsche said it beautifully, “only where there are graves are there resurrections.”
A rebirth event cannot happen within an enworldment, as a simple change of opinion or moral outlook or life trajectory. They happen across enworldments — in traversal of nihilitude that dissolves self and world together.
Rebirth is preceded by death — nihilitude — and, before that, dread, which is the existential response to intuited nihilitude, by no means limited to death. But if we confront dread and plunge into oblivion, we reemerge on the other side, in the next enworldment… ex nihilo.
Is this myriad vs infinity distinction just is a pedantic hair-split? Yes! And perhaps life as you know it depends on this remaining so. Note the note of unease behind the annyance and boredom. Also, have you checked Instagram today?
Metaphysical 3D glasses
Before 2016, I characterized my religious attitude as exoterically (ethically) Jewish and esoterically (metaphysically) Taoist. Then I began studying Kabbalah, and learned “esoteric Hebrew”, carefully translating it into “esoteric Chinese”.
Now esoteric Hebrew has become second natural to me. It is so second-natural that I now understand in it without any need to translate back and forth. I think in Kabbalah.
However, I still sometimes find value putting on my esoteric 3D glasses, with one lens Kabbalistic-colored, the other Taoist-colored, so I can look at ideas common to both traditions, and enjoy the parallactic special effects of exaggerated depth.
All this rambling preamble, just to say:
In Assiyah are ten-thousand things.
In Yetzirah are ten-thousand everythings.
In Beriah are ten-thousand traversable nothings, dividing everything from everything.
In Atzilut is infinitesimally articulate infinitude.
Removing the 3D glasses, and speaking more compactly:
In Assiyah are myriad objects.
In Yetzirah are myriad subjects, each an enworldment.
In Beriah are myriad traversable oblivions, dividing enworldment from enworldment.
In Atzilut is infinitesimally articulate infinitude, the source of all oblivion and enworldment.
Common senses
Below is one — perhaps idiosyncratic — common sense account of the Olamot, presented from the first-person:
Common sense of Assiyah: each of our senses gives us the world in some sensory mode — a world with reality understood to transcend each of our senses and all our senses, but gains reliability through sensory testimony. What we see and touch is assumed to be real. What we see, but cannot touch is assumed to be a hallucination.
Common sense of Yetzirah: each of us is given the world in a specific way, but our own way shares much in common with others of our community, and this commonality — this consensus understanding — is our most reliable access to the reality of the world. What all of us understand together is assumed to be real. What only one of us understands is idiosyncratic, less real, possibly delusional. What other communities take as common sense, but which are clearly false or nonsensical, might be delusional groupthink.
Common sense of Beriah: from moment to moment, age to age, the common sense of solitary persons and the common sense of communities changes, and testifies to different experiences and understandings. Reality and truth clearly can be given quite differently to different people in different places in different times. What is common across them, and how can they differ? The commonalities and differences are always given to the threefold present, according to what can and cannot be received in this particular I-here-now. All this is what existentialism (and its myriad siblings) pursues, and in response it receives ciphers, interminable questions, aporias, shocks, terrors, ecstasies. Light, dark, rippling oblivion.
Common sense of Atzilut: our various attempts to account for the givenness of the real points to a reality beyond questions and answers, beyond defined objects and defining subjects, beyond sense, within a commonality so all-inclusively common, so inescapably, so infinitely common, it is beyond comprehension.
Account of tzimtzum
One account of ztimtzum — today’s conception:
In the finite world, impurity is a matter of exclusion of inessentials.
But infinity is essentially absolute, unconditional inclusion.
When finite being attempts to approach the infinite, any exclusion from the infinite is an impurity.
Yet, finite being is somehow entirely of the infinite without itself being infinite.
Pure infinitude precludes exclusion.
We subsist finitely as impurities to the infinite.
Infinitude’s capacity for finitude depends on nihilitude, the principle of impurity — of self-exclusion from infinitude — within infinitude.
Nihilitude is the nacre which coats the infinite ocean with accreting layers of protective oblivion, sheltering tender finitude from dissolution into what it is not, yet is. An infinitessimal universe-size spark.
