Room to Room to Room

Photo by Asher Crispe 2012

Picking up where we left off in our last article, we were discussing the first of two schemas under consideration (not that there couldn’t be more) wherein our four essential rooms divide into a group of three (living room, kitchen, dining room) and one (bedroom). For the explication of the second of these, we must remind ourselves that the bedroom can be seen as the ‘room apart.’ In the first situation, we placed the bedroom at the top of the sequence of letters so that it corresponded to the Yud. Now, we are going to contemplate the opposite situation wherein the bedroom assumes the role of representing the final Hei.

As we noted before, in the Divine name (Yud-Hei-Vav-Hei) the rooms relate such that the second Hei is in fact redundant. We have a situation where three are in fact four. In Jewish life and observance there are numerous examples of this: the three patriarchs vs. the four matriarchies, the three vs. four pronged shin on the tefillin box worn on the head, pesach, matzah and marror of Passover vs. the four species of Succot etc….. In this case the first three letters are ‘shadowed’ by the second Hei.

In order to understand this arrangement, let us back up and start at the beginning of the  Tetragrammaton again and work our way through it letter by letter. In the most general system of correspondence, the Yud relates to chochmah or insight. What we did not mention before (but should now enter the conversation) is that additional kabbalistic descriptions characterize chochmah (intuitive insight) as a pre-linguistic visual perception. In order words, I may have caught sight of something in my mind, but I cannot verbalize it. Not yet having been enclothed in words (linguistic processing is associated with binah or understanding in Kabbalah), this new intuition floats on the surface of my consciousness (or as the kabbalists phrase it: mati v’lo mati ‘touching but not touching’).

As a mental space, chochmah is where the inhabitants of my mind–all of my psychic content, pre-existing ideas, organized concepts, formulated reasons, logical operators stemming from binah–meet and greet new experiences which are guests that I entertain, mingle and converse with. More specifically, chochmah, or flashes of insight, presupposes that I am open to receiving company and that my house/consciousness is not already feeling full. Holding an ‘open house’ or ‘invite only party’ welcomes non-resident experiences and ideas into my ‘living room.’

Along these lines, we should make mention of the idea that the soul has five levels, each with its own name, according to Jewish mysticism. The fourth highest of these is identified with chochmah and called chaya meaning ‘living one.’ We learn this from a verse (Ecclesiastes 7:12) which reads “…wisdom (chochmah) gives life (te’chayah) to those who have it.” Thus, chochmah is the soul’s capacity to tune in to life as it is lived–life before it is apprehended by our understanding (binah) and analysis, conceptualized, grasped and fitted into words.

If the ‘living’ room within us reflects the phenomenology of the lifeworld, then the kitchen once again falls in the same position symbolizing binah (understanding/comprehension) just as it did in the previous schema from our last article.

One of the principle shifts that occurs when transitioning from chochmah to binah revolves around our capacity to transpose pictures of thought into words. Once enclothed within the ‘letters of thought’ (otiot ha’machshavah in Chassidut) the flow of experience slows. It might even give the appearance of stopping. While the fountain of wisdom (maayan ha’chochmah) remains relatively uncontained and undivided, taking an image and breaking it down into pieces that can be processed and encoded in a linguistic or logical system necessitates a different sort of mental acuity. Understanding (binah) an insight in life (chochmah) demands dissection. Our ability to grasp something implies that its movement has been highly restricted. To fully grasp it must mean that it’s completely ‘dead.’ What remains is a petrified representation of what was once alive. We perform an autopsy on a corpse, not a living being. Even raw foods have to be disconnected from the ecosystem from which they originated.

Therefore, this sense of cutting something off from its native environment, plucking the fruit of one’s experience (what you take away from an episode or exchange) off its tree (the larger system of interrelated ‘living’ phenomena), of treating the object of one’s understanding as a detached thing that exists in an of itself but which can be stirred in a pot and recombined into new forms, constitutes the hallmark of the kitchen of the mind. In Jewish law, we cannot eat living things. So too, our mental representations cannot assume or consume the fullness of present life. To paraphrase the Jewish philosopher Emmanuel Levinas: ‘the idea of a thing is not adequate to the thing itself.’ Why? Because that which exists and is living will always overflow and rupture any idea we may have of it. Try as we may to keep it in an iron clad conceptual pot, the ‘food’ will always boil over. Nutrients are lost.

While in the expanded model of six rooms, the kitchen occupied the position of gevurah (severity or judgement, both of which carry the connotation of dividing if not divisiveness) we can uncover the origin of gevurah in the mental faculty of binah. Our prooftext for this comes from Proverbs 8:14 which states: “I am understanding (binah); with me is severity (gevurah).” Understanding (representing the first Hei in the name Havayah) teams with our ability to slice through, chop up, or peel away at our object of reflection. As dramatic as the change in state that occurs with the food preparation in the kitchen, our minds produce a similar effect. The transformation of our ‘lived experience’ can be so extreme at times that the original ‘ingredients’ get lost in the final presentation of the dish and they are no longer recognizable. You might have to ask or be asked: ‘What’s in this meal?’

