He didn’t recognize them anymore. The world he knew had shattered, and they were all but shards. Sometimes they cut. Whether he walked among the market throngs or sat alone in the forest, he felt alone.

In that solitude, he was hollow and anxious, surrounded by loud waves of change, fear, and anger. Sometimes he wanted to gasp and kick, thinking that soon he might tire of treading water, then fall into the deep and drown.

But a few, he saw, had turned back to the old ways—the books, the traditions, the places of worship. He had even gone to an old temple one day. Those he found there seemed to be clinging to the flotsam of something that had been broken up in a great storm. The congregants invited him to come back, but something in him—perhaps the restless stillness of anticipation—told him he could not.

One morning, something woke him just before dawn. As the first light began to paint the sky, something inside him mirrored it. And as the sun rose, he felt its warmth, within and without. It flowed through him, filling him with energy. Creative energy. A generative urge, yes, but a sublime warmth, too, as if his heart were a vessel capable of containing an emanation from the All.

The experience reminded him he was still alive.

He thought of going back to the old temple, but knew it was still freighted with its traditions, interpretations, and well-worn paths among the well-planned gardens and well-tended grave sites. Any new ideas would just stir up dust, and the old temple-goers are allergic to dust.

He thought of joining the angry mobs, but when they are not chanting slogans, they are bowing to the houses of power. Their plebiscite prayers are never answered by those who fancy themselves as gods. But their gods don’t create. They take and impose.

He thought of letting himself fall into the abyss where nothing is sacred, and nothing is real or true. There, at least, he might be able to ignore the cacophony, to determine that the world is just Sturm und Drang and ultimately meaningless. But nothing could be created in the abyss.

Where could he go?

His solitude, along with the consuming radiance that filled him, would become somehow burdensome if he could not find the others and set to work. So he went back into the forest to reflect, where he hoped he might find an answer, at least, outside the cacophony of change, fear, and anger.

He went deep into the woods, where light shone in glimmers and shafts through the treetops. As he approached the forest stream, he discovered he was not alone.

A stag stood at the bend in the brook, drinking. It was large but unhurried, and the light that fell in shafts through the canopy seemed to gather between its antlers—drawn to them the way iron filings orient around an invisible field. The stag stopped. Then it raised its head and looked at him without alarm. It held his gaze long enough for him to understand this was not a chance encounter. Then the stag turned and moved along the bank—not in retreat, but intending to be followed.

So he followed.

The stream bent around a great oak whose roots had been bent by the brook and its bank over many years, pulling and twisting until they formed a natural, shaded hollow. Sheltered on three sides by roots, earth, and moss, it was open to the water and light on the fourth side.

The stag stopped at the tree and went no further.

Inside the hollow, a child sat with her back to him. She was stacking stones along the curved edge of the roots. She worked the way children work when no one is watching—completely absorbed. She placed each stone deliberately, building a modest wall. It could hold warmth, but not much. It could shelter a few, but no more. It was the work of someone enclosing the sacred against the profane, saying: Here, this place, for us, for now. She built it in the spirit one might cup a candle's flame.

The child turned and looked at him. She was neither surprised nor expectant. She looked at him the way one looks at a person who arrives exactly when they are supposed to. Then she stood, brushed her muddy hands on her knees, and walked into the trees, leaving the wall complete for him to admire.

The stag was gone.

He stood at the edge of the hollow for a long time. Above him, the canopy moved in a breeze. The stream flowed. He thought of the others—the ones he had not yet found, the ones who were perhaps standing at the edge of their own forests, waiting, wondering what they were waiting for.

There were eleven others. He would make twelve.

He envisioned a place where all twelve could gather, away from the cacophony and the waves. There, they would create something together, sheltered for a time in something modest and temporary, but holy.

He knelt by the water and picked up a stone.

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A founding convocation is in order. If you're interested, please reach out.

It will come into existence when enough of us see what it can be and are ready to commit to its becoming. For many, that will take accepting that their societies have become fractured and factionalized. Others will conclude their once-great civilizations have become decadent and disordered, that their communities have become rootless and their spirits aimless as they haunt the material world.

Too many live without binding agents, which makes them weak and vulnerable.

Our order shall form in the blessed tension between the Unanswerable Questions and Unquestionable Answers—inquiry and doctrine. The former supplies us with a measure of spiritual nourishment and, occasionally, of wonder. The latter offers us a star around which to orbit, a sense that we coalesce around a certain set of commitments.

Every Summer, for example, our order must recommit to its Mission: to organize so as to form a consent-based social order—a polity without the politics of domination. Behind this mission, we set out the brutal game theory of the protection racket. It explains life under Pharaoh, or Caesar, or George III. Since the time of brigands and planters, this protection racket has persisted throughout the ages, freighted with pomp, circumstance, and self-congratulation.

But if we are to escape Pharaoh, we have to change the collective consciousness of a people. We have to awaken a Geist. We have to build an Empire of the Mind.

But a consent-based social order does not exist, the skeptics will say.

Yet, we shall reply. That is why we exist, among other whys.

Our mission is to midwife a polity, just as the Greeks developed democracy, the Romans built a republic, and the Americans introduced the first constitutional republic. Though men such as Thomas Jefferson, Robert Yates, and George Mason were all worried that the 1787 Constitution risked forming an authority that would overshadow a person’s rights to “Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness” as well as the “consent of the governed” meant to secure those rights, the American Founders instituted something more ideal than what had preceded it.

Eventually, their polity mutated into an extractive empire before it could celebrate a quarter-millennium. Yet Jefferson, Yates, and Mason, who had warned against the consolidation of power, possessed wisdom and foresight from which future generations could draw. Echoes of their Geist persisted, as did those of the Greek and Roman Geists, and of Persia and Israel.

Yet for imperfect ideals and their imperfect instantiation mediums, people were willing to kill and die.

They still are.

As it is proper in Winter, our thoughts should turn to death. The question before us, then, is: For what should we be willing to kill or die? The answer should be the same as that to the question: For what should we be willing to live and create? Surely the answer has to do with the Pursuit of Happiness—or in our order, the Tiers of Joy. Yet somehow we don’t savor a meal or cherish the time as much when we dine alone.

Communities of Individuals

Neither hedonic individualism nor eudaimonia is enough. As Ibn Khaldoun reminds us, we are also creatures of asabiyyah, that is, social solidarity. One’s happiness is bound up in both the I and the We.

Our nomadic forebears, roving extended families, encountered other nomadic groups seeking the same resources. Such confrontations were often violent, so we evolved a sense of kindredness and an instinct for in-group protection and mutual support. But there is wisdom in this beyond survival. Some of that wisdom is instrumental, some is transcendental.

Just as speaking the same language lowers coordination costs, so does the enchantment of shared blood. Yet siblings of our order won’t likely have the blood ties that bind the members of a roving clan. We must bind together with forces beyond blood. Beyond race. Beyond even the patch of soil upon which we were born.

To operate according to a common doctrine creates social coherence, as does spiritual siblinghood.

We recognize the fact of pluralism. That means we include the knowledge that each of us pursues ends that differ from one to the next, so each of us is engaged in a separate pursuit. Yet we also know we are stronger together. To slake the thirst of loneliness and avoid the vulnerability of solitude, we gather at the well of solidarity. We are happier together—basking in the mystery, living by our code, and finding meaning in the fact that each of us has a place in a community of siblings.

If our siblinghood is to seed a society of consent, we must be willing to die for our cause and for one another, just as the American revolutionaries were willing, in their morbid humor, to “hang together” so they wouldn’t hang separately. In John’s gospel, it is written that “Greater love has no one than this: to lay down one’s life for one’s friends.”

How odd that anyone would kill or die for some state of affairs that doesn’t exist. How odd that anyone would kill or die for the brothers and sisters of a creed.

How odd, but how human.

Killing in the Name Of

Nonviolence remains the prime virtue of our order. Its daily practice in thought, word, and deed defines us as siblings. But our pledge never to initiate violence against the innocent doesn’t require us to become pacifists. Like the ancient warrior-monks of the Far East, or Quohelet in the Near East, we must pray for peace and prepare for war. For each has its season.

