Dual Deeds and Free Agents

Climbing over the tree and beyond the moon, our indictment extends to two additional levels for which the iris of the mind’s eye must continue to open in order to soak up the low light of mystery swallowed in mystery. These next two subversions constitute even more subtle self-inflicted paradoxes within the general cosmography outlined in Lurianic Kabbalah.

3) The Breaking of the Vessels

Without rolling out a full-blown discussion on the topic, we can provide a quick sketch of this central concept in the teaching of the Arizal. He describes an unstable world, a World of Chaos (Tohu) which seems to be a prequel to a World of rectification (Tikun). While one could make the argument that this chaotic world chronologically precedes its stable brother, a more psychological understanding grasps these worlds as twin realities that are constant companions. Precedence, then, is a measure of abstraction or a degree of effervescence.

The World of Chaos is highly charged. It possesses tremendous unwieldy lights. These lights are inner experiences whose intensity and volatility renders them out of control. Any attempt to attenuate this world by means of containment places the vessel at risk. With so much inner pressure they are bound to burst. Excavate enough of the bedrock of our seemly organized galactic ship, and lava and plasma (a nebulous thicket of flows) explode onto the scene wreaking havoc everywhere. The lights are too big and the vessels are too small.

Now picture this as a cognitive process happening in the constitution of our inner mental world. Each experience, idea, or emotion, if untamed, feeds back upon itself–its energy building to an overload. This description relates to the higher Hei of the Divine name which corresponds to binah or understanding and comprehension–the rational mind. From the womb of our understanding springs the emotions. Each brain child is special and has the continued nourishment of its understanding mother (binah) helping it to grow and grow. If unchecked, the rational support for how we are feeling will bring up a terror of an emotional ‘child’. Strong feelings are nursed by ideologies which are themselves the baked goods that come out of our analytic ovens after having been shaped from the raw dough of unrefined ideas. Keeping these ‘children’ at home for a prolonged period won’t work. They will destroy the house of understanding that ‘mother as the faculty of understanding’ built. Eventually nothing will contain them.

Vessels are like new and diverse media which store and play content. Chief amongst them are the vessels of the mind, heart and mouth. Too much light, too powerful an experience, and the mind shorts out. All of my cognitive categories are too primitive and too weak. What pocket flask can hold Niagara Falls? Turning to the soft tissue of the heart as the racing vehicle of one’s experience comes up short as well. Feeling one thing until it hurts, until the heart is broken, denotes the emotive firestorm of chaotic experience. Sometimes one feels more than what is possible to feel. Finally, Schrödinger’s Cat got my tongue. My words are somehow both very much alive and poisoned to death. While having so much to say I may over-stuff my words and they shatter from the strain. I need to talk but I can say nothing. The shards and fragments of meaning our scattered all over. My semantic excesses in what I tried to say were indiscriminately disseminated and ended up fertilizing foreign fields and yielding crops of mutated meaning.

Each over-driven bestial tendency of the soul rails against its cage until it is free. In Kabbalah these are the ‘kings of the World of Chaos’ who ‘rule and then they die.’ It calls to mind the motto of the State of New Hampshire “life free or die.’ The sovereign emotion cannot accept parliamentary rule nor any other check and balance of its supremacy, unlimited extension and expression of self. These ‘kings’ would rather be on top for a day than live in cooperation of an eternity or even a moment. This spirit without compromise is truly dangerous but still has a chance at amelioration if we can produce a new line of expansive vessels. Then order (or the World of Rectification) can spring forth from disorder (the World of Chaos).

Whose doing was this? Again, the blame would appear to land at the feet of the Creator who prefabricated this element into the system of Creation as an integral part of its design. Moreover, the external dysfunction of the moon would also trace its cause back to this even more essential crack in Creation. In the example of the moon, the expressed or reflected experience is only diminished, like a power transformer that steps down the voltage passing through it. However, with the breaking of the vessels its a total blow out. The communication is short circuited.

1. The act of Divine self-limitation or tzimtzum

The Creation of the world at an even higher level entailed the self-othering of the Creator Himself. In terms of the revelation of Divinity, the infinite light of God was everywhere. There was no vacancy. No room for an other. Thus, if there were to be even a semblance of an independent world, of creatures as ‘virtual’ others vis-à-vis God, then this infinite light would have to contract and fold into itself (like the tensing of a muscle) and thereby allow for a consciousness of finitude to emerge. This exercise in Divine space-making hollowed out a void with which the world could come into being.

If we distill this idea of tzimtzum or contraction down, it amounts to the hiding of the infinite within the finite, the self within the other. God feigns having an alter ego as it were. The Chassidic masters love to remind us that the root of the word for world (olam) in Hebrew is identical with that of the word for concealment (helem). Theophany amounts to a game of hide and seek. The conundrum brought about from this dissimulation is our profound addiction to letting the real give us the slip while we embrace the virtual. In other words, the world is a blindness of sorts. Finitude is the cloaking device of infinity.

The question of the contraction–the ultimate form of reductionism–gives rise to uncertainly about the existence of the Creator. This primal building ground can easily be mistook for an atheistic universe. The Master Builder tries to hide the evidence of His involvement in our evolution. This higher root-cause of the other causes is the top rung of the causal chain. The elevator that reaches here lets you off at the meta-level.

Questions that arise can only be apprehended through our faculty of ‘transcendental intuition’ which is known as chochmah in Kabbalah. Chochmah allows us to ‘think beyond thinking’ or to ‘unthink thinking’ by jumping into the metaphysical sea. In the Divine name, it relates to the letter Yud whose dot-like form attests to the compactification or super-condensing of Divinity into the limited experience of our reality. This highest level demands that we take time to unravel the mystery of what’s hidden in the worldhood of the world, the wonderment of life and the uncanniness of nature.

Each of these four subversive levels can now be demonstrated to be the root of four kinds of history whose characteristics we hope to uncover in Part Nine.

http://www.interinclusion.org/inspirations/the-history-of-histories-part-9/

http://www.interinclusion.org/inspirations/the-history-of-histories-part-7/ 

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