Nihilitude is the nacre which coats each defined concept with the distinction “as opposed to”. A refracted spark filling heaven with stars, worlds, sun, moon, earth, oceans, lands, people.
Nihilitude defines finite against infinite, then defines finite against finite. Nihilitude’s self-exclusion everts the relationship between the finite-and-infinite, rendering it everything-or-nothing.
Nihilitude is creation. All creation is ex nihilo.
Nevertheless, infinitude continues to penetrate oblivion, leaving halo-traces at concentrated strike points. Infinitude crisscrosses each finite being as dimensions of time space and self. The intersection of this crossing is the threefold present.
Oblivion is something that creates apparent nothingness, and is therefore not an impurity at all, but which also makes apparent impurity possible, without defiling infinitude with exclusion. Tzimtzum.
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”
A Painter Paints a Painting of a Painter
A painter is painting a picture of another painter in the act of painting. The painter plans to call this piece “A Painter Paints a Painting of a Painter”.
The second painter (like the first) is holding a palette in his left hand, a brush in his right, and is standing before a canvas, and upon the canvas is his painting-in-progress.
The essential difference between these two painters (besides, of course one being the painting subject, and the other being a painted object) is that the two artists paint using different palettes.
(Neither painter is color blind. Only their palettes are limited.)
The first painter’s palette has only two colors: red and white.
What makes the second painter so fascinating and infuriating to the first — and, in fact, the entire reason he wants to paint him — is the fact that the second painter paints only in blue and black. For the first painter, this difference is a crisis, and he hopes to resolve it by capturing that difference on canvas. This is why he is painting “A Painter Paints a Painting of a Painter”.
So the first painter sets out to capture this difference — of painting in blue and black — using his own palette of red and white.
And the painting is a success. By some poetic miracle, the first painter perfectly captures the essential difference. Or at least some artists believe so. The community of painters who paint in red and white, marvel at his success.
But the second painter sees in the portrait allegedly of him, only a reflection of the first painter — certainly not himself. And his view is shared by his peers who paint in blue and black.
And here I am — palette and brush in hand — painting this fable in black, white, red and blue, which is the palette of this fable-world.
And whoever hears this fable is cursed to paint this story and the telling of this story onto their own canvas with their own palette.
The end.
Here, elsewhere, focused, scattered
Susan said that she gets sad when she goes to a playground and sees parents sucked into their phones oblivious to their playing children.
She wondered if absorption in a phone is different from absorption in knitting or absorption in a novel. To her it seemed worse.
I agree.
Absorption in knitting is not total. Maybe another word than “absorption” would serve better — maybe occupation. Knitting occupies our hands, leaving us ambiently aware of our environment. We are still here, despite being focused on an activity.
Reading, ideally, is total absorption. A good book transports us elsewhere, to a fictional reality that holds our attention.
What makes phones different is that they transport us away from where we are, but not to another place, or at least not for long. Our attention is taken out of where we are, away from who we are with, and shattered and scattered. Five second blips of exposure to here and there, this image, that image, this feeling and that. Our attention disintegrates into disconnected stimuli. Our spirit is an atomized cloud of impressions and twitches dispersing into nowhere, whenever, no-one.
And this is what makes the playground phone use feel tragic. A parent reading a book seems like they’re enjoying a moment of their own. It is escapism to somewhere, but it leaves the child space for free play. A parent on a phone is just escaping from presence where their child is. They could be anywhere and do this, and it is likely their habit to do it wherever they are.
This got me thinking. If there is a focused elsewhere and a focused here, and there is also a scattered elsewhere, is there a scattered here? It would be attention scattered across an environment. It might be because the environment is overstimulating and chaotic (like an amusement park or festival), or it might be a distractible state of mind — or both at once.
Not to pull a stock consultant move, but I had to map it to a 2×2.
I realize I actually missed the subtle crux of what Susan said.
The thrust of it was more personal and less an opinion on parenting.
When Susan sees another parent (or grandparent) absorbed in their phone at the playground, Susan herself feels isolated from them. Why would she feel that way?
It makes perfect sense to me. Here I wax designerly, and reflect on our human need to share the world.