If we are to become a siblinghood, we must be prepared to defend ourselves within reasonable bounds. And if we are ever to form a consensual society, we will almost certainly have to defend ourselves from enemies within and without. Predators and parasites will encircle us. So defense and retaliation will be necessary to serve our mission, realize our vision, and preserve whatever we create that contributes to our thriving.

Imagine a membrane around our order. This membrane symbolizes the separation of the sacred and the profane. That is, we sacralize that which is within the membrane. We sacralize our siblings not merely because we can better count on their sacralizing us, although that is true. We sacralize them because we know they share our commitments, and we are conscious that they are holy sparks with whom we set the work of tikkun.

Now, other membranes might well extend in concentric circles outward from this inner membrane. And these fall on a continuum outward from the sacred. The next membrane might include allies or non-sibling fellow travelers, whose behaviors and worldviews give rise to a peaceable domain of interaction. But the further out we go, the closer we get to those who do not share anything resembling our doctrine. And at the outermost reaches, we find those who threaten us and our way of life.

Those who denied the existence of their enemies—and were not willing to kill and die defending their own—rarely lived to tell the tale.

Hyperstition

A hyperstition is a fiction that makes itself real. It’s an idea, narrative, or belief that—through the very act of being circulated and believed—causes itself to come into existence. The concept collapses the distinction between an imagined reality and our present reality. Its darker variants conjure lies and deception, but its more virtuous forms channel mythic truths that can become reality in the future.

Philosopher Nick Land, who coined the term, says hyperstitions are “fictions that make themselves real.” Indeed, something that exists in the future—imagined in the present—can have transformative power. It’s rather like a self-fulfilling prophecy, but stranger, perhaps. A normal self-fulfilling prophecy works through straightforward psychology: One believes she will fail a test, so she does not study, and thus fails. With hyperstition, the fiction propagates itself through culture, almost as if it has its own agency, setting the conditions of its actualization.

Mythic truths, sufficiently propagated, become Geists capable of combating narratives of deception that will almost certainly become enemy Egregores. Grey hyperstition thus operates through time, but non-linearly. Drawing on occultism and cybernetics, Land suggests that hyperstitions can “come from the future”—that a future state of reality exerts a kind of backward causation, pulling the present toward it through the medium of ideas and belief. That is why we must overcome failures of imagination, then engage in radical collective intention-setting, then be willing to fight or die according to that intention.

At the very least, we must be willing to live for it, which, as we have said, is to seek to repair the world—despite our imperfection, because we carry a spark.

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Before we get into Kabbalah, we need to set up two ideas.

The first is a debate that theologians have been having for centuries: Is God transcendent—distant, separate, and wholly other? Or is God immanent—inherent in all things, and flowing through us as nature itself?

It turns out, as we’ll see, that the Kabbalists had a pretty elegant answer to these questions.

The second idea is the Unity of Opposites. Day and night. Hot and cold. Young and old. These feel like opposing categories, but there’s something philosophically interesting going on: opposites are always defined in relation to each other. They’re inseparable, so interdependent. There is unity in opposition—a fundamental complementarity.

Now, keep both thoughts in mind as we continue.

Reimagining Genesis

The Kabbalists—Jewish mystics whose thought flourished in the Levant, and later in medieval Europe—offer a fascinating account of what happened before creation. Not the creation of the world, but the very first moment of anything at all.

Pre-creation. Pre-cosmos.

First, they say, there was Ain. Nothingness. The void.

From the void emerged Ain Soph—literally “without limit,” that is, the Infinite and Eternal. (Notice what just happened: from absolute nothing came its perfect opposite.)

And from the Infinite and Eternal radiated Ain Soph Aur—the Divine Radiance. This force emanates from the eternal source.

Ain,
Ain Soph,
Ain Soph Aur.

The Void, the Infinite, and the Divine Radiance. Three in one. The Kabbalists, without quite advertising it, gave us a trinitarian God.

[They laughed.]

In our original framework, Ain Soph is transcendent—infinite, beyond all categories, and unknowable by mere mortals. Ain Soph Aur is immanent—it radiates outward, flows into the world, and dwells within things. Transcendent and immanent. Not either/or, but both/and. Another unity of opposites, just like the Void and the Infinite.

Syncretism

Where did these ideas come from? In a word: syncretism—the hybridization of different philosophical and religious traditions.

The Kabbalists were inheritors of a long conversation between Jewish thought and Greek philosophy, and the results are remarkable.

Start with Plato. His theory of Forms proposes that behind the messy, imperfect world of our senses lies a higher realm of eternal, ideal archetypes, such as Beauty, Justice, or the Perfect Circle. This is one of the most powerful ideas in Western Philosophy.

Of course, Plato has his critics.

The philosopher Sidney Morgenbesser once made fun of this idea by taking his students to a restaurant. If you’re a Platonist, he told them, you can only order Soup. (You can’t order the tomato bisque or the clam chowder.) You have to order Soup—the ultimate Form. Tomato bisque is but a fragment, an imperfect instance of the eternal.

I dare say Morgenbesser wasn’t a Kabbalist. Kidding aside, though, Platonists see the world as a cascade from unity into multiplicity, from the universal into the particular.

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Plotinus

Now fast-forward from Athens to Rome, and meet the Egyptian-born philosopher Plotinus, who served up what we call Neoplatonism. In other words, Plotinus took Plato’s Forms and pushed them further. He proposed a supreme principle he called The One—an entity so fundamental that you can’t even say it is “good” or “beautiful” or even “existent” without limiting it by category.

The only way to approach understanding The One is through negation: “not this, not that.” This and that are but fragments of a higher-order unity, mediated by our imperfect, time-bound minds.

Sound familiar?

Plotinus’s One doesn’t just sit there, either. It emanates. It radiates outward in a kind of cosmic overflow.

• The first emanation is the Nous, the Divine Mind, where the eternal Forms reside.

• The second is the Psyche, the Cosmic Soul, where those Forms begin to differentiate into categories, sequences, and multiplicity.

• The third is the Sensible World — material reality, where forms are fully fragmented into the individual things around us. (Morgenbesser’s tomato bisque.)

And yet, through it all, there is unity in diversity. The cosmos is a single entity expressing itself in many ways.

This is called monism.

But syncretism cuts both ways.

Interestingly, the second-century philosopher Numenius of Apamea, an important forerunner of Plotinus, once asked: “What is Plato but Moses speaking Greek?” He meant it as a compliment to both. Ideas flowed in both directions across the ancient Mediterranean—with Jewish thinkers absorbing Greek philosophy, and Greek philosophers absorbing Jewish theology.

When the Kabbalists eventually arrived, they were building on centuries of cross-pollination—of ideas having sex.

The Shattering of the Vessels

Back to Ain Soph Aur—that divine radiance emanating from the Infinite.

If Ain Soph is going to generate a world, that radiance needs containers. Vessels—kelim in Hebrew—that can hold and differentiate the divine light into higher-order categories. Think of them as like Plato’s Forms, the archetypal structures that shape reality, only rigidly.

But here’s the problem: the Divine Radiance is too powerful.

The vessels can’t hold it. They shatter.

This is sheverat ha-kelim—the shattering of the vessels. The cosmic catastrophe at the heart of Kabbalistic cosmology.

The holy shards scatter throughout the cosmos. They compose the physical world we inhabit. When those shards are ordered and harmonized, we glimpse goodness and beauty. When they become more disordered, separated, scattered—that’s what we experience as suffering and evil. Not evil as a positive force, but evil as privation, as fragmentation, as things being more broken, separate, and disharmonious than they ought to be.

And here is where it gets personal: we, too, are those holy shards. Glints of Ain Soph Aur flow through each of us. The divine is not only transcendent and remote. It is immanent in its nature, flowing through you, me, and everyone we encounter.

What We Are Here to Do

This is where the Kabbalists arrive at something genuinely beautiful.

We carry the shards of the vessels, and thus the divine sparks.

We also have freedom—and freedom, amid all this fragmentation, means we are imperfect and error-prone. We are not perfect. But we are holy. And that matters.

Ain Soph stands outside of time. But its emanance (Ain Soph Aur) flows through us as instruments of a cosmic purpose.

That purpose is what the Kabbalists call tikkun — repair. Hence, tikkun olam. The call to repair the shattered world.

