Philosophy is a design discipline whose material is language, whose medium is enception (capacity to take as given what is given), and whose goal is actualization of ideal enworldment: inhabiting reality freely received as an infinitely valuable gift.
Category Archives: Enworldment
Gone native
What does it mean to “go native”?
According to Karen O’Reilly, “The term ‘going native’ refers to the danger for ethnographers to become too involved in the community under study, thus losing objectivity and distance.”
She (or whoever writes her abstracts), continues:
Going ‘native’ as a derogatory term associated with the rhetoric of colonialism. The continuing problem of what is now termed ‘over-rapport’. The lure of acceptance and its implications for lack of distance. ‘All but the dissertation’: the problem of never getting enough distance to be able to write it all up. Balancing distance and empathy, and the role of reflexivity in the participant observation oxymoron.
Design has its own ways of experiencing, understanding and participating in human life. It differs, often radically, from other ways of experiencing, understanding and participating — for example the ways of a business executive, an engineer or a marketer.
Let us call these ways of understanding and participating “enworldments“. Enworldments extend far beyond perspectives or “worldviews”, because they are practical, material, instrumented, environed, linguified, and, perhaps above all, ethnomethodic.
Participation in an enworldment reconfigures our own sense of reality, and it can temporarily change us as people. This is why in some settings we feel natural and say things like “I feel like myself”, where in others we feel subtly off, or awkward, or unnatural, or even estranged from ourselves. We feel this way until we return to a more comfortable setting. Sometimes we are born into an alien enworldment, and find our place — and with it, ourselves — later in life. A lot of romantic longing is for a person with whom we feel at home. But even if we do find a home, if we go back to our alien place of origin, we can re-lose ourselves within hours, and find ourselves once again the pissed-off alienated adolescent we worked so hard to outgrow.
Enworldment is a powerful force, and if we are insufficiently aware of enworldment and its uncanny workings, it is almost automatically overpowering.
This is why I spend hours every morning reading weird philosophical books instead of chasing industry best practices in design journals and Harvard Business Review.
I do this because I have a strong sense of the importance of design’s own enworldment. By understanding it deeply, thoroughly and extensively, I can hold it more firmly and preserve it even when I immerse myself in other enworldments, as I must in order to work effectively as a designer.
My philosophical work prevents me from going native and forgetting why I do what I do.
It prevents me from going native in the corporate world, even if the leaders of my own organization, or even the thought leaders of my whole industry go native in the corporate world and forget the whole reason design matters.
For indeed, this has happened to service design, and much of the rest of the design world.
Service design has gone native. Service design is now as soullessly corporate as every other corporate function.
We put so much effort into learning the world of business management and engineering, and the management of engineering and the engineering of management that we have forgotten design’s transformative mission and we have become part of the machinery that grinds humans down into fungible resources. We have forgotten design so thoroughly, we are oblivious to the fact that we are just business consultants with briefcases full of new management methods. We just know we don’t love our jobs anymore, and that we have little besides fear and duty driving us through each joyless, dispirited man-day, and man-month between this calendar date and the terminal milestone, retirement.
We no longer even have an inspired alternative to offer.
We no longer provide ourselves the conditions needed to do design work. We work long hours, chop up our days (and souls) into the same tiny 15 and 30 minute chunks, juggle the same inconceivable mass of disparate details, glue the disparate details together with the same logical and logistical glue, talk the same endless talk as any other cog on the Chaplin machinery.
And deprived of conditions to design, we stop designing. We talk and talk instead of doing iterative trial and error . We write long reports instead of prototyping. We adopt a QA model of quality, and think we have done something right when no nitpicker can accuse us of doing something wrong. Consequently, our outputs are nothing anyone could love. We construct vast systems of parts with totals that any accountant or procurement officer must admit equals precisely the whole.
We are hired to grind with higher efficiency and effectiveness, because that is how we sell ourselves when we meet our clients where they are. We call what we sell “design”. But we are no longer judges of what is or is not design.
Service design has gone native. We are corporate.
Our only remaining contact with design is with an emptied word.
And the forgetful shake their heads knowingly at those of us who still remember who we are and why we design.
