Category Archives: Esoterism

The everted present

Esoterism, Metaphysics, Star

Ray Cummings: “Time is nature’s way of keeping everything from happening all at once.”

“…And,” someone adds, “space is nature’s way of keeping everything from happening everywhere all at once.”

“…And,” another offers, “self is nature’s way of keeping everything from happening to everyone all at once.”

Presence is God’s way of distributing Godself through time space and consciousness.

But within God, everything does happen all at once, everywhere to everyone.

Adonai echad.

The present is the Absolute everted within Itself.

Contemplation

Esoterism, Judaism, Metaphysics

A passage from Plotinus reminded me of another passage from Brothers Karamazov:

The painter Kramskoy has a remarkable painting entitled The Contemplator: it depicts a forest in winter, and in the forest, standing all by himself on the road, in deepest solitude, a stray little peasant in a ragged caftan and bast shoes; he stands as if he were lost in thought, but he is not thinking, he is “contemplating” something. If you nudged him, he would give a start and look at you as if he had just woken up, but without understanding anything. It’s true that he would come to himself at once, and yet, if he were asked what he had been thinking about while standing there, he would most likely not remember, but would most likely keep hidden away in himself the impression he had been under while contemplating. These impressions are dear to him, and he is most likely storing them up imperceptibly and even without realizing it — why and what for, he does not know either; perhaps suddenly, having stored up his impressions over many years, he will drop everything and wander off to Jerusalem to save his soul, or perhaps he will suddenly burn down his native village, or perhaps he will do both.

There are a good many “contemplatives” among our peasants. And Smerdyakov was probably one of them. And he was probably greedily hoarding up his impressions, hardly knowing why.

From Plotinus, who might very well have inspired the above passage:

If [nature] were asked why she creates, she would reply — if, that is, she were willing to listen to the questioner and to speak — “You should not have questioned me, but understood in silence, just as I myself keep silent, for I am not accustomed to talk. What is there to understand? That what comes into being is the object of my silent contemplation, and that the product of my contemplation comes into being in a natural way. I myself was born of such contemplation; this is why I have a natural love for contemplation. My contemplation engenders the product of my contemplation, just as geometers draw figures by contemplating. I, however, do not draw anything, but I contemplate, and the lines of bodies come into existence, as if they were issuing forth from me.”

(This is an English translation of Hadot’s French translation.)

Etymonline’s entry on contemplation:

contemplation(n.) —

c. 1200, contemplacioun, “religious musing,” from Old French contemplation and directly from Latin contemplationem (nominative contemplatio) “act of looking at,” noun of action from past-participle stem of contemplari “to gaze attentively, observe; consider, contemplate,” originally “to mark out a space for observation” (as an augur does), from assimilated form of com-, here perhaps an intensive prefix (see com-), + templum “area for the taking of auguries” (see temple (n.1)).

It is attested from late 14c. as “reflection, thinking, thought, act of holding an idea continuously before the mind.” The meaning “act of looking attentively at anything” is from late 15c.

In cogitation the thought or attention flits aimlessly about the subject.

In meditation it circles round it, that is, it views it systematically, from all sides, gaining perspective.

In contemplation it radiates from a centre, that is, as light from the sun it reaches out in an infinite number of ways to things that are related to or dependent on it. [Ezra Pound, 1909, recalling in his own words ideas from Richard of St. Victor, 12c., “De praeparatione animi ad contemplationem“]

Perhaps to con-temple something is precisely to refrain from com-prehending it.

The last passage in Daniel Matt’s Essential Kabbalah is taken from the Sefer Bahir

Whoever delves into mysticism cannot help but stumble, as it is written: “This stumbling block is in your hand.” You cannot grasp these things unless you stumble over them.

This recalled a passage from Aryeh Kaplan’s Inner Space:

The Kabbalists teach that this is the concept of God’s most sacred name, theTetragrammaton, YHVH. The Tetragrammaton consists of four letters Yod, Heh, Vav and Heh. These four letters have a very special significance.

The Tetragrammaton is related to the past, present, and future tense of the Hebrew word “to be.” In Hebrew, “was” is Hayah, “is” is Hoveh and “will be” is Yihyeh. Therefore, when one reads the Tetragrammaton, one should have in mind that God “was, is and will be” all at the same instant.’ This indicates that God is utterly transcendental, and higher than the dimension of time. God exists in a realm where time does not exist. At the same time, the Tetragram

At the same time, the Tetragrammaton denotes that God is Mehaveh, “the One who brings all existence into being. It is in this sense that the Tetragrammaton refers to God’s causal relationship with His creation. He is the source of all being and existence and His essence permeates creation.

We can understand this on the basis of an ancient Kabbalistic teaching which states that the four letters of the Name contain the mystery of Charity. According to this teaching, the first letter Yod can be likened to a coin. The letter Yod is small and simple like a coin.