Yet the goal of tikkun is the harmonization of difference—not the elimination of multiplicity or a return to perfect unity. We are not trying to force everything back into an undifferentiated whole, to put back the vessels, or find our way back to the void. Instead, we are charged with reordering the shards toward greater coherence, greater beauty, greater justice.

Harmonization doesn’t create a perfect world—but a more perfect world than this one. For our posterity.

And when our children inherit that better world, they too will practice tikkun. And their children will inherit what they build. Generation after generation, holy sparks reordering themselves and each other, never perfect, but always better.

We are, as the Kabbalists understood matters, the cosmos reflecting on itself, then repairing itself.

Worthy of Reflection

As shards of broken vessels, we are capable of reflection. Here are some questions we can reflect on today:

• How does this account of pre-creation and creation compare to what cosmologists tell us? (Are the parallels—void, singularity, emanation, expansion, complexity emerging from simplicity—more than coincidental?)

• What does it mean to carry the divine spark of Ain Soph Aur?

• How does that change the way you see the person sitting next to you?

• And perhaps most practically: how do we practice tikkun every day? How do we reorder the holy sparks—first in ourselves, then in our families, then in our communities?

For the Kabbalists, that’s not just a theological question. It’s the whole point of life. Because, in the process, we can become closer to Ain Soph. We can experience a modicum of Ain Soph Aur’s compassionate presence—enough to fill us, but not shatter us. And we can try to find a little bit more joy in practicing tikkun together.

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Recall the three confrontations: change, evil, and death. We shall linger on the second—evil—for it will surely linger in us.

Evil exists, and one can become more attuned to it, whether in its classification or intensity. As with the other confrontations, one must begin in a state of centeredness. Otherwise, she risks being swallowed up.

Attunement is as much about recognizing evil in others as in oneself. Our capacity for cruelty, indifference, and exploitation is part of our natures, which means it is part of your nature and mine.

Thoughts and words steeped in malevolence will eventually spawn misdeeds.

We must take a few steps into the Shadow to reveal the hidden source of such secrets, though that process can arouse unexpected resistance. It is unflattering, if not frightening, to recognize in oneself everything she hopes to avoid in others.

Yet from the grounded awareness of equipoise, we can become more attuned to our darker impulses. And we must become so attuned, for these will linger as magma building pressure beneath the surface. Explore the Shadow as a physician would an abscess, a priest would a confession, or an explorer would a cave.

Then hold three simultaneous truths:

1. Evil lives within me (one-twelfth);

2. I can respond with patience instead of anger, fear, or disgust.

3. I can face it all with centeredness and courage, and it will not consume me.

By accepting that we are born as both Light and Shadow—capable of creation and destruction, unbound freedom and rigid order—we integrate within the fullness of being. Integration provides the stability to face evil without letting it consume us.

Now let us identify evil beyond mere abstraction, in three embodied forms.

Luciferic

Luciferic Evil is rebellious, a wanton turning away from order. Its anti-authoritarian nature is exemplified by an angel who defied God. It is an evil of unchecked desire and the rejection of just authority. This form of evil can be seductive, as it is associated with pursuing pleasure, risk, and adventure—none of which are evils per se. Evil lies in their dangerous admixture, whether one descends into decadence or lets consequences be damned.

Can she indulge without indulging to excess?
He succeeded, but was someone innocent harmed in the process?
What is the difference between sleeping with your spouse and your sibling’s spouse?

In experiencing the Tiers of Joy, we must remain attuned to differences of degree and kind, as even good things, when taken too far, become evil.

Archontic

Archontic Evil, by contrast, is not about decadence but control. Named after the Archons of Gnosticism, these powerful entities rule the material plane through domination and oppression. In contrast to Luciferic evil, Archontic evil arises from a desire for order but brings about oppressive, even totalitarian, circumstances.

Can we manipulate the masses with propaganda?
How shall we use violence to gain power?
How can we exploit vulnerable populations for profit?

Archontic evil also tends to invert values. Practitioners treat vices as virtues and promote lies as truths, as long as doing so gives one more control. Only in politics, for example, could the following be considered a list of virtues:

1. Violence—Initiate harm, through violence, theft

2. Corruption—Dishonor commitments, self-deal

3. Callousness—Show cruelty or indifference to suffering

4. Monomania—Adhere zealously to The One True Way

5. Negligence—Fail to care for one’s property or offices

6. Casuistry—Apply fallacy or deceptive reasoning

7. Injustice—Deal unfairly with the innocent

The list of vices is not, of course, exclusive to Archontic evil. One needs only to learn the objectives of its practitioners.

Archontic practitioners treat people as parts in a machine or instruments of some perceived greater good, so these systems are marked by soullessness and despair. As this evil seeks to replace all freedom with control, the powerful sit atop rigid hierarchies in which everyone is formally systematized, top to bottom.

Where Luciferic Evil risks chaos or decadence, Archontic Evil risks stifling the spirit.

Ahrimanic

Ahrimanic Evil is perhaps the purest form of evil—not because it dominates or tempts, but because it negates life. Driven by states such as fear, resentment, and hatred, Ahrimanic Evil seeks neither freedom nor order. Ahriman, the evil twin of Zoroastrianism’s Ahura Mazda, seeks to annihilate. The entity embodies a profound nihilism expressed as a desire to extinguish everything. Thus, Ahrimanic Evil takes Thanatos Masculine to deadly extremes.

In other words, Ahrimanic Evil aims to destroy the risky delights sought by Luciferic practitioners and annihilate the oppressive order sought by Archontic practitioners. Ahriman initially fragments the world through resentment and living by lies. But as these forces are unleashed, the factions turn on each other in an escalating cycle of reprisals. Some view Ahrimanic Evil as the ultimate evil for this reason, because hatred of the other conscripts all sides into obliterating one another, and ideally, all existence.

Ahrimanic Evil does not seek order or freedom, but exhaustion—the point at which hatred and reduction render existence itself intolerable.

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Dark Dialectics: A Foreshadowing

A tension exists between Luciferic and Archontic evils. Certain ideologues love this tension because they can exploit it, calling the others evil and themselves good. If Luciferians want more decadence and Archontics want more control, their drift into ideological zeal can obscure the reality that freedom and order should be mutually constraining—and good will be found in the balance.

But the blood moon rises when Luciferic and Archontic evils become locked in conflict. Greedy Luciferians seeking paper profits encounter Archontic functionaries ready to impose order. Initially, their encounter is oppositional, but eventually they discover the benefits of collusion. Lucifer’s lucre finds the Archons’ authority.

All that’s left is to ask who wins and who loses.

The colluders win, of course, and society pays. Luciferians view legislatures as auction houses. Wealth concentrates among the powerful, and power concentrates among the wealthy in a grotesque orgy. A perverse, corporatist order is ascendant. The rest of society—taxed, controlled, indebted, and immiserated—grows resentful. Resentment turns to hatred. Hatred inspires violence. Violence escalates, only now the conflict is a negative-sum game.

Ahriman laughs.

Bear in mind that many who seek power will use chaos and decadence to accelerate decline, and then seek to impose a totalizing order in the ashes.

Today, Luciferic Evil sits at Ahriman’s left hand, and Archontic Evil sits at his right. Until Ahrimanic Evil finds the means to extinguish us all for good, he will let the other two rut in that unholy bed while resentful hordes tear through cities with angry torches and zeroes for eyes.

The Transformations

Evil does not vanish when named. When we confront it and integrate it, we become transformed. Just as freedom, order, and preservation may curdle into decadence, domination, and annihilation, so too can they be refined into higher expressions. Each evil casts a shadow because it is the corruption of a virtue. To confront evil without being consumed by it, one must also learn to transfigure it.

Thus, where Luciferic, Archontic, and Ahrimanic evils threaten imbalance, three countervailing forces restore harmony within and without.

Promethean

Where Luciferic Evil awakens rebellious instincts for injustice or indulgence, Promethean virtue rebels for the restoration of the good.

Prometheus is no seducer. He does not steal fire to exalt himself, nor does he deny the cost of transgression. He brings divine fire to humankind out of compassion, knowing full well the punishment that awaits. His rebellion is not prideful.