When parents gather at a playground with our children, we have important things in common. We are doing the same kind of activity, in the same place, with the same equipment. We have spaces and objects mediating experiences that matter to us. We also play a parenting role, and we probably share many joys, fears, hopes, concerns and other experiences all parents know. These things potentially connect us.
Humans need this connection to each other via the places and things of the world, and connections to the world via relationships with others. One core job of designers is to materially mediate these relationships.
As happens so often, Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities comes to mind:
In Ersilia, to establish the relationships that sustain the city’s life, the inhabitants stretch strings from the corners of the houses, white or black or gray or black-and-white according to whether they mark a relationship of blood, of trade, or authority, agency. When the strings become so numerous that you can no longer pass among them, the inhabitants leave: the houses are dismantled; only the strings and their supports remain. From a mountainside, camping with their household goods, Ersilia’s refugees look at the labyrinth of taut strings and poles that rise in the plain. That is the city of Ersilia still, and they are nothing.
They rebuild Ersilia elsewhere. They weave a similar pattern of strings which they would like to be more complex and at the same time more regular than the other. Then they abandon it and take themselves and their houses still farther away.
Thus, when travelling in the territory of Ersilia, you come upon the ruins of the abandoned cities, without the walls which do not last, without the bones of the dead which the wind rolls away: spiderwebs of intricate relationships seeking a form.
Blind and deaf
A rock-tumbled Nietzsche saying: “When we see badly, we see less than what is there. When we hear badly, we hear more than what is there.”
Too often we fail to notice what others do for us, then resent them for not doing enough. Too often we hear more than what others mean in what they say, and then blame them for saying it.
On the matter of Nietzsche
The first sentence of Beyond Good and Evil — the most electrifying in all of philosophy — proposes a thematic question:
Supposing truth is a woman — what then?
I have incessant asked and re-asked this line for over twenty obsessive years, and today I ask it like this: Supposing truth, of all things, is a woman?
When Nietzsche asked this himself, in 1885, what was the matter with him? Or better, where was the matter for him?
Some hints from the preceding book: “One must still have chaos in oneself to be able to give birth to a dancing star.”
And another:
Into your eyes I looked recently, O life! And into the unfathomable I then seemed to be sinking. But you pulled me out with a golden fishing rod; and you laughed mockingly when I called you unfathomable.
“Thus runs the speech of all fish,” you said; “what they do not fathom is unfathomable. But I am merely changeable and wild and a woman in every way, and not virtuous — even if you men call me profound, faithful, eternal, and mysterious. But you men always present us with your own virtues, O you virtuous men!”
Thus she laughed, the incredible one; but I never believe her and her laughter when she speaks ill of herself.
And when I talked in confidence with my wild wisdom she said to me in anger, “You will, you want, you love — that is the only reason why you praise life.” Then I almost answered wickedly and told the angry woman the truth; and there is no more wicked answer than telling one’s wisdom the truth.
For thus matters stand among the three of us: Deeply I love only life — and verily, most of all when I hate life. But that I am well disposed toward wisdom, and often too well, that is because she reminds me so much of life. She has her eyes, her laugh, and even her little golden fishing rod: is it my fault that the two look so similar?
And when life once asked me, “Who is this wisdom?” I answered fervently, “Oh yes, wisdom! One thirsts after her and is never satisfied; one looks through veils, one grabs through nets. Is she beautiful? How should I know? But even the oldest carps are baited with her. She is changeable and stubborn; often I have seen her bite her lip and comb her hair against the grain. Perhaps she is evil and false and a female in every way; but just when she speaks ill of herself she is most seductive.”
When I said this to life she laughed sarcastically and closed her eyes. “Of whom are you speaking?” she asked; “no doubt, of me. And even if you are right — should that be said to my face? But now speak of your wisdom too.”
Ah, and then you opened your eyes again, O beloved life. And again I seemed to myself to be sinking into the unfathomable.
If only Salome had accepted Nietzsche’s marriage proposal. The painful lessons she could have taught him!
It took a decade, but my own wife taught me this: She cannot be reduced to who I imagine her to be. She is perpetually surprising. We will never stop defying my understanding, and if I confuse her for my understanding, the defiance might not be polite.
From this I know that matter is not who physics theorizes her to be.
Supposing reality is a woman — what then?