The second letter, Heh, represents the hand that gives the coin. Every letter in the Hebrew alphabet also represents a number. Since Heh is the fifth letter of the alphabet, it has a numerical value of five. The “five” of Heh alludes to the five fingers of the hand.

The third letter, Vav (t), which has the form of an arm, denotes reaching out and giving. Furthermore, in Hebrew, the word Vav means a “hook,” and thus Vav has the connotation of connection. Indeed, in Hebrew, the word for the conjunction “and” is represented by the letter Vav prefixed to a word.

Finally, the fourth letter, the final Heh (n), is the hand of the beggar who receives the coin.

And every mention of the together-grasping comprehending mind always recalls Kosho Uchiyama’s beautifully titled Opening the Hand of Thought:

I use the expression “opening the hand of thought” to explain as graphically as possible the connection between human beings and the process of thinking. I am using “thinking” in a broad sense, including emotions, preferences, and all sense perceptions, as well as conceptual thoughts. Thinking means to be grasping or holding on to something with our brain’s conceptual “fist.” But if we open this fist, if we don’t conceive the thought, what is in our mental hand falls away. Our universal self, jiko, also includes that which lets go. Sleeping at night is a natural expression of your life with the hand of your thinking mind wide open. Nodding off while you are awake is something else entirely, from the perspective of the self. While you are awake, opening the hand of thought isn’t dozing or thinking, it is the fine line between them where you really are right now.

The self of Western psychology is the Cartesian “I think, therefore I am.” But actually, we are, whether we think so or not, and behind the conscious self your life continues even when you are unconscious or unaware. And precisely because of that we are alive with a life that includes our thinking self. In fact, it is because we have this actual ongoing life that the thought can occur that we are only our thoughts. So our true or whole self is not just an abstract self made of thoughts. Our whole self is the force or quality of life that enables conscious thought to arise, and it includes that personal, conscious self, but it also includes the force that functions beyond any conscious thought.

The whole or universal self is the force that functions to make the heart continue beating and the lungs continue breathing, and it is also the source of what is referred to as the subconscious.

This inclusive self is at heart the creative power of life. It is related to what the Judeo-Christian tradition calls the creative power of God.

That power — what is immediately alive and also what is created — that is self too. If you want to use God as your referent, it is crucial to receive God as pure creative power, as being fresh and alive and working in and through yourself: no matter what I do or think, God is in all things and is working through me.

Whatever is alive — that is jiko, or universal self. All of this — thoughts and feelings, the and desires, the subconscious and the beating heart, the effort that enables other lives to function and the creative power of life itself — is what I mean by the “self.” Saying “whole” or “true” or “universal” self is a way to try to include all the actual reality of life, and what I am saying here is that the actual reality of life is not something separate from the actual reality of your own life.

Progressing beyond progress

Biography, Esoterism, Philosophy, Spiral

One place where progressivism has a grip on me is the mania for originality.

We moderns compete to be the first to discover or invent or create some novelty or another, so we can get credit for progressing our society to wherever it is headed.

I am possessed almost entirely by this competitive urgency, and its unexamined goal of unconditional forwardness toward wherever we have not yet arrived. Almost entirely, but not entirely. I am slipping a razor’s edge of question into this precious fissure to see if I can crack it wider. Perhaps if I can wedge it in far enough to get some leverage, I’ll be able to pry it open and get out.

The essential difference between a paradox and a contradiction is depth and shallowness. Contradictions point at pointlessness. Paradoxes point to heights and depths in hierarchies of being.

Why do we think it is better to deny better and worse? How can we think this?

Mystical topology

Esoterism, Everso, Metaphysics, Philosophy

When we apprehend realities that transcend our comprehension, and find that our minds cannot find objective edges around which a concept may be gripped, we can ignore these realities into oblivion and see them as dead nonexistence. Or we may accept them as living nothingness — divine ground — and attempt to relate ourselves within them in ways that compulsively reduce all realities to objective terms. That is, we can take part in what involves and surpasses objectivity: we participate in being to whom we are subject — in life in whom we are organ. And when we do so knowingly we assuage the apprehension of incomprehensibility in a new kind of awareness of being within being — a knowing we might call suprehension. The old insult “his reach exceeds his grasp” loses its sting. Is it really so bad to have a capacity to touch without grabbing? Everso.

Design and form

Design, Enworldment, Esoterism, Everso, Philosophy

We can speak of objective truth, but if we speak of objective reality, we reveal a fundamental metaphysical misconception. Objectivity is “real” only as a subjective phenomenon.

If we say “objective truth” while meaning “absolute truth”, we reveal two fundamental misconceptions. The first, of course, is the erroneous belief just mentioned, that reality is itself objective. The second is that absolute truth is an objective truth.