Promethean action is guided by discernment: Is this gift meant to uplift, or merely to inflate? Is this knowledge shared to liberate others, or to crown oneself superior? Is this risk undertaken for growth, or merely for the thrill?

Where Luciferic Evil indulges without restraint, Promethean virtue practices bold action. It is criticism through creation. Where Luciferic Evil rejects authority wholesale, Promethean virtue challenges unjust authority while honoring the responsibility of tikkun. Where Luciferic Evil consumes pleasure heedless of the consequences, Prometheans accept consequence as the price of illumination.

The Promethean fire warms, illuminates, and forges. It is a generative fire.

Mardukian

Where Archontic Evil imposes order to dominate, Mardukian virtue creates order so that life may flourish.

Marduk does not rule through suffocation. He confronts chaos not with fear, but with wisdom. From the formless deep, he shapes a cosmos where distinctions matter—where boundaries give rise to meaning, and structure makes growth possible.

Mardukian order asks: Does this structure serve the living, or merely preserve power? Does this law protect the vulnerable, or entrench the strong? Does this hierarchy clarify one’s responsibilities, or erase others’ dignity?

Where Archontic Evil treats people as components, Mardukian virtue treats people as participants. One’s place in the cosmic order is not formally assigned but discovered and revised. Where Archontic Evil freezes systems into rigidity, Mardukian virtue allows for adaptation. Where Archontic Evil inverts values to secure control, Mardukian virtue aligns law with justice.

This is an order of cosmic protocols and emergent architecture, not oppression by design. Mardukian order channels energy rather than suppressing it–respecting the Law of Flow. Order should serve flourishing and keep freedom in balance; it should not seek to suffocate the Promethean Fire.

Asharic

Where Ahrimanic Evil seeks an end in annihilation, Asharic practice affirms truth, healing, and wholeness.

The Zoroastrian entity Ahura Mazda embodies Asha: the deep substructure of truth that sustains all that exists. Asharic force does not merely preserve—it generates. It does not deny conflict, but it refuses the Lie that fragmented disharmony is inevitable.

Asharic virtue is quiet but inexorable as life overcomes entropy and disintegration.

Truth illuminates; druj distorts.

Where Ahriman fragments the world through resentment, Asharic truth reconnects it through understanding. Where Ahriman weaponizes lies to turn factions against one another, asha dissolves hatred by revealing the truth behind illusion. Where Ahriman drives systems toward collapse, Asharic preservation renews the conditions for life.

Asharic practitioners do not seek stasis. They seek continuity without unnecessary decay—a living order, always becoming, that repairs itself because it is grounded in truth.

Triadic Balance

These three conceptions of good are not rivals; they are mutually constraining and mutually reinforcing.

Promethean aspiration without Mardukian structure becomes reckless. Mardukian structure without Asharic truth becomes hollow. Asharic good without Promethean courage becomes an inflexible orthodoxy—a final state that doesn’t seek to complete the harmonization of difference.

Together, they form a living system. And in this balance, freedom becomes a gift rather than a theft. Order becomes structure instead of subjection. Truth, however beautiful and brutal, becomes constructive, creative, and life-affirming.

No wonder that mustacioed poet-philosopher—part sage, part bon vivant—chose Zoroaster as his avatar.

Remember: none of this represents the eradication of darkness. Instead, it symbolizes its integration—the art of standing amid the whirl of shifting realities, holding the fire without getting burned or letting it go out, and respecting bounds without lapsing into sclerosis.

We must never seek to eliminate Thanatos in its season, whether masculine or feminine. After all, there is,

A time for birthing and a time for dying,
A time for planting and a time for uprooting the planted;
A time for slaying and a time for healing,
A time for tearing down and a time for building up;
—Ecclesiastes 3

We resist the dying light so that we can generate life and light, order our lives, repair the world, and transmit what we can for generations to inherit.

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We crash in the dark- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
- - - in FITS AND STARTS - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
- - - - - - and, oh, that really smarts - - - - - - - - -
- - - - - - - - - - - - i know it’s gonna leave a mark
—Lee Schulteiss

We’re more compelled by artwork when the artist has a reputation, when we have a context for the piece, or when we know the backstory. We are willing to pay $20 for the simulacrum of hand-blown glass, but we might add a zero or two if we know that an artist toiled with molten silicon and used his own breath to create the form. The same can be said for paintings, craft dolls, and metal sculptures.

Stuff just isn’t that interesting anymore. It’s stuff plus experience.

Often, these items are imperfect. In fact, relative to what a machine might produce, each piece could be uniquely flawed. According to Japanese lore, a young man named Sen no Rikyu sought to learn an elaborate ceremony called the “Way of Tea.”

Rikyu went to the tea master Takeeno Joo, who tested the student by asking him to tend the garden. Rikyu cleaned up everything and raked the garden until it was immaculate. He scrutinized everything to be doubly sure. But before presenting his work to Takeeno Joo, Rikyu shook a cherry tree, which caused a few flowers to fall randomly—imperfectly—onto the ground.

According to the Japanese tradition of wabi-sabi, Rikyu understood the true nature of the aesthetic. There is beauty in imperfection. And there is something interesting about the fissures in wood, the crack in a bowl, or the randomness of a splatter.

Natural-living enthusiast Robyn Griggs Lawrence agrees:

Wabi-sabi understands the tender, raw beauty of a gray December landscape and the aching elegance of an abandoned building or shed. It celebrates cracks and crevices and rot and all the other marks that time and weather and use leave behind. To discover wabi-sabi is to see the singular beauty in something that may first look decrepit and ugly.

Of course, it’s not impossible for an artificially intelligent artist to iterate endlessly on patterns of aesthetics that most people tend to like. And indeed, many fine-looking designs might come straight from AI, developed perhaps as amalgams of popular designs from the past.

But for many things, human beings will not want the popular or the amalgamated. We will want the uniquely beautiful, interesting, novel, or compelling art forms because we have imbued them with our humanity. We will want many things wabi-sabi because they mirror our imperfections. And experience will surround our goods like narrative metadata.

Now, what about the cracks in us?

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Our imperfections are a part of what it means to be human. It’s one of the reasons we call ourselves grey. Far from drawing from the dark forces around us, grey is, in one sense, an acknowledgement that we are not just imperfect, but that we are separated from the eternal—from what might be considered perfect by some supreme being who, if he/she created us, gave us freedom, which is so easily abused.

One of the types of cracks in us—whether in mind, body, or spirit—is our scars. Our healed wounds sometimes indicate that, in our effort to improve the world around us, we get hurt.

Life is hard.

My wife is friends with a group of old rockers called the Drive-by Truckers. And in one song, the frontman sings two apparently contradictory things, namely that “it's gonna be a world of hurt” and “it’s fucking great to be alive.” Amid the raucous guitars and drums without click tracks, my wife finds redneck wisdom and pure poetry.

She finds wabi-sabi and scars.

She and the band remind us to look around at the broken world and set about fixing it. In doing so, we will not only find that life is worth living, but also that it is worth living because we are capable of overcoming all the pain, sadness, and failure that being free and imperfect brings.

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Drawing from Zoroastrian wisdom, we can construct a powerful framework for understanding the fundamental forces that shape existence and guide spiritual practice. By mapping two essential dualities onto perpendicular axes, we create Zarathustra’s Quadrants—a tool for discernment, self-examination, and conscious spiritual development.

Two Axes of Existence

Axis 1: Creative-Destructive Polarity

The first axis extends from Ahura Mazda to Angra Mainyu, representing the fundamental tension between constructive and destructive forces.

• Ahura Mazda, the Wise Lord of Zoroastrian tradition, represents the constructive and generative principle—the force that builds, creates, orders, and brings forth life. This is the impulse toward formation, organization, and manifestation.

• Angra Mainyu, the Destructive Spirit, stands at the opposite pole. This is the principle of dissolution, decay, and destruction—the force that breaks down structures, dissipates order, and returns things to formlessness.

In Zoroastrianism, it is important to understand that asha and druj are the spiritual emanations of Ahura Mazda and Angra Mainyu, respectively. Asha represents truth, righteousness, and cosmic order. Druj represents chaos, deception, and disorder. Asha is associated with light, and druj is associated with darkness.

Zoroastrians venerate Ahura Mazda and eschew Angra Mainyu, but in our order, we understand that we must seek wisdom in the Shadow.