When a field goes underground, it does so like a seed under winter soil. The kernel preserves itself alive under snow, frost, frozen mulch and decay, until conditions for growth return with the spring.
It is easy to store and retrieve What. It is documented fact.
It is a little harder to record and reactivate How, if know-how is lost. But How can be relearned step by step.
But Why, once lost, is nearly impossible to summon back to life, when feel-why is lost.
Why must be cultivated, kept alive, matured, propagated, and at times hidden and protected. When we lose Why we also lose our ability to sense its absence, except as phantom ache where love once was.
Alive to craft
Most of our making is construction. We build systems of meaningful units, glued together with logic and causality.
We do precious little craft.
In fact, we do not even know what craft means.
We are dead to craft.
Because we are dead to craft, the material world is dead to us.
We are cursed with a midas touch. Whatever we touch turns to word. On contact with our skin, words to turn to more words — words about words — entire universes of words — packing inward, denser and denser, within our word stuffed suits.
We cannot touch the world. We cannot feel anything against our skin, except the texture of text. Words have woven themselves around us, webs, cobwebs, soul mummies, whited cocoons.
We can speak fluently about galaxy clusters, theories of relativity, subatomic particles, but we have to sit down with a computer to figure out what love is. We understand how things happen in supercolliders, distant laboratories, radio telescopes, but our own kitchen table, and the things sitting on and around it? It is all inscrutable epiphenomena.
Walter Benjamin quoting Stanley Eddington, made this same point:
I am standing on the threshold about to enter a room. It is a complicated business. In the first place I must shove against an atmosphere pressing with a force of fourteen pounds on every square inch of my body. I must make sure of landing on a plank travelling at twenty miles a second round the sun — a fraction of a second too early or too late, the plank would be miles away. I must do this whilst hanging from a round planet head outward into space, and with a wind of aether blowing at no one knows how many miles a second through every interstice of my body. The plank has no solidity of substance. To step on it is like stepping on a swarm of flies. Shall I not slip through? No, if I make the venture one of the flies hits me and gives a boost up again; I fall again and am knocked upwards by another fly; and so on. I may hope that the net result will be that I remain about steady; but if unfortunately I should slip through the floor or be boosted too violently up to the ceiling, the occurrence would be, not a violation of the laws of Nature, but a rare coincidence. Verily, it is easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for a scientific man to pass through a door. And whether the door be barn door or church door it might be wiser that he should consent to be an ordinary man and walk in rather than wait till all the difficulties involved in a really scientific ingress are resolved.
Bruno Latour, crypomarian ethnographer of Sciencestan, said this:
When the debate between science and religion is staged, adjectives are almost exactly reversed: it is of science that one should say that it reaches the invisible world of beyond, that she is spiritual, miraculous, soul-fulfilling, uplifting. And it is religion that should be qualified as being local, objective, visible, mundane, unmiraculous, repetitive, obstinate, sturdy.
…
Religion does not even attempt to race to know the beyond, but attempts at breaking all habits of thoughts that direct our attention to the far away, to the absent, to the overworld, in order to bring attention back to the incarnate, to the renewed presence of what was before misunderstood, distorted and deadly, of what is said to be “what was, what is, what shall be,” toward those words that carry salvation. Science does not directly grasp anything accurately, but slowly gains its accuracy, its validity, its truth-condition by the long, risky, and painful detour through the mediations of experiments not experience, laboratories not common sense, theories not visibility, and if she is able to obtain truth it is at the price of mind-boggling transformations from one media into the next.
What is it to be alive to craft?
How does the world feel on our fingertips when we remove the thick mittens that control our hand movements?
We feel what material suggests. We are medium. We, our instruments, the being coming are fused in medium.
My eye, my hand, the pencil in my hand, the vibration of pencil tip against paper tooth, that trace of graphite my pencil leaves, the form on the paper, the urge for a line here, a shading there, my eye and my heart — they are inseparable. Words, memories, stray emotions drift about discreetly. They know not to get in the way. Something comes into being through the work, among the converging materials, borne on media.
An unknown goal draws the present toward its desire. This is how it is to craft.