If we deny the existence of absolute truth, what we probably mean is half true. The true half of the meaning is that there is no absolute objective truth. But the untrue implication lurking behind the truth is that truth is essentially and necessarily objective. This is a philosophical limitation that can be overcome.

To overcome objectivist confinement, we must learn to think supraformal and infraformal truth.

Designers, especially, already know how to engage supraformal and infraformal realities in purely intuitive practice. But when pressed to explain or justify our way of working, our concepts and language mystify rather than clarify.

When designers try to be faithful to what we do, we bungle it — confusing and alienating nondesigners. So often we “translate” what we do to objective business language, and call it “design thinking”. But the stubbornly non-objective truth of design is lost in translation. In trying to represent design objectively, we misrepresent, misdirect, and mislead — offering only an illusion of comprehension and mastery. These nondesigners then share their “expertise” with other nondesigners. (Lesson #1: Everyone is a designer!) They found programs, institutions, consultancies, and whatnot, until we have a whole industry of nondesigner design experts. None of them ever actually design, and if they did, they would quickly discover that their theories and wise words — so compelling to executives, academics and writers — are useless to designers designing real artifacts. But of course, this is no argument against their expertise.

Much harder is clarity faithful to the reality of designing. But this requires us to “open the hand of thought”. We must allow some fundamental and unexamined beliefs about reality and truth to drop from our grip, and invite new ones to alight in their place.

Pluralism

Esoterism, Ethics, Metaphysics, Philosophy

I agree that many moral and theoretical ideas historically treated as absolute were more relative than their adherents realized.

I also agree that such relative beliefs — being approximate and contextual — can be true in their own way, with different trade-offs — even as they conflict.

But I no longer believe that all truth is relative or pluralistic. Some truths transcend relativity and pluralism: to deny them in thought is wrongheaded; to defy them in practice is immoral.

We can debate where the boundary lies between the relative and the absolute.

But if you argue that no such boundary exists — why are you arguing?

Belimah

Esoterism, Judaism, Metaphysics

Chaos is relative to an order-comprehending mind.

To comprehend, a mind must have a capacity to receive (conceive or perceive) a given order within increasingly comprehensive comprehensions of order. All these interrelated, inter-comprehending comprehensions are themselves ordered within a grounding and orienting relation to absolute reality. Metaphysics is what we call any grounding, orienting relation to absolute reality — again, within which all comprehensions occur.

Where the capacity to receive (conceive or perceive) order-within-order is lacking — where an enception is lacking — only chaos can be apprehended. We cannot comprehend what the chaos is, only apprehend that the chaos is.

(((Incidentally yesterday I leaned a new Hebrew word, used in the Sefir Yetzirah: “belimah“. According to Daniel Matt’s footnotes:

The word belimah, also obscure, can be read as two words: beli mah, “without what.” It appears once in the Bible in the book of Job (26:7): “He stretches the north over chaos and suspends the earth over belimah,” meaning apparently “emptiness” or “nothingness,” the cosmic void. The sefirot are without whatness, they cannot be grasped. A few paragraphs later, we find belimah followed immediately by the imperative belom, “bridle, restrain”: “Ten sefirot belimah. Belom, Bridle your mind from imagining, your mouth from speaking.” The phrase sefirot belimah conveys a sense of concealment and mystery.

I will translate belimah as whatless or whatlessness. It is any reality that defies objective understanding. And if to you understanding necessarily entails objectivity, and if to you objective and real or objective and true are synonymous, I’ll say it plainly: You are missing an entire class of enceptions. This condition is analogous to spiritual blindness and deafness, lacking “eyes to see” or “ears to hear” certain crucial religious truths. Your religious common sense is missing a dimension, but you are as unable to miss it as a birth-blind person is unable to miss sight. But I will also say it plainly: if you find a way to allow these religious sights and sounds to become visible and audible to you, it will be the most glorious shock of your life. You will feel like a new person in a new, infinitely meaningful world. And I know you cannot believe me, but that does not make it any less true. “In theory, there is no difference between theory and practice; but in practice there is.” You will see.)))

The intuition that real order is present, but intellectually inaccessible, generates apprehension. This apprehension intensifies with the intuited importance of the intellectually inaccessible intuited reality. A crucial whatless thatness inspires excruciating apprehension, a minute spark of the dread of the infinite, which to us is Ayin, nothingness. This nothingness is the outer surface of myriad surfaces concealing Ein Sof. The Kabbalists call these concealing surfaces garments. Ein Sof is clothed in Ayin, and if it were otherwise, our finitude would exfinite into the infinity to which it belongs and we would be whatever the eversion of annihilated is. I suppose “exnihilated” is as good a word for it as any.

How can we account for enception? Enceptions are determined by possibilities within a comprehensive conception.