Axis 2: Temporal-Eternal Polarity

The second axis runs from Zurvan to Ameretat, capturing the distinction between temporal flow and eternal changelessness.

• Zurvan represents time itself—the realm of becoming, change, and transformation. Here we find the flowing river of temporal existence, where all things are subject to process, development, and alteration.

• Ameretat, meaning “immortality” or “deathlessness,” represents the eternal and changeless. This is the realm of the imperishable, the immutable truths that transcend temporal flow, the eternal principles that remain constant while the world of Zurvan churns and transforms.

Interestingly, there were once Zoroastrian sects called Zurvanites who believed that the god Zurvan was higher even than Ahura Mazda and Angra Mainyu, one suspects because there seems to be an ultimate power in the passage of time and the cycle of endings. What then should we do with neo-Platonist notions of the timeless or eternal, such as those we explore through kabbalah? Zurvan is powerful to a point.

The Four Quadrants

When these two axes intersect, they create four distinct quadrants, each representing a fundamental mode of being:

1. Eternal Creation (Ameretat + Ahura Mazda)

This quadrant contains the unchanging divine principles, the eternal forms of truth and order. Here resides Asha in its purest expression—the timeless law that governs reality, the perfect patterns that exist beyond the reach of temporal change.

2. Temporal Creation (Zurvan + Ahura Mazda)

Here, we observe all generative processes unfolding over time: growth, evolution, healing, learning, and building. This is the realm of spring planting and autumn harvest, of children growing to adulthood, of civilizations rising and flourishing.

3. Temporal Destruction (Zurvan + Angra Mainyu)

This quadrant encompasses decay, entropy, death, and all destructive processes that occur within time. The falling of leaves, the aging of the body, the erosion of mountains—all natural dissolution belongs here.

4. Eternal Destruction (Ameretat + Angra Mainyu)

This is the most challenging quadrant to contemplate, because its worship is nihilism. It represents the void, absolute negation, the unchanging principle of non-being—such as Ein—that precedes even Ein Soph. This is the abyss that stands opposed to eternal creation, the fundamental “no” against existence itself.

The Four Practices

Practice 1: Eternal Creation (Ameretat + Ahura Mazda)

This is the path of alignment with timeless truth—the highest aspiration of spiritual practice.

• Meditate on the eternal principles of Asha (truth and cosmic order)

• Act so as to build lasting goodness beyond your lifetime

• Connect to divine, unchanging wisdom

• Study sacred texts and eternal teachings

• Contemplate the forms and patterns that transcend time

This practice calls us to lift our consciousness above the flux of temporal existence and align ourselves with what is eternally true and good. When we act from this quadrant, we plant seeds that can bear fruit for generations, we speak truths that remain valid across centuries, and we create beauty that reflects the eternal.

Practice 2: Temporal Creation (Zurvan + Ahura Mazda)

This is the path of engaged service in the world—the work of building and healing within time.

• Heal, teach, and serve in the material realm

• Grow plants and steward the delicate ecologies

• Work creatively, letting divinity flow through right process

• Raise children and nurture your community

• Build institutions and infrastructure for a consent-based social order

This quadrant honors the sacred work of manifesting goodness in the world of change. Here, we acknowledge that while eternal principles guide us, the actual work of creation unfolds in time through patience, effort, and gradual transformation. The farmer who tends crops, the teacher who guides students, the builder who constructs shelter or temples—all work in this quadrant.

Practice 3: Temporal Destruction (Zurvan + Angra Mainyu)

This is the path of recognizing necessary endings—the wisdom of knowing when to let go.

Discern:

• What must decay to make room for new growth

• The difference between natural entropy and malicious harm

• When to release what no longer serves

• The role of death in the cycle of life

• How destruction in time can serve ultimate creation

Not all destruction is evil. The forest fire clears deadwood for new growth. The composted plant feeds next year’s garden. The demolished building makes space for new construction. This path requires the difficult wisdom of accepting impermanence and working skillfully with the destructive forces that operate within time.

Practice 4: Eternal Destruction (Ameretat + Angra Mainyu)

This is the path of confronting absolute negation—the most perilous yet potentially transformative quadrant.

• Confront the void, the abyss, and existential doubts

• See what must be utterly rejected (druj in its purest form, the negation of truth)

• Avoid the temptation to nihilism

• Mark the boundary between being and non-being

• Reckon with the ultimate “no” that defines the ultimate “yes” in the Unity of Opposites.

This quadrant represents the darkest territory of spiritual exploration. Yet encountering it is necessary. To know what we utterly reject helps clarify what we absolutely affirm. To peer into the void can strengthen our commitment to truth. Facing eternal negation deepens our appreciation of eternal creation. This path is dangerous and should be approached with caution and spiritual preparation, like Milarepa, who confronted demons in the cave.

Daily Practice: Living with the Matrix

Morning Contemplation

Begin each day by asking,

Consider what work lies before you and which energies you must engage. Perhaps today requires the patience of Temporal Creation, or the wisdom to accept Temporal Destruction. Or, perhaps you need to reconnect with Eternal Creation through meditation and study.

Evening Examination

At day’s end, review your thoughts, words, and deeds—the three pillars of Zoroastrian practice. Reflect by asking,

Did you build when you should have built? Did you let go when necessary? Did you maintain a connection to eternal truth while working in time? Were you pulled unconsciously toward the void, or did you consciously choose your path?

Life Work

The ultimate spiritual aspiration is to move consciously toward the upper-left quadrant—Eternal Creation—aligning yourself ever more fully with Ahura Mazda and Ameretat. Yet wisdom requires honoring the necessary work of the other quadrants when circumstances demand it. This is Zarathustra’s paradox.

A spiritually mature person recognizes when to create and when to allow destruction, when to grasp eternal principles, and when to work patiently within time. She navigates the Matrix with discernment, choosing consciously rather than being pulled unconsciously by forces she doesn’t understand.

Reflection

Zarathustra’s Quandrants offer more than an intellectual framework—it provides a compass for spiritual navigation. By mapping our experiences, impulses, and choices onto these two axes, we gain clarity about the forces operating in our lives and the choices available to us.

The ancient wisdom of Zoroastrianism, perhaps the world’s oldest monotheistic tradition, recognized these fundamental dualities. By bringing them together in this matrix, we create a practical instrument for the eternal work that Zarathustra proclaimed: to choose good thoughts, good words, and good deeds, and thereby align ourselves with the forces of light, truth, and creation.

In every moment, we stand at the intersection of these axes. May they guide us in spiritual freedom and responsibility.

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Every order must have its scribes and its shamanoids. This is especially true of our order.

The scribes, or priest-like siblings, are responsible for setting down and protecting the doctrine. Core features of our doctrine are the Unquestionable Answers.

The shamanoids, or shaman-like siblings, are responsible for reaching out to the edges of inquiry. We have referred to such challenges and questions as basking in the mystery—that is, to ask the Unanswerable Questions.

Scribes and shamanoids operate in dynamic tension under the Blood Moon.

Where the scribe protects the transmission of wisdom that endures over time, the shamanoid has visions that occasionally challenge the existing order, allowing it to evolve. Sometimes they argue. But in their argumentation, they represent internal functional dialectics.

We shall call these functional dialectic pairs roots and rhizomes.

Roots

First, recall the Ascending Orders, which are partial orders, or suborders, of our siblinghood taken as a whole. These correspond with stages of psychosocial development.

Tier One: A Sibling’s Psychosocial Journey

1. Order of the Naked. Survival stage focused on basic needs (food, water, shelter). Ascend by mastering one of the four elements.

2. Order of the Moon. Magical/familial stage centered on tribal bonds and rituals. Ascend by gathering with others around a fire under the moon until dawn.

3. Order of the Fist. The power-and-glory stage is driven by strength and competition. Ascend by winning a competition without harming the innocent.

4. Order of the Pyramid. Structure and order stage valuing hierarchy and discipline. Ascend by trusting superiors to guide you while blindfolded.

5. Order of the Sun. The achievement stage emphasizes reason, commerce, and scientific progress. Ascend by earning profits or sharing new empirical knowledge.

6. Order of the Leaf. Communitarian stage prioritizing equality, consensus, and care for all. Ascend by organizing a community feast or giving gifts.