In craft we are alive to reality. In this state, we receive reality, take it in, incorporate it, grateful for what is given. We finally know that we do not need much, only a handful, but this handful makes us and the world real. Without that, there is nobody present to possess a retirement fund the size of the entire S&P.
Do you feel the unreality of what you take for life? Do you suspect you are living in a simulation? Entertain the reality that it is true. You are living a simulation — and this lingering suspicion is your last tenuous contact with reality.
Our being streams out into the world around us. Every soul is nebula-shaped and its ethereal arms radiate to the ends of the cosmos. The world streams into us, and its tendrils convey light and life from oblivion, the benevolent mask of infinitude. The streams crisscross, interweave, and each brightly knotted nexus is someone.
Protected: Subjective multistability
Protected: Hex
Returning to some enworldment design themes
I’ve said it before, but why not say it again? Take this as attention sustained for decades — as evidence of an enduring soul…
A better distinction than technology (or artifice / artificiality) versus natural is what we experience as natural versus what we experience as unnatural. That turns it into a matter of design quality. What artifice lends itself to second-naturalness, and what stays unnatural? We’ve used fire and language for so long they seem like part of nature to us. What other artifices can we add to the world to make the addition — and the world — and ourselves feel natural?
This standard, by the way, pushes Liz Sanders’s classic useful / useable / desirable framework to new levels of aspiration.
Useful is not only just having needs met. Useful means reducing or eliminating unnatural-feeling tasks required to meet our needs, or to change tasks into more natural and meaningful ones. “Do it for me, or allow me to do it myself in a less painful, more meaningful way.”
Usability is not just a matter or reducing frustrations, but also the need to figure things out at all. The goal is to make natural extensions of our thinking, our perceiving and our doing. “Afford me direct intuitive connect with the world.”
Desirability is not merely about aesthetics or entertainment, but about affirming what makes us love the world and our own lives together. “Inspire me to feel more value and more gratitude for our life.”
Pearls and Shells, reinvocation
In earlier invocations of the “Pearls and Shells” anomalogy, the pearlescent element, nacre, insulated the subject from the object and environment, and allowed these not-self beings to peacefully neighbor or environ the self.
This individuating substance was imagined to be mind: We coat whatever realities we cannot incorporate into our own selfhood with intelligibility. Mind helps us cope with not-self, also known as alterity.
The earlier anomalogy goes like this: An oyster inhabits an existence suspended between two alterities. The first alterity, the outer alterity, is the all-encompassing ocean. The second alterity, inner alterities, is whatever particles from the ocean get inside the shell with the oyster. The oyster responds to both alterities the same way. It secretes its own selfhood, its mind-nacre, and coats the offending alterity, layer upon layer, until the alterity is smooth, lustrous and undisturbing. The particles are painted smooth and round and become pearls. “Good fences make good neighbors.” Now the oyster can live side by side with these irritants, because they are comprehended with nacre. The ocean, too — the dread source of all irritants and inexhaustibly teeming with existential dangers — is coated with layer upon layer of protective nacre. It is painted on all sides, repainted, innumerable times until it is thick, smooth and protective. The oyster coats the ocean with nacre, and the inner surface of the shell, the mother-of-pearl lining makes the ocean habitable for the oyster and its treasure-house of pearls.
The nacre substance is the same in both alterities, and its function is the same — insulation, protection, self-preservation. What differs is the topology — the situating curvature. Pearls are convex and are comprehended by the oyster. The shell is concave; it comprehends the oyster. Flip your shell inside-out — that is, evert it — and you will find yourself holding a pearl. Evert a pearl, and you will find yourself held within a shell, or rather, the shell will find you held within it.
Lately, I have noticed that my thinking has moved to a new standpoint.
The next invocation of “Pearls and Shells” goes like this: Perhaps the nacre with which we paint the defining boundaries between selfhood and otherhood is not mind, but something beyond mind that conditions and enables it. Perhaps nacre is the principle of “not” — nihilitude.
Nihilitude belongs to infinitude, and is inseparable from it. Nihilitude generates and sustains finitude within infinitude, without disturbing the all-inclusive purity of infinitude with even a trace of exclusion. Indeed, exclusion of nihilitude from infinitude would be an abhorrent exclusion.