Enceptions crystallize from the multistable possibilities of soul.

Some possibilities of soul harmonize essential orders essential to human existence and relate them to what surpasses all understanding, but at the cost of practical competence. Other possibilities of soul grasp the objects of scientific understanding at the cost of understanding social or biological epiphenomena like love or morality. Other possibilities permit deep attunement to people and groups, but at the cost of clarity and self-confidence.

When we understand one way, within one metaphysic and one comprehensive comprehension, it enables some enceptions and disables others. It produces a distinctive vision with its own regions of intuitive sensitivity and oblivion, and its own way of filling in oblivion with its own imaginative productions.

Some metaphysics give us unshakable certainty about a great many unimportant matters, leaving us free to fill in the vast void of truth with our own constructed ideas. We can freely invent whatever reality we wish to inhabit. The only cost is that we are haunted by the whatless thatness of the absolute, and almost everything induces excruciating apprehension. We are disoriented, ungrounded and gripped in anxiety, neurosis and depression. Love is impossible, because other people intensify our angst — to the degree they are personal and non-identical and refuse to cooperate with our language games. But at least we are masters of our own domain, free to construct according to our whim. “Neither God, nor master.”

Truth circulates only when the ladder of Yetzirah stands firm on the rock of Assiyah and penetrates the heavens to Beriyah.

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.

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.

 

An aggressive poke at materialism

Esoterism, Metaphysics, Star, Taoism

It is entirely possible to take science seriously and to respect science as the ultimate approach to generating valid knowledge and technological know-how in its own very important sphere, without succumbing to the temptation to make science (or even the ideal object of scientific inquiry) our metaphysical foundation.

In fact, as Thomas Kuhn beautifully observed and articulated, scientists can function better as scientists if they do not confuse their physics and their metaphysics. Why? Because the most important and consequential scientific work challenges our understanding of the ultimate substances and dynamics underlying reality as we know it. When this understanding collapses and then reconfigures itself in radical and inconceivable ways (as they do during scientific crises and revolutions) those whose entire personal integrity and sanity stand upon these understandings cannot maintain themselves during these disruptions. They cannot avoid clinging to these ideas as if their life depended upon them, because, spiritually, this is literally the case.

The best scientists stand on something else as they work on their basic notions of physical reality, even if that something else is never thematized or analyzed. And frankly, scientific analysis and objective thematization is the wrong form for metaphysical understanding. Such attempts are practical category mistakes of the lowest order, which lead directly to fundamentalism, the objectifying of what must be subjective, the containment of what contains, the eversion of being into thing.

I know very few metaphysical materialists who seem fully aware of the difference between a scientific understanding of matter and the givenness of matter and its source. That source is dark and even darker, where darkness is imperceptible — the glaring mercurial chrome behind sight itself.

What metaphysical materialists worship as ultimate is the scientific understandability, not material mystery, not the materially-inflected transcendence known as apeiron. They cannot know it, but they are, in fact, metaphysical idealists.

Today’s scientistic fanatics could be viewed by material mystics as alchemical fundamentalists.

Cryptic Hymns to the Distributed God

Chord, Esoterism, Judaism, Religion

J. L. Borges:

In one part of the Asclepius, which was also attributed to Trismegistus, the twelfth-century French theologian, Alain de Lille — Alanus de Insulis — discovered this formula which future generations would not forget: “God is an intelligible sphere, whose center is everywhere and whose circumference is nowhere.”

Francis Cook:

Far away in the heavenly abode of the great god Indra, there is a wonderful net which has been hung by some cunning artificer in such a manner that it stretches out infinitely in all directions. In accordance with the extravagant tastes of deities, the artificer has hung a single glittering jewel in each ‘eye’ of the net, and since the net itself is infinite in all dimensions, the jewels are infinite in number.

There hang the jewels, glittering like stars of the first magnitude, a wonderful sight to behold. If we now arbitrarily select one of these jewels for inspection and look closely at it, we will discover that in its polished surface there are reflected all the other jewels in the net, infinite in number. Not only that, but each of the jewels reflected in this one jewel is also reflecting all the other jewels, so that there is an infinite reflecting process occurring.

A. N. Whitehead:

“Concrescence” is the name for the process in which the universe of many things acquires an individual unity in a determinate relegation of each item of the “many” to its subordination in the constitution of the novel “one.” An actual occasion is nothing but the unity to be ascribed to a particular instance of concrescence. This concrescence is thus nothing else than the “real internal constitution” of the actual occasion in question. The process itself is the constitution of the actual entity; in Locke’s phrase, it is the “real internal constitution” of the actual entity.