Tier Two: Of Hierophants Ascended

7. Order of the Nautilus. Integration stage, weaving together complexity and diverse perspectives. Ascend through subversive innovation or communication.

8. Order of the Lotus. Holistic stage, recognizing cosmic interconnection and unity with the universe. Ascend by practicing secret hierophant arcana.

Whether viewed as an individual, a member of an Ascending Order, or taken as a whole, we are all rooted in the stages of the Ascending Orders. Intuitively, our survival and familial roots are shared by all, but as we ascend, we develop roots at higher stages that are increasingly cognitive and cultural, rather than inherited features of human nature.

Roots and rootedness mark the philosophy of the scribe.

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Rhizomes

The concept of the rhizome is a model for understanding knowledge, culture, and reality that rejects hierarchical, tree-like structures in favor of non-linear, multiplicous connections. Key characteristics of rhizomatic thinking include:

Connection and Heterogeneity. Any point in a rhizome can connect to any other point, unlike a tree structure, where connections follow predetermined branches. Elements need not be similar to connect.

Multiplicity. A rhizome has no central unity or organizing principle. It’s composed of dimensions and directions that change nature as it expands, with no overarching subject or object.

Asignifying Rupture. A rhizome can be broken or shattered at any point, but will start up again along its old lines or create new ones. It’s resilient and anti-fragile rather than dependent on a central root.

Cartography and Decalcomania. Rather than copying or tracing a preexisting model (like tracing territory on a map), a rhizome is about creating new maps, new connections, new becomings.

Non-hierarchical. Unlike the tree (arborescent) model with its binary logic and hierarchical organization, the rhizome operates through horizontal, lateral connections without central command.

The biological metaphor comes from rhizome plants (such as ginger) that spread through underground stems, shooting off roots and shoots in all directions, versus trees with their vertical trunk-and-branch structure.

Deleuze and Guattari use this to critique systems that impose single narratives, linear causality, or hierarchical order—proposing instead a philosophy of difference, becoming, and creative possibility.

Rhizomatic thinking marks the philosophical orientation of the shamanoid.

The Hierophant’s Role

The role of the hierophant is to reconcile roots and rhizomes, meaning to integrate both ways of thinking. Hierophants must sometimes adjudicate when scribes and shamanoids engage in destructive conflictual inquiry. Of course, hierophants will have come from either scribes or shamanoids, so their biases will persist.

But all hierophants’ mastery should be integrative.

Thus, it is especially important for the hierophants not to try to adjudicate too soon. Recall that the dialectical method is a process that takes place under the Blood Moon, which is sacred. Indeed, the conflict can be rather bloody, though not literally, of course. The hierophant’s intercession must only occur once each case has been thoroughly made and the overall order requires a final word to quell the prospect of a bitter schism.

Recall that the dialectic process requires conflict between conception and negation, which gives rise to sublation. Premature intercession forecloses sublation, which can be difficult and unwieldy as it occurs. Hierophants must be catalysts for sublation if they participate in the process at all. Sublation pushes our thinking, sometimes violently, into higher-order novelty. But any higher-order novelty, though it might appear rhizomatic, will integrate and transcend both lower-order styles, welcoming the new and integrating the former wisdom.

Novelty will be rooted.

Notice that such insights emerge in Tier Two of the Ascending Orders, where hierophants steward the Orders of the Nautilus and Lotus.

There can never be roots without rhizomes, nor rhizomes without roots. There can never be Unquestionable Answers without Unanswerable Questions. The totality of our order benefits from this functional mutualism that simultaneously grounds us and pushes us out farther into the cosmic mystery.

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E pluribus unum. Ex uno plures.

In the Hindu tradition, Patanjali’s Yoga Sutras offer timeless wisdom for living a virtuous life. Swami Satchidananda, a modern translator of the Yoga Sutras, recounts the story of monks meditating deep in a forest.

The sages embody the principle of ahimsa—nonviolence—the first of the Yamas, which means the practice of reining in or self-control. For the forest sages, ahimsa was not just an abstract ideal but an active practice. Their peacefulness radiated outward, creating an environment in which even the forest animals coexisted in peace. It is said that the tiger and cow drank side by side from the same stream while in the monks’ presence.

How does ahimsa differ from an ethical rule of nonviolence?

As a transformative practice, ahimsa offers the foundation for our doctrine. Unlike the old liberalism of indifferent coexistence and abstract principles of non-harm, our doctrine calls for a rebirth of practiced virtue in thought, word, and deed.

Such is neither an abstract rule nor an ideal but instead a discipline to be cultivated daily, radiating nonviolence in ever-widening circles from the self to the world. As with other virtues, it requires our movement toward mastery. That means we must practice every day, just as we practice violin, painting, or jiu-jitsu.

Ahimsa as a Practice

To embody ahimsa is to practice it consciously. Such a practice does not preclude self-defense or standing firm against one’s enemies, but prioritizes nonviolence as the first virtue, first practice.

Such requires equipoise—a state of centeredness in which we align our internal drives, fractured selves, and reflex responses.

Drawing from Western psychology, we can see these drives through the lenses of Freud’s Eros (life, creation) and Thanatos (death, destruction), as well as Jung’s anima (feminine) and animus (masculine). These forces manifest in distinct yet interconnected ways:

• Eros Masculine. The urge to control and build, to force, or to “make it so” through planned order.

• Eros Feminine. The power to facilitate and let order emerge, to “let it flow” through collaboration.

• Thanatos Masculine. The drive to end or destroy, to “burn it down” or “end it now.”

• Thanatos Feminine. The release of letting go, preparing for change without forcing it.

Each of these forces has healthy and unhealthy expressions.

Destruction, for instance, can be necessary, like ending a toxic relationship, while creation can be dangerous if taken to excess. The key is balance: releasing the feminine without suppressing the masculine, maintaining the creative destruction of Eros and Thanatos. We learn to channel or suppress as circumstances dictate.

As the old mystic Gurdjieff suggested, combining the wisdom of the yogi, monk, and fakir creates a “sly one.” Balance, aligning the cognitive (head), emotional (heart), and intuitive (gut), returns control to its inner locus.

The paradox of centeredness in ahimsa is that you will be better prepared for war.

Radiative Sovereignty

This balance practice begins within and, with mastery, radiates outward, a phenomenon we call radiative sovereignty. By mastering our inner world, we project peacefulness and determination into our outer world.

Starting with the self, we extend this harmony to family, friends, and the wider world. As the saying goes, “Don’t try to save the world before yourself.“ This concentric-circle approach ensures that our actions are grounded in a sense of centeredness and competence before we face challenges outside the home.

Strange that we live in a system that attracts the venal and uncentered to positions of authority. Then again, one who has mastered ahimsa is by disposition and practice averse to the desire for political power, which we have suggested is a pathology of the soul.

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A serene eye, nested within a triangle, figures prominently in Masonic symbolism. Outside the triangle, artists sometimes render bands originating from the Eye, which represent a Supreme Being’s radiance. While we are a distinct order, we appropriate this symbol and make it our own.

For our purposes, we can break the symbol down into its constituent parts, explain each part, and then put it all back together again as a symbol fit for our order.

Three Sides

First, we shall break down the familiar equilateral triangle, which doubles as the Greek letter delta. The triangle is composed of three equal-length lines, each symbolizing an important feature of our siblinghood. Because each side is of equal importance and constraint, which side represents the base is not basic, but relative, just as the front of a Necker Cube is also the back.

Simply said, the sides appear in no particular order: Religio, Fabula, and Spiritus. Latin is superior to English in this context because the root words are closer to what we intend to invoke with each side of the triangle.

1. Religio is the force that binds individuals into a community.

2. Fabula is the story we tell about ourselves that ensures continuity over time.

3. Spiritus is our experience of the ineffable, which is the mysterious breath of life.

Now, we can reassemble these parts as sides to form our delta. Each side is vital. Each side constrains and reinforces the others.

Consider also that each side has a primary modality, which is to say, a communication vector. We pray you will forgive Greek being paired with Latin.