From the kitchen to the dining room we will once again evoke the association of eating with knowledge (as in the eating from the Tree of Knowledge that we explained in Part Six). As before, all of our emotions feast upon our overall state of consciousness. They are the ‘seats’ at the table (six in all which corresponds to the Vav [note Vav equals six] in the name Havayah). Each emotion digests the representations churned out by our mental kitchen. Fueled by these thoughts, our emotions become energized and grow– at least if they like the food. Some emotions, if an appetizing meal is not served up for them, refuse to eat. Malnourished to the point of starvation, our emotional growth may be stunted. Emotions may even die. For the positive emotions, this is clearly negative. Lovingkindness deserves good meals each day. Reflecting  or meditating on the right things can definitely feed our capacity for love and give ‘weight’ to our ‘kind’ inclinations. Other undesirable emotions, such as anger, need to be reined in. Stop feeding them. The more we feed them, the more they become hungry monsters with stomachs that are bottomless pits.

If we want to continue with this analogy, then having company over for a meal and mixing at the table home-bodies and foreign-bodies, with the dinner conversation over the food, generates an amazing emotional synthesis, a beautiful (tiferet) blend of sensory delights. My feelings participate in a dialogue (hosted in the dining room) between that which is manufactured by my mind (kitchen) and the original intuitions and insights gleaned from ‘having company over’ (living room).

Once our day is done (meaning all of the conscious activities which are symbolized as day matters), we go to bed. Emblematic of the unconscious, night and night time occurrences shift us into another world. Generally speaking, we inhabit a number of worlds simultaneously. However, only one world can be the focus of consciousness at a time. The world immediately above might be termed the ‘superconscious’ crown above the primary world within which we are dwelling. Furthermore, the world directly below the one we’re standing on operates as the ‘unconsciousness’ realm relatively speaking. Thus, to die in a world, at a certain level means to descend to the world below wherein we are buried. Additionally, the Talmud draws an important parallel between sleep and death. In fact, sleep is said to be one sixtieth of death. Hence, we fall asleep.

The bedroom now becomes the doubling of the higher world (with the experiences of all three rooms as the Yud-Hei-Vav of the Divine name Havayah) copied (albeit imperfectly) onto the world below. This is like saying that our waking experiences form the fodder for our dreams. Alternatively, the composting of the substance of the higher world becomes the fertilizer for the (imagination) of the world below. Since the final Hei of Yud-Hei-Vav-Hei relates to malchut (kingdom), it should not be surprising that the self-expression of a higher world (its kingdom) becomes the basis for the world below it. The ‘kingdom,’ according to Kabbalah, is as far as the word of the king travels. Empires are forged by communication. The dream/sleep/death factor in the lower world suggests a kind of information entropy at play–a gradual waning of the signal or a loss of integrity to the message. So we really need good communication in the bedroom as well as the rest of the house. Likewise, we must aspire to have sweet dreams and comfortable refreshing sleep so that we can wake to rejoin the rest of the house and in doing so make the house (Yud-Hai-Vav-Hei) whole.

Photo by Asher Crispe 2012

Citing Proverbs (5:5) once again: “her legs descend unto death.” ‘Her legs’ according to Kabbalah, denote the lower most reach and extension of malchut (kingdom). The descent into death carries the same connotation that we just put forth regarding falling asleep in a lower world. What we have here is a ‘displacement’ of the final Hei, which cannot remain attached to the other three letters completely but slips aways and ends up in exile. The redemption, therefore, amounts to the reconnection or restoration of the final Hei to the other three letters in order to complete the Divine name.

As far as the layout of our home is concerned, the bedroom must be both a little bit ‘detached’ from the rest of the house (living room, kitchen, dining room) and yet remain integral to the house as a whole. It is ‘separate-and-not-separate.’ It is partitioned but not completely inaccessible. In terms of the spacing and layout of consciousness, the bigger picture entails an embracing of cycles of both night/darkness (unconscious/bedroom) and day/light (consciousness/living room, kitchen, dining room) as a unified ‘Day’ (housing of our fully expanded or spelled out [Yud-Hei-vav-Hei]  consciousness). For support of this assertion, we need not look further than Genesis 1:5: “And God called the light day [conscious], and the darkness night [unconscious]; And there was evening and there was morning, one day [literally a ‘day of oneness’].”

The kabbalistic tour of the rooms of the home continues in Part 8.

http://www.interinclusion.org/inspirations/inspiring-interior-design-part-8/ 

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