This is a theory of monads; but it differs from Leibniz’s in that his monads change. In the organic theory, they merely become. Each monadic creature is a mode of the process of “feeling” the world, of housing the world in one unit of complex feeling, in every way determinate. Such a unit is an “actual occasion”; it is the ultimate creature derivative from the creative process.

Each actual entity is conceived as an act of experience arising out of data. The objectifications of other actual occasions form the given data from which an actual occasion originates. Each actual entity is a throb of experience including the actual world within its scope. It is a process of “feeling” the many data, so as to absorb them into the unity of one individual “satisfaction.” Here “feeling” is the term used for the basic generic operation of passing from the objectivity of the data to the subjectivity of the actual entity in question. Feelings are variously specialized operations, effecting a transition into subjectivity. They replace the “neutral stuff” of certain realistic philosophers. An actual entity is a process, and is not describable in terms of the morphology of a “stuff.”

This word “feeling” is a mere technical term; but it has been chosen to suggest that functioning through which the concrescent actuality appropriates the datum so as to make it its own. A feeling appropriates elements of the universe, which in themselves are other than the subject, and absorbs these elements into the real internal constitution of its subject by synthesizing them in the unity of an emotional pattern expressive of its own subjectivity. Feelings are “vectors”; for they feel what is there and transform it into what is here. We thus say that an actual occasion is a concrescence effected by a process of feelings.

The philosophy of organism is a cell-theory of actuality. The cell is exhibited as appropriating, for the foundation of its own existence, the various elements of the universe out of which it arises. Each process of appropriation of a particular element is termed a prehension. I have adopted the term “prehension” to express the activity whereby an actual entity effects its own concretion of other things. In Cartesian language, the essence of an actual entity consists solely in the fact that it is a prehending thing (i.e., a substance whose whole essence or nature is to prehend).

Martin Buber:

To man the world is twofold, in accordance with, his twofold attitude.

The attitude of man is twofold, in accordance with the twofold nature of the primary words which he speaks.

The primary words are not isolated words, but combined words.

The one primary word is the combination I-Thou.

The other primary word is the combination I-It; wherein, without a change in the primary word, one of the words He and She can replace It.

Hence the I of man is also twofold.

For the I of the primary word I-Thou is a different I from that of the primary word I-It.

Primary words do not signify things, but they intimate relations.

Primary words do not describe something that might exist independently of them, but being spoken they bring about existence.

Primary words are spoken from the being.

If Thou is said, the I of the combination I-Thou is said along with it.

If It is said the I of the combination I-It is said along with it.

The primary word I-Thou can only be spoken with the whole being.

The primary word I-It can never be spoken with the whole being.

–

There is no I taken in itself, but only the I of the primary word I-Thou and the I of the primary word I-it.

When a man says I he refers to one or other of these. The I to which he refers is present when he says I. Further, when he says Thou or It, the I of one of the two primary words is present.

The existence of I and the speaking of I are one and the same thing.

When a primary word is spoken the speaker enters the word and takes his stand in it.

…

The world of It is set in the context of space and time.

The world of Thou is not set in the context of either of these.

Its context is in the Centre, where the extended lines of relations meet — in the eternal Thou.

In the great privilege of pure relation the privileges of the world of It are abolished. By virtue of this privilege there exists the unbroken world of Thou: the isolated moments of relations are bound up in a life of world solidarity. By virtue of this privilege formative power belongs to the world of Thou: spirit can penetrate and transform the world of It. By virtue of this privilege we are not given up to alienation from the world and the loss of reality by the I — to domination by the ghostly. Turning is the recognition of the Centre and the act of turning again to it. In this act of the being the buried relational power of man rises again, the wave that carries all the spheres of relation swells in living streams to give new life to our world.

Perhaps not to our world alone. For this double movement, of estrangement from the primal Source, in virtue of which the universe is sustained in the process of becoming, and of turning towards the primal Source, in virtue of which the universe is released in being, may be perceived as the metacosmical primal form that dwells in the world as a whole in its relation to that which is not the world — form whose twofold nature is represented among men by the twofold nature of their attitudes, their primary words, and their aspects of the world. Both parts of this movement develop, fraught with destiny, in time, and are compassed by grace in the timeless creation that is, incomprehensibly, at once emancipation and preservation, release and binding. Our knowledge of twofold nature is silent before the paradox of the primal mystery.

Zohar:

When the King conceived ordaining

he engraved engravings in the luster on high.

A blinding spark flashed within the concealed of the concealed

from the mystery of the Infinite,

a cluster of vapor in formlessness, set in a ring,

not white, not black, not red, not green, no color at all.

When a band spanned, it yielded radiant colors.

Deep within the spark gushed a flow, imbuing colors below,

concealed within the concealed of the mystery of the Infinite.

The flow broke through and did not break through its aura.

It was not known at all

until, under the impact of breaking through,

one high and hidden point shone.

Beyond that point, nothing is known.