Supposing truth is marriage —
Accusation in a mirror
According to wikipedia, accusation in a mirror is “a technique often used to incite hate speech, where someone falsely attributes their own motives or intentions onto their adversaries.”
If I ever planned to pull this move on my enemies, the first thing I would do is accuse them of doing it.
Woo-woo
I take books like drugs. Doubt me?
Chaos is not absence of order, but precisely the opposite – the presence of infinite orders. Each of us, sheltered in the shade of our own minuscule I-here-now, benefits from
sphere upon sphere upon sphere upon sphere of ontological filters — deflecting, transmitting, sky-glowing — each successively diffusing and reducing infinity infinitesimally. Each sphere bears its own portion of infinity. Each contains a holographic infinity, a jewel-node in Indra’s Net, conveying within itself the entire jeweled net, refracting and refracting and refracting and refracting to infinite density in one centripetally radiant photon of infinite, dimensionless magnitude.
From mid-ladder
If we imagine being as a ladder, we might situate ourselves at the base.
But what if we imagine ourselves elsewhere, neither at the base, nor at the top of the ladder.
Something is gained if we situate ourself at a permanent middle — metaxy, media res, thrown — with superscendent rungs always beyond the reach of our fingertips and subscendent rungs extending interminably below the soles of our feet.
No more tidy, enclosing heaven or supporting earth with humankind between. Here it is rungs and more rungs.
Wherever we climb, upward or downward, we reach from the heart — ex cord — arms above outstretched, hands groping upward to grasp whatever is graspable here, our feet below, seeking footholds, security, a supporting under-standing.
In this imagined situation, there is a point where we might climb — and we are here! — where we confuse our ideas about nature and our capacities to command and control it. Many of us were born on this rung, carved from a solid plank of a probabilistic swarm of subatomic particles. Our feet, too, were carved from this substance, and our hearts, too! We stand here, fused to our rung, groping above for the right political aspirations, oblivious to our footing.
But matter is not subatomic particles, though she might allow herself to seem so, when she feels cooperative. Matter sometimes deigns to cooperate with our laboratory play. But she reserves her right to turn on us arbitrarily, when we least expect it.
And physical matter is only one of myriad materials.
Material is any reality — physical or otherwise — that can take form, without itself being form.
And no material is pure. Any thing is a chaotic convergence of materials. And with each additional witness, materials proliferate. Instauration (revelation-creation) ex cord is difficult. Instauration ex con-cord borders on impossible. A designer knows this truth. Who else knows…?
Transcendence is not only ascension to ecstatic heights, nor penetration to fathomless depths. It does not leave or aspire to leave mundane life. It completes a circuit of behind and beyond. It stands mid-ladder, ushering lower angels upward, and higher angels downward. It circulates divine light so the bright blood bathes the tissues of matter, saturating matter with soul and form, then returns the spent light to the source for replenishment.
Chaos is not absence of meaning. Chaos is too many meanings. Chaos is hypermeaning.
Extreme white noise vanishes into blind ether, nothing-present-nothing-missing.
To a finite soul, infinity is nothingness; hypermeaning is meaningless.
The midpoint of unity and infinity is zero.
Absolute infinitude versus the infinite infinitesimals.
In the Metaxic Middle — Malkhut
in whom we are suspended
Ein Sof — Absolute Infinitude — One
meets
Shekhinah — Infinite Infinitesimals — Sparks
one spark of which is oneself
within One’s Self.
I have quite a heresy brewing here!
Craft as conversation
To be alive to craft is to converse well with materials. Good conversation is reciprocal exchange — give and take, hearing and responding — within an event of emergent meaning.
Hans-Georg Gadamer said that in the best games, players are participants through whom the game plays itself, and, similarly, in the best conversations, the conversation has itself through its interlocutors.
In craft, artisan and artifact, speaking a common language of materials — physical or otherwise — participate in the emergence of form.
This is your civilization on drugs. Any questions?
Postmodernism is civilization on acid.
Those bale-wire concepts that held everything together are snipped, and the whole is flying apart into mad coils of notional chaos. This wild profusion can eventually be gathered back up, after the unbound ideas release their spring energy in expansion and diffusion.