1. Religio’s primary vector is Logos, as it offers reasons and structure that bind.

2. Fabula’s primary vector is Mythos, which offers timeless truths beyond the literal.

3. Spiritus’s primary vector is Pathos, as emotion animates us with qualitative consciousness.

Again, each enables and constrains the others.

When outsiders say they are *spiritual but not religious,* they seek to feel without thinking, or to experience the sublime without solidarity with others or commitment to doctrine or mythic truth. In many cases, we would say this is incomplete. In others, it is but emotional onanism.

The same can be said of the other sides that compose the delta. A religious order without spirituality is like a temple without prayers or the prayerful. A story without feeling is just a schematic in a sanctuary. Congregants without a story are but a bacchanalia or a bureaucracy.

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The Delta and the Eye

The delta, once formed, symbolizes elements that are resistant to change. Strange, then, that term delta indicates change. So be it. We are comfortable with paradox. We are also comfortable with the Unquestionable Answers and the Unanswerable Questions existing together in that dynamic tension that impels us as a siblinghood.

The delta of our order integrates change into the unchanging.

Then, of course, our delta (triangle) includes that which lies within and that which lies without, and together they form a unity of opposites, symbolizing the sacred and the profane, as well as the esoteric and the exoteric.

What can we say about the Eye, with its silent repose, its sight beyond sight?

Most of us, excluding pirates and Polyphemus, have two eyes, one on the left, one on the right. When we open our inner eye, also called the third eye, we imagine a third point above the head, which the Hindus call the crown chakra. When we connect the three pupils, we discover three vertices, which recreate our delta.

Opening only the left eye lets one see only two dimensions.
Opening the right eye with the left eye reveals three dimensions in stereo vision.
Opening the inner eye reveals nonduality and multidimensionality.

This can be a powerful experience. It awakens the entheos. But we must never confuse such insight with infinite sight—the omnipercipience of the All. To become a psychonaut, reckoning with nonduality and multidimensionality, is like an astronaut hurtling towards a single star in the spiral arm of a single galaxy, amid a billion galaxies, yet thinking he holds the keys to the cosmos. To reckon with such insight is to allow an infinitesimal fraction of Ain Soph Aur—the radiance of Ain Soph, the breath of the All—to flood your being.

In the top Tier of Joy, we touch the transcendent, if but for a moment, but that is as far as we can go in this life.

One’s inner eye is like a porthole opening to the deepest ocean. While it is indeed an aperture into the All, it is small, revealing just a glimmer. Perhaps we risk anthropomorphizing the All when we imagine the Eye as belonging to the countenance of Ain Soph. Yet we know, along some dimension, that our consciousness is the cosmos regarding itself. Deep within the bounds of Religio, Fabula, and Spiritus lies a mystery. And when we are ready to bring head, heart, and gut into alignment, we can start to open our inner eye and stare into the mystery.

But we must prepare for the possibility that one day it will stare back.

Sierpiński’s Secret

The delta contains multitudes. We have written that our telos is tikkun, where ongoing repair is work towards the harmonization of difference—expressed as organic unity. So our Radiant Delta, plucked from the arcana of our forebears, when viewed from within, reveals a recursive reality.

1, 3, 9, 27, and so on to infinity, complete with as many eyes as insights.

In the case of the Sierpiński gasket, depicted above, mathematics is metaphorical. For those disposed to logos, we appeal to the left brain to activate the right. We hope it helps to open the inner aperture. Suffice it to say that the experience of Spiritus is not just a feeling, but almost always a fractal manifestation.

Thus, we arrive at a signpost: the Radiant Delta is not merely a symbol to be decoded, but a living geometry through which we decode ourselves. As we trace its sides—Religio, Fabula, Spiritus—we discover they are boundaries that both limit and enable us, where each opens onto the others in endless recursion.

The fractal nature of our symbol reminds us that every insight contains worlds within worlds, every answer births new questions, and every time we think we have grasped the whole, we find we are holding but one triangle in a vast tessellation. To engage this symbol is to commit to a journey without a destination, a traveller’s telos—to embrace the paradox that we are simultaneously the observer measuring the delta, the mystic dwelling within it, and channeling a radiance from beyond.

In this recognition lies our most essential teaching: that the work of tikkun—of repair and harmonization—begins not when we fully understand the mystery, but when we accept that we are, ourselves, a part of it. The Eye within the Delta watches, and we watch back, and in that mutual gaze, the All contemplates itself through us, as us, forever.

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Marcionism was an early Christian movement founded by Marcion of Sinope in the second century AD. Marcion taught that the God of the Old Testament—a deity focused on law and judgment—was entirely separate from and inferior to the God of the New Testament revealed by Jesus.

Marcion not only rejected the Old Testament entirely but also created his own biblical canon, consisting of edited versions of Luke’s Gospel and ten of Paul’s letters. Crucially, he removed what he saw as Jewish influences.

Early, mainstream Christians declared the sect heretical. Still, Marcionism remained influential for several centuries and ultimately pushed the Church to define its own scriptural canon and theological boundaries more formally.

Marcionism is back—with an attitude.

Underthrow

In Defense of the Old Testament

Marcionism was an early Christian movement founded by Marcion of Sinope in the second century AD. Marcion taught that the God of the Old Testament—a deity focused on law and judgment—was entirely separate from and inferior to the God of the New Testament revealed by Jesus…

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4 months ago · 4 likes · 13 comments · Max Borders

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A master builder spent decades designing the perfect city, where every street and structure revealed divine proportion. When construction began, he discovered a neighborhood of old workshops in the way—places where craftspeople had worked for generations. The master builder demanded that the workshops be torn down immediately, as delays would compromise the city’s geometric harmony.

The craftspeople petitioned for time to relocate their tools and materials, but the master builder explained that sentimentality toward mere objects was a failure to appreciate the greater good. One craftsperson refused to leave her forge until she honored her agreement to finish a commissioned piece, but the master builder had her forcibly removed and her forge demolished.

The city’s divine plan, he explained, must supersede any contract.

When critics questioned the master builder, he produced detailed calculations proving the new plaza would serve a thousand times more people. How could anyone argue against this mathematical truth?

Vicious Mirrors

The Seven Social Virtues have vicious mirrors. If we are to practice the virtues, we are to avoid the vices. The trouble is, vices not only masquerade as virtues, but they can also consume us through our dispositions and habits. To avoid the vices, we must first understand them. That means it’s best to look upon them as one might a deadly snake or spider—that is, at a safe distance. Variously, the vices are perverse manifestations of Evil’s Trinity: Decadence, Control, and Nihilism. What makes the vices so insidious, though, is their shapeshifting natures, which allow them to hide in the heart and twist the Logos.

It’s not enough to present lexical definitions. We must reveal the vices’ power to trick, tempt, and trap. The following are vices we must understand and avoid.

Violence

To harm someone in her body or property, whether through threat, destruction, or constraint.

Because it is sometimes a necessary evil, violence is arguably the most difficult of all to assign limits. Violence is vicious when initiated against the innocent. When we use it in defense or retaliation, it can be justifiable. In war, matters become even muddier. For now, let us consider violence in peacetime.

We have called enemies those who would commit acts of violence against our persons or property. Once so designated, it is not always clear when preemptive or proportional violence is justified. One can argue that when an enemy has articulated a threat, defensive violence is warranted. But to what degree? When an authority uses various forms of threat and violence against us, perhaps feeling justified in the service of some external conception of the good—such as in enforcing an unjust law—at what stage is it permissible to revolt? Possibility trumps permissibility, of course.

Violence is never virtue, but it is not always vice. At least we can say that no one should use violent means directly against the innocent as a means to some purportedly good end. Such is nonviolence. Around that boundary, at least, we must build our practice in thought, word, and deed, acknowledging that cultivated hatred or rising anger can plant thoughts of bloodying noses and smashing teeth in our minds.

Corruption

To lie to ourselves, dishonor our commitments, or engage in self-dealing.

Integrity’s vicious mirror, corruption, reflects a cluster of subsidiary vices, such as dishonesty, double-dealing, or disrespect for another’s time. Individual acts of integrity—such as honesty and honoring one’s commitments—accumulate to create a society of trust. Similarly, the structural integrity of a whole building depends on the strength of each beam, joint, and truss. Individual lapses of integrity accumulate to risk social decay. Whether people start to normalize tardiness to meetings or the taking of bribes, corruption can spread and corrode.