So it is called Beginning.

“The enlightened will shine like the zohar of the sky,

and those who make the masses righteous

will shine like the stars forever and ever.”

Zohar, concealed of the concealed, struck its aura.

The aura touched and did not touch this point.

Then Beginning emanated, building itself a glorious palace.

There it sowed the seed of holiness

to give birth for the benefit of the universe.

Zohar, sowing a seed of glory

like a seed of fine purple silk.

The silkworm wraps itself within, weaving itself a palace.

This palace is its praise, a benefit to all.

With Beginning, the unknown concealed one created the palace,

a palace called God.

The secret is: “With Beginning, ___________ created God.”

Misusing esoteric symbols

Design, Enworldment, Esoterism, Philosophy

I have a long habit of turning esoteric symbol systems into all-purpose concept models.

Two of the most dramatic examples: the trigrams (and hexagrams) of the I Ching and the Sefirot of Kabbalah.

When I interrogate myself on what I genuinely believe, I find that I I believe that this (mis)use of esoteric symbol systems that is the ground of their validity. It is primarily their value in practical use — helping us make sense of our own subjective experience, inspiring, motivating and animating our responses (or non-responses) and guiding our actions — that suggests that they are “true” beyond this sense-making use.

But I am a Pragmatist, and I’m not sure that I believe that truth is meaningful beyond this kind of practical use.

To repeat, the value of these models is threefold. They can help us live more lucidly, meaningfully and skillfully.* And I think it is important that the models engage us intuitively, that is, in a way that transcends what is explicitly sayable. This is the power of concept models, both in design and in religion. These models reach beneath language and help our intuitions organize themselves into living faiths, instead of forcing intuitions to push paper in the bureaucracy of talk — essentially enslaving them to doctrine.

All art and design derive their power from transcending the centralized control of language, which filters out all but the commonest experiences.

Note: * This, of course, is a paraphrasing of Liz Sanders’s Useful, Usable, Desirable framework, which is itself a concept model of supreme importance. It is, in fact, a mundane expression the Great Triad: Earth, Man, Heaven.

Earth is What-lucidity, that is objective mastery. Man is How-skill, that is practical effectiveness. Heaven is Why-meaning, a capacity to experiencing value, positive or negative.

The downside of modernity, especially its scientific aspects, is that it emphasized What/Is/Usable/Earth and How//Can/Useful/Man to the exclusion (or more, the compartmentalization) of Why/Ought/Desirable/Heaven. We got amazing at explaining and manipulating the physical world. We developed myriad techniques for doing whatever we want. We accomplished this by bracketing all questions of meaning. When scientists ask “why?”, they are not asking for a meaningful why, they are asking for a causal account, “how?”

In late modernity Why/Ought/Desirable/Heaven part of life has been sawed off from everything else entirely, and quarantined in museums, theaters and religious spaces. During the day, we are scientific, practical and dutiful, doing things without any Why at all, pretending very unconvincingly to be “passionate” about our drudgery. At night, after we’ve used ourselves up doing meaningless tasks all day, we try to regain some meaning through entertainments and spiritual stuff, and it fails to replenish us.

And this is why we can do anything we set our minds and hands to, but we find it harder and harder to want any particular thing. We have a crisis of caring. We are nihilists because our ways of understanding fail to take seriously the problems of value and meaning. We are forced to emotionally hype ourselves up to care about anything outside our most mundane needs. We project our own petty childhood feelings onto the world stage, finding stand-ins for our shitty moms, dads, friends, teachers — maybe movies or stories that touched us as kids — and wherever these projections fail, we force them into some shape we can feel about, or we just drift off into confused apathy, or cosmic generalizations that license indifference and dress it up as wise detachment. This is why, once our kids are taught the correct way to think about the world, they fall into hysterical despair and display every symptom of distress. We know damn well we damaged them, but we shout over our intuitions and call them prejudiced and phobic.

Fact is, we have no idea how to make sense of the world and continue participating in it — and at the same time, care about it. That can change, but we are resistant most of all to what will save us. We’re too clever for any human way of being. The theories of physics and our good standing with our fellow nihilists is far more important to us than living lives we can love.

Rambling on about self-formation

Design, Enworldment, Esoterism, Extended Self

When children engage in repetitive play, it generates habits of personhood. It is important to be patient and allow them to be repetitive, however tedious it might feel after the zillionth repetition. I find it helpful to meditate on what kind of adulthood might grow from whatever habits form in various kinds of repetitive play.

The analogue for adults is ritual. Rituals can be intentional, such as religious observances, or secular (or semi-secular) routines like exercise or other practical self-maintenance activities. Or they can be accidental, like habitually consuming certain kinds of media, playing games or performing routinized work tasks.