Ontological veils
The sefirotic garments are ontological veils. Physical veils selectively admit and deflect light, ontological veils selectively admit and deflect realities. Where a physical veil deflects light, light dims. Where an ontological veil deflects realities, those realities remain ungiven, withheld in oblivion. There is dimming, but not a darkening dimming. It is an oblivious dimming.
Blindness is not darkness. Conflation of blindness and darkness makes misleading metaphors.
Darkness conceals visibly.
Scotoma unreveals invisibly. When nothing is present, nothing is absent.
According to Etymonline, reveal / revelation comes from
revelen, “disclose, divulge, make known (supernaturally or by divine agency, as religious truth),” from Old French reveler “reveal” (14c.), from Latin revelare “reveal, uncover, disclose,” literally “unveil,” from re- “back, again,” here probably indicating “opposite of” or transition to an opposite state + velare “to cover, veil,” from velum “a veil”.
If we imagine revelation as lifting of the veil of oblivion, revelation designates an extreme of being shocked by the inconceivable — or as we say with accidental poetic precision, blindsided by something totally unexpected — then revelation loses its divine intervention overtones and becomes something at once more mundane, but also much stranger.
My first experience of radical shock, a revelation that required me to rethink everything, left me utterly underwhelmed with “supernatural” miracles. They seemed unimaginative — just suspending this or that natural law — slightly snagging the fabric of nature with mysterious arbitrariness, but leaving it more or less intact.
The revelation I received forced me to reweave nature on a vast new loom. I wasn’t even aware of the old loom, or that my old nature was woven upon a supernature.
In the domain of blindness, ocular migraines are instructive.
Designerly metaphysics
Before any beginning is infinitude.
Pure infinitude. Ein sof.
Before the beginning, the infinite articulates itself. Finitude is articulated within infinite ground, inseparable from it, like a ripple in water. Articulate finitude in infinite luminous ground. Atzilut.
At the beginning, inside the threshold of finitude, articulate infinitude defines finitude within itself, enclosing it as being, within its infinite ground, still luminous.
Finitude, inception of being. Beriah.
Within history, being articulates into beings, each a finite everything, each defining itself against what it is not, each bounding its own finite portion of infinitude within itself. The infinite ground pervades each being, but infinitude is paradoxically excluded, cloaked in nihilitude, oblivion.
For some beings, the infinite ground still glows brightly or dimly behind the oblivious cloak, numinous nothingness, alive with paradox, irony. For other beings, everything is all that there is.
From within finitude, piercing of the cloak is ex nihilo. From without, this is creation, revelation, instauration ex infinitum.
Each being bears within itself an ideal order, a schema of forms, a repertoire of possibilities and impossibilities within itself, what can and cannot be received, what ought and ought not be. This is enception: capacity to receive, to perceive, to conceive. Conversely, and just as importantly, incapacities — rejection, filtration, the maintenance of finitude-preserving oblivion.
Beings suspended in paradoxical oblivion, the ground of actuality. Yetzirah.
Each being actualizes, lives, articulates itself, defines finite beings within its being, beings actualized in myriad ways, acting upon the material ground, which is — surprise! — vestigial inarticulate infinitude, that common ground of beings, that which each being is not, but which is given.
Each being brings its own finite order to materials, its own articulations, its own capacities and abilities, its own objectivity. Each being enworlds what is given.
In the act of enworldment, materials may be persuaded to cooperate, but often they resist, and sometimes they revolt, sometimes the being breaks and must reform. Through the commonality of material, beings encounter one another, and through materials, cooperate, resist, revolt, conflict, win, lose or break.
The infinitude meets infinite in Assiyah.
The capillaries of the divine light saturate the tissues of chaos. This saturation materially forms, combines, shapes, ensouls, and sets the world in motion — literally animates it — like trees climbing themselves from the soil to meet the sun.
The light saturates the common world with meaning before returning the spent light to its source.
And for us, enmeshed in life, this spent light returning to its source, this is reflection on life, on being, on the source of being. Metaphysics is the rising smoke of spent light, piercing the roof of being, seeking its source. In its plumes can be seen rays of incoming light, and here we are told the story of Creation the only way we know it, in reverse.
