Angels, Shekinah, and Systems Theory

166. It is written: “Who would not fear the King of the nations of the world?” (Yirmiyahu, 10:7) That is, their Supernal King is there to threaten and persecute them, and do with them as He pleases. Hence, He should be feared. And all fear Him Above and below. For it is written that among all the sages of the nations of the world (the angels that rule over these nations) and in their Kingdoms (Above) there is none like You. There are four Kingdoms Above that rule over all the nations of the world according to the Creator’s will. And there is no one who can do even the smallest action without His personal instruction. The sages of the nations of the world are the forces that rule them from Above, and all the wisdom of the nations of the world comes from these rulers. “In all their Kingdoms” means that the Creator’s will rules over them. - Zohar

What is this strange business of the kabbalah? Many people are inclined to study it, but I would wager that until the pioneering work of Konrad Lorenz in the 1950's, combined with the ideas of Pierre Teilhard de Chardin developed around the same time, that few people really understood what was going on - although, compared to other philosophical/mystical systems, the kabbalah appears to be more coherent - more systematic in its concepts, methods and assertions about reality.

The Kabbalah, it is claimed, goes back to Adam and Eve, 5777 years ago (according to the Hebrew calendar). The claim is that the Hebrew language is the "language of creation", which has never made much sense, but in light of systems theory, may make more sense than anything else.

What is language but the way we construct our symbolic-cognitive relation to the world? What is culture, ethnicity, and "race", other than the effects, as well as the cause, which come in and out of a particular language?

Human Beings

If you understand that evolution is true - and reality can only be understood in light of a process-metaphysics that empirically follows what nature shows, then you can construct a theory of reality that starts with a big-bang, and unfolds according to the elaboration of quantum principles of complementarity, symmetry, and coherency, which spatially-temporally speaking is always a movement towards paths of least-resistance, while at the same time giving expression to dynamics and movements elsewhere in the system (the quantum superpotential). Part and Whole remain quantuamly, connected, while local-dynamics give rise to "emergent agent" who, operating within the constraints listed above (symmetry etc) carve out their existence in space-time while interacting with other systems/agents.

By the time you reach the Human being, much "mattering" has happened. The meaning of existence, explored from within by natures agents - finds its deepest discoverer in the Human being - Homo Sapiens. Our knowledge is not "out there", or merely "in-here" - but represents an internal-mapping of coherent relations that, being fundamentally physical and physics-based, is simultaneously allowing a more complex physical dissipative dynamic - almost as if reality, when properly and correctly understood "mentally" - also achieves a physical existence in the brain-mind of the observer, as a state that is more coherent - of a higher "grade", or "score" than a previous relationship - and so permits a "deeper" relationship with reality itself.

I love What I Believe!

All the time it amazes me that people seem to care more for their pride - and implicitly, to fear the negative effects and significance of shame feelings as they relate to self, identity, and personal responsibility - than they do death. Is this not an astonishing phenomena?

Perhaps, it is based on the assumption that death is the end - no more "living" or having to "account" for things. This assumption - of course, is always a defense-mechanism - even if no one can say for certain that death is the end, the self certainly feels a sense of "easement" when its morals and ethics in living and relating to others contains much "incoherency" - so much that the mind cannot metabolize its 'truth' - or the truth - so that its knowledge-of-what-it-does - the very percept of its own developed 'nature' - is a feared knowledge - ontologically in the same category as the wolf or lion - as an external "marker" for threat-to-ones-life.

We may take our own perceptions far too flippantly - not yet aware that "lions and tigers" exist in our mind, and have as much ontological "oomph" as properties with physical effects as ideas which contain and represent 'energies'.

“Large group affiliation can be so powerful because an individuals sense of ethnic, religious, or national identity is so closely tied to his or her “core” identity – his or her deep, personal sense of sameness, of stable gender and body image, and of continuity between past, present, and future. Most of the time, we are not even aware of this link until our large group identity is threatened or until an event occurs in which group belonging gives us pleasure.” – Vamik Volkan, Blind Trust, pg. 24, 2004, Pitchtone

This is what Rabbi Elazar (or Moses De Leon) is referring to, even if his primitive dogma represents it as a cosmic battle between "God" and the "nations". The 'sages' of the nations, in all likelihood, are the spiritual caretakers of the traditions which perpetuate a particular brand of socio-political order in the world. I imagine noble houses, religious institutions, secret societies, and political institutions, all play a role in regenerating such phenomena.

If someone thinks language is "arbitrary" or a mere "battle of wills" between opposing parties, - then they are indeed living in a 'sub-shekinah' sense of reality, even if the inheritors of this tradition - i.e. the rabbis, can oftentimes be brazenly ethnocentric in their habits-of-thought, the basic or central idea, that there is a "truth" that is more real than any subjective truth - is what is at issue here, and indeed, the heart of our modern day political struggle.

There is an objective truth, and that is the perspective of non-linear physics, as it relates to the emergence of organisms, the emergence of "emergence" as an ordering principle (i.e. anti-reductionism), and the fundamental fact that love - the affect which flows between Humans - is the sine-quo-non of a happy and fulfilled Human existence. Being-Cognition - Not deficiency Cognition, is what the systems sciences happily lead the Human mind.

Yet - for so long, the isolated self-enclosed existence of peoples have maintained "islands of knowing" - a knowing without really knowing. Reminding me of Douglas Adams description of chaos theory, and on the back of James Gleicks famous book "Chaos: The Birth of a Science": "An awe-inspiring book. Reading it gave me that sensation that someone has just found the light switch".

Yes. There is undoubtedly something like a "spiral" shape to the evolution of organisms. Humans - and their beliefs - constitute a very advanced stage of this "teleodynamism" - or dynamical-knowing of nature.

It could be said that our beliefs literally "suck" the energy flow of our material dynamics towards some 'sink': the angel, or collective unconscious, as it were, which we in our collective-existing give expression to.

Yet there is, in fact, a deeper way of knowing --

ASS theory. I like it.

...not limited to Jews (an abhorrent, prototypical example of traumatological consciousness), but expressed everywhere in every culture. Think Socrates, Buddha, Zoroaster, Moses, Jesus, Gandhi, MLK, Mandela, or the confucianism of the East and democratic and sustainable sensibilities of native-americans.

Goodness emerges naturally, and likewise, the bad - or those who are hurting themselves, are violently recalcitrant against the good - those who remind them of the very principles that their biodynamism has devalued: a threat to their present structure.

Humans are uniquely situated today to truly transcend our lower existence and make it to a level that ecological constraints on knowledge acquisition have hitherto made impossible.

The internet is a profound technology - a profound means to extend ourselves not just externally, but internally as well.

Perhaps the Buddha saw the deepest - inasmuch as he saw that it was the Human who lay-at-root of what is, and determining what is.

Or, maybe, we have just sorely misunderstood what the Book of Genesis is talking about. Is it coincidence, for example, that the oldest evidence found to date of Human evolution is now being located to the land of Israel circa 380,000 years ago? If Humans first evolved in the middle-east, and then went into Africa, we are again being confronted by a strange pattern that derives from a mythological tradition which claims a specialness to the middle-east.

Anywhoo.....