Prayers are verbal-mental rituals. They bring us back to a way of understanding the world along with the emotional attitudes that naturally attend that understanding. Obsessive-compulsive thoughts are a kind of involuntary prayer. Reading challenging books and having challenging conversations can also be prayer.

We also have social rituals that shape our collective existence. Ethnomethods are the meaning-making social habits we use to be understood and to understand others in any given social setting. Nearly all ethnomethods function unconsciously and recede into the background of social life, unless they are not followed, at which point things become awkward or tense. Ethnomethods are a little like well-designed tools, which disappear in use. (Design researchers who know the history of their craft know that much of what we do is rooted less in anthropology than in ethnomethodology, the systematic study of ethnomethods. Lucy Suchman pioneered thinking of physical artifacts as social actors woven into the ethnomethodic social workings of their use contexts. It is sometimes very helpful to think of design flaws as a kind of ethomethodic breach objects commit. Maybe it would be better to reverse what I said. Well-designed tools disappear into the background like ethnomethods, because, in fact, they are materialized ethnomethods,)

Ethnomethods are also verbal and mental. To participate in social sense, we adopt a certain collective vocabulary and logic, and this becomes the conventional wisdom of the group.

I’m flaky enough to believe ethnomethods (enacted by humans and nonhuman) enable distributed cognitive processes that are a conscious being of a group. This seems less far-fetched, once we observe and take seriously how each person’s own mind exhibits intellectual polycentrism among factions and alliances (complexes) within one’s own mind, but that somehow this polycentrism creates a nebulous center who is each person’s I. What shouldn’t this same intra-self consciousness-generating social dynamic be possible between people and generate consciousness that transcends any one of us? I think it is not only possible, I experience it as actual.* (If you like this line of thought, see the extra-extra-flaky note below.)

These verbal and mental ethnomethods are enacted in official communications of organizations; in these cases, they function like group prayer. The mental ethnomethods are repeated in popular news and entertainment media, and then we repeat them in our own conversation. This same vocabulary and logic is, more often than not, adopted by individuals, made habitual through repeated use and internalized as truth.

Like all ethnomenthods, if a person does not participate in verbal and mental ethnomethods, and insists on using idiosyncratic or disharmonious vocabulary or logics, they will create confusion, awkwardness and strain. Severe breaches of verbal and mental ethnomethods have been treated with hemlock.

Our deeply-engained ethnomethods and personal babits are self-generating activities. Whatever we repeat shapes our first-person being — let’s call it first-personality — which in turn shapes our third-person being — our third-personality, or persona — and how we perceive it.

  • Extra-extra-flaky note: For me, super-personal consciousness (also known as egregores) are not a matter of speculation, but is, in fact, a given feature of reality, as manifestly real as gravity.

And I’ll disclose right now — I’m feeling reckless, so why not? — that as service designers, we are intentional shapers of social arrangements within organizations. We attempt to create stable, mutually-beneficial interactions among people through modifications of physical artifacts (touchpoints), processes, policies and social roles.

This means that, whether we know it or like it, we in the egregore summoning business.

I got ever-so-slightly recognized (and I mean almost not at all) in some service design circles for pointing out that the essential medium of service design is organizations. An organization as a discrete social entity. As a disciple of Bruno Latour, I define “social” very broadly, and include within its scope not only humans but everything that supports a social order. Anything social is a human-nonhuman hybrid.

The medium we work with is social — organizations. But what do we actually aim to produce when we design in an organizational medium?

Monocentric designers (UXers, visual, interaction, communication, product designers) often say that, whatever medium they work in, the goal is to produce experiences — individual experiences.

Polycentric designers produce collective experiences, in which each of us partakes as participants, each with their own individual experience.

Right now, service design is heading into a new formalistic phase. It is probably necessary. But we must not lose the inward and qualitative whole as we focus on quantifiable parts.

Totality : Infinity ::

Esoterism, Judaism, Metaphysics, Philosophy

Some ideas alive and other ideas are not.

Nonliving ideas are mere content components. These content components can be combined with other content components to construct larger and more complex content component systems.

Living ideas are not mere content. Living ideas generate content.

Some living ideas participate in infinite being and others do not.

Transcendent living ideas are aware that they are organs of infinite ultimate being, and it this awareness that allows them to participate in being that transcends their comprehension.

Comprehensive living ideas believe they are themselves the totality of ultimate being, and whatever they cannot comprehend is, to them, nonexistent.

Levinas named his magnum opus Totality and Infinity. This book could have been given a very different title.

Hyperobject of knowledge

Esoterism, Philosophy, Pragmatism, Religion

The reason I am clarifying my theology is so I can contrast it with Richard Rorty’s inspiring atheistic alternative. But as is so often the case, I share Rorty’s disbeliefs. The God I know is not the “God” Rorty rejects. And a great many of Rorty’s atheistic hopes are hopes that, for me, are inseparable from my religious faith. To put it in his own words, he favors an atheistic description, while I favor a theistic one.