Perhaps nihilitude is the substance the ocean self-secretes into itself in order to allow a spark of itself to be an oyster, liberated to be not-the-whole-ocean, through imprisonment within a mother-of-pearl vault. The vault fills with ten-thousand pearls, each of which, touched by the oyster’s tender midas flesh, is counted among its pearly hoard.
As behind, so beyond. And so thrice-present between.
Protected: Scrappy thoughts on metanoia
Protected: As aleph, so tav
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?
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.
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 occurs 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.
Protected: Brief: Enworldment
Notes on design esoterism
Ontopologically, Beriah sur-prises what Yetzirah variously com-prises as objective content in Assiyah.
Neither Beriah nor Yetzirah is something that can be comprehended.
Yetzirah comprehends by one of myriad formational, enworlding principles. Yetzirah is not itself comprehensible, for the reason that sight cannot be seen.
Beriah comprehends (envelops) comprehension through observation of difference among enworldments, even differences across recollections of observations. Beriyah is even less comprehensible than Yetzirah, for (to make an anomalogy) Beriah is transcendent sensus communis among all possible Yetziratic enworldments, against and within the limitless Oneness of Atzilut.
And every Yetziratic enworldment is some particular social sensus communis regarding the human lifeworld.
And the human lifeworld is Assiyah — the perceptual sensus communis of human perception.
To understand all this inside-out and outside-in, backwards and forwards, to-to-bottom and bottom-to-top, and to know it by heart, soul and body, and therefore internalize and, more importantly, spontaneously externalize its pragmatic consequences, is to “suprehend” what transcends, yet grounds, comprehension.
(Suprehension is the whatless therefore of pregnant oblivion.)
Concepts concerning Beriah are not a conceptual grasp of Beriah, but derviations across differences. Another anomalogy: Light emanated within Atzilut is transmitted by Beriah, refracted through Yetzirah, then reflected upon Assiyah — and only upon reflection can a truth be grasped, indirectly.
Design esoterism seeks to dissolve the Axial regime and its domain divisions, in order to resanctify what has been secularized. Religion is disinvented, exvented. Methods are ritual. Tools are ritual objects. Organizations summon responsible collective beings.
Esoterism wants to materialize.
Lord, truly we have come to the end of this kind of vision of heaven.
Exnihilism is at the heart of it.
New ex nihilo irruptions from Beriah are preceded by intense apprehension. We let go or lose grip on our Yetziratic social sensus communis and ascend into aporia, where, on all important matters, our intuitive reach exceeds our cognitive grasp. But this loss “opens the hand of thought” so new forms can alight on our open palms — a new as-yet-solitary social sensus communis.
Dreamt awakening
Identities are the result of participation in particular forms of social life. We participate in social being, and this gives us some portion of reality as a world.
Identities enworld us, with others who also belong to the identity. They are our co-inhabitants of our enworldment, and we identify with them.
We notice our own identity most starkly in encounters with those of other identities. We sense a difference that is as important as it is hard to describe. They sense that they inhabit some other world where things are experienced and talked about and judged very differently. We categorize them, first, as different from us. As we encounter multiple forms of difference, we categorized and name categories, not only those of others, but our own.
Here is where things get tricky. While identities can be categorized, and categorizing identities can be helpful for recognizing our identity as an identity, not naively as some privileged true world — identities are not categorizations.
We do not belong to an identity simply by categorizing ourselves or being categorized by others.
And identities exist independently from categorization. We may participate in a social being without even being aware of it. And sometimes this unawareness of identity represents a naivety toward the role social being plays in how reality is given to us. Failure to recognize participatory identity results in naive realism.
Now, imagine a scenario. Imagine a social group whose members fully succumb to a category mistake that conflates identity with categorization. And imagine that participation in this social being consists of doing precisely this “identification” both of oneself and others, so that real identity — identitarian participation — recedes into the background, while identity categories are thrust into the foreground. And that background identity, the actual identity of this group devolves into a thoroughgoing naive realism… of having transcended precisely what that to which they have succumbed: a dreamt awakening.