My main point of disagreement with Rorty is over the role of religion in social life, and the importance of maintaining commonality of faith across divergent modes of understanding. Here I find esoterism persuasive. Religious language and practice support a pluralism that supports cultural solidarity and personal spiritual growth and flourishing. But conceiving this truth requires a different mode of thought than science. Those whose understanding of “how things in the broadest possible sense of the term hang together in the broadest possible sense of the term” is scientistic will find themselves unable to enter this mode of understanding. Worse, they will consider this incapacity a virtue, and reinforce their humble “can’t” with a proud “won’t”. They want’t to break with the past and with those loyal to the past, and actively effect a rupture they believe they merely observe.

Now I’m thinking about where I disagree with esoterists. First, I do not believe in their absolute hierarchy of development. I do think there are degrees of understanding of esoteric truths, and I these truths are common across traditions. But we gain these only with some real and painful tradeoffs. We lose some virtues as we gain others. A religious community needs the full range of virtues, not only intellectual ones. I do not believe esoterists ever arrive at a full understanding of God.

With respect to knowledge, God’s infinite being is best understood as a hyperobject (to use Tim Morton’s term), an object of knowledge of a scale and topology ungraspable by any individual mind, and therefore best “known” through distributed understanding. But this is just the belief part of religious faith. Religious faith is a whole-being affair, something done with the entirety of one’s heart, soul and strength.

If this blog were an online publication, I’d set this post aside for further editing. But this blog is a public diary, so I’m hitting “publish”.

How to close the theory-practice gap

Design, Esoterism, Existentialism, Philosophy

I have never once just thought up a truly new practice and then executed it afterwards.

Every new thing I’ve ever conceived emerged from intuitive, nonverbal doing — from groping in the dark, from muddling through, usually under conditions of considerable perplexity and stress.

Only after, if it worked, can I go back and reflect on what made it work, and produce a theory.

I’ve never seen things go the opposite direction.

As far as I know, the only way to close the theory-practice gap is to theorize from practice. And it is less like a closing of a gap than it is paving something substantial but rough and poorly lit.

There is only a gap if theory has been sketched into a vacuum. I don’t think those gaps ever close.

And trying to practice from theory leads to mechanical sterility. It leads to execution of memorized dance steps, or the recitation of syllables from an alien language.

Every important thing I’ve ever conceived has come came to me this way. And every important thing I’ve ever learned has come to me first as a new practical capacity, a new ability to perceive or respond first — tacit know-how — and only much later has it become something I can actually explain.

Maybe a Sartrean formula would be helpful: Practice precedes theory.

What emerges from practice-forged theory is praxis — articulate practice.

I am excited about design as an alternative mode of practical life.

It is a new living tradition, a way of working, self-consciously developed by many diverse practitioners, solving a vast and growing array of real-world problems in every conceivable material (matter, space, time, information, imagination, feeling), for (arguably) the last 60-so years.

It is a tradition that must be appropriated and internalized before it becomes productive in the head, hearts and hands of a participant.

It is the appropriate mode of practice for anyone who works in systems in which humans participate. If you think about it at any depth at all, this category embraces just about all human activity, most of all the governing of people at every scale.

Design is the way we should be approaching life together, but its methods and even more, its core sensibilities, its conceptive capacities, are still largely confined to specialists. In my own life, I’ve found that disciplining myself to behave as a designer has made intractable, incorrigible problems soluble.

Almost anything I do, I do better if I do it in a designerly way.

But what is this designerly way? It is not methods. It is what animates these methods. It is a faith.

More and more, I am realizing that the purpose of my life is to illuminate and activate the esoteric underpinnings of design practice.

Like all faiths, design has a visible outward form that can be looked at — an exoteric expression — and an inward, esoteric being that cannot be looked at, but rather is seen from.

The reason I have been so quiet lately is I am returning to the sophia perennis. I want to do for design what esoterists have done with traditional religions — illuminate their transcendent unity. To this end, I am focusing on the esoteric depths of my own faith, and studying Kabbalah.

But just to preemptively address on obvious and important objection:  I am not in the slightest interested in making design into a religion. I am just trying to invest our practical lives with religious energy. We cannot continue on with this vacuous, stressful, tedious slogging. Our oil-dependent economy depends even more on another rapidly depleting fuel source, will-power. Our will-power tanks have been sucked dry are emptied even of vapors.

We sit before our screens, commanding our hands to move and type out words, but they refuse to do what we say.

We need an alternative, renewable psychic energy source. But we cannot tap into this source as long as we continue to insist that all new sources conform to our current sacred theories of power. These theories possess us and will not release us until we pay the price of our redemption.