In many places, corruption infects the whole of society. For example, if bureaucrats, police, or functionaries position themselves between essential interchange points, ordinary people learn to accept and participate in an informal system of bribery to conduct the basic business of life. It’s critical to see how corruption can become an infection that enervates and immiserates a society. Whenever one is in a position or office that allows her to act with impunity, whether at the highest or lowest echelons, she will be tempted to wield her authority in the service of vice—especially if everyone else in her position is doing it.

Callousness

To show cruelty or indifference to suffering.

The further a human counterpart is from embracing the Unquestionable Answers, or from joining up with enemy Egregores, the more likely one is to otherize him. Othering can be a necessary evil, too, but it also risks making one callous. If one becomes cruel or indifferent to suffering, she risks becoming that which she hates. It can be difficult, nigh impossible, to become a model of virtue in the face of one’s enemies. Indeed, it can even be unwise to practice compassion during combat. Still, in equipoise, one must do one’s best to strike a balance between errant compassion and unnecessary callousness when under threat or siege.

Some say Jesus's teachings create an unresolvable tension—that cruelty is sometimes tragically necessary but never fully righteous. The Christian must act in a fallen world while knowing his actions fall short of the ideal. Must they fight without triumphalism, with sorrow rather than hatred? Vexing questions bedevil those who would turn the other cheek. But they bedevil all of us. If someone takes a deadly action against an innocent person, it is not callous to kill the offender.

What about those whose life choices have pushed them into the life of a derelict? Is our compassion misapplied when we invite such souls to camp on the high street? Surely such compassion worsens their condition and ours. So, our default position ought to be to practice compassion until compassion is clearly counterproductive. But that doesn’t mean we ought to cultivate callousness instead. Doing so risks awakening a monster that lives in the Shadow—a monster that makes one dangerous to his siblings.

Monomania

To adhere zealously to The One True Way

Monomania is an unhealthy obsession with a single means to a single end. While there is no One True Way, some zealously adhere to it at others’ expense and to the exclusion of other ways.

What about the Unanswerable Questions? one might ask. Are we siblings not zealously to adhere to the Law of Consent? There is a difference between a rule that opens a thousand ways and a way that forecloses all other ways. Even a rule as simple as Travel on the right—while it restricts our freedom to travel on the left—makes it possible for innumerable travelers to make their way safely to countless destinations. By contrast, if a tyrant insisted everyone travel to the city center, chaos and gridlock would ensue.

Monomania can be tempting.

To resist its temptation, one must operate with humility, open one's mind to experimentation and therefore to surprising results, and allow others to live their own little experiments so long as they threaten no one. The fixations of monomania can lead one to compel others to help realize ends they wanted no part of.

Negligence

To fail in caring for one’s property or offices.

Private property is one of the most fundamental institutions in our order. Wherever we have made an implicit reference to private property, let us make it explicit here. Respect for the difference between mine and thine brings peace where we might otherwise fight over unowned property. We also know that entrepreneurial production and trade are good within the context of reciprocal property protections, undistorted prices, and a system of profit and loss. But there is no exchange without private property. Nor are there undistorted prices. The socialist calculation debate is over. Private property is a precondition of a healthy market economy.

But private property carries a set of ongoing responsibilities, a virtuous practice we call stewardship. When we fail to be good stewards, we leave behind less bountiful, less useful detritus. It’s not merely that we risk leaving degraded property or offices to posterity. We also risk failing in the most basic commitment to tikkun. The sages remind us that we cannot take our belongings with us in death. Our stewardship, like life, is temporary. But when we are negligent, we overlook necessary maintenance. When we overlook necessary maintenance, we leave behind material conditions that reflect a disordered spirit. Social decay prevails.

Casuistry

To apply a fallacy or deceptive reasoning

Members of our order are committed to truth tracking, even when our enemies are fond of using fallacies, deceit, or deceptive reasoning to create powerful Egregores. Casuistry, which is the vice of either communicating falsehood or communicating with falsehood, tempts us, too. But we must resist. One might think that casuistry is like violence, that is, sometimes a necessary evil in retaliation. But refusing to live by lies not only separates us from our enemies, the truth almost always finds its way into the light. Deception eventually unravels the deceiver’s plans. Unreality and illusion are like dark spells that eventually dissipate in truth’s radiance.

It might seem that those who live by lies have an asymmetric advantage over those who do not—and such can be the case in the short term. But casuistry is unsustainable through time. Lies unwind enemy designs. And casuistry, even when its practitioner tells no explicit lie, obscures truth and blurs perceptions. The secret of subversive communication is our commitment to truth tracking.

Injustice

To deal unfairly with the innocent.

Take great care. Fairness is one of those areas in which injustice wears the mask of justice. Our enemies will equivocate when it comes to fairness, because there are at least two conceptions of fairness one can employ—but one is permissible, one is not. The acceptable form of fairness is proportionality. For conceptual ease, let’s assume two people are doing the same type of valuable work, so each produces the same value per unit of time. But if we observe that Person Two works twice as long as Person One, then Person Two is entitled to twice the reward according to justice as proportionality.

Yet those committed to justice as equal outcomes commit to injustice. Under this theory, also called social justice, Person One and Person Two are entitled to the same reward. Indeed, under a graduated tax system, Person Two is compelled to redistribute a portion of her higher reward to Person One, even though she worked twice as much. It is hard to justify this quasi-slavery. So in our order, we do not. Instead, Person Two might practice compassion and freely choose to give aid to Person One. But that aid might not come in the form of a financial gift. Instead, she might offer advice, such as Work longer or smarter for greater rewards.

Purveyors of injustice, such as politicians, will twist themselves into rhetorical knots to justify fairness as equal outcome (equity). But they must laud and practice multiple vices to do so.

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In a small village where the river bends, there lived a young Washerwoman who knew the world of steam and scrub, starch and press. Each dawn, she rose to light her washpot fire. Each night, she ironed until the stars blinked. Her brow knew sweat. Her hands knew the weight of wet clothes and the satisfaction of wringing fabric.

This was her domain. She was good at what she did, but a different fire burned in her heart.

As a girl, she had hoped to wear a nurse’s apron, to heal rather than clean. Necessity deferred that dream. Poverty’s arithmetic demanded she earn instead of learn. Yet the dream never died—it just transformed. If she could not become a nurse, she would have to do something else.

So, she asked herself:

The Washerwoman made a pact with time.

Every bit of surplus earned from her labor would be set aside, denied to present comforts, and saved for a future she might never see. For decades, she dwelt at the limen—physically in her river-bend village, but spiritually in a tomorrowland where formerly poor women in white aprons moved through the hospital to help people heal.

The work was Sisyphean.

Soak, wash, boil. Rub, rinse, wrench, and rub again. Starch and hang. Day after day, bundle after bundle, she repeated the same ritual thousands of times. Sometimes she worked for two or three days straight, the fire never going out. Her dry, cracked hands seldom rested. The wealthy folk whose clothes she pressed probably never thought about the woman who made their collars crisp. As the help, she was almost invisible, more a function than a fellow.

But they paid.

The Washerwoman held secret wisdom: She loved the work. The bright fire. Wringing out clothes. Tunics drying on a line. She had found what the philosophers call amor fati. While others might have been bitter, she grew rich in ways that had little to do with money.

By the time she was old, the Washerwoman had accumulated a small fortune. It had been built from modest coins and lesser denominations. Weary from a lifetime of work, she now faced her most significant test. This was money she had never spent on herself nor used for pleasure. It represented decades of effort.

To throw it away would be to throw away all the value she created and stored.

She could have lived her final years in considerable comfort. She could have taken trips or eaten dinner from fine plates on white tablecloths. She could have scattered it like seeds to random poor people with outstretched palms or begging bowls. But the Washerwoman knew a vital truth: 

The Washerwoman established a scholarship fund for aspiring nurses. This was not errant charity, but it was directed toward the specific dream that had been denied her. The funds would not go to strangers, but instead to young women in her community.

She would be able to meet their hopeful gazes and see them beam with pride.

In doing things this way, the Washerwoman tapped into an ancient lesson. Good giving involves three elements:

• Connection. Support something or someone important to you.

• Choice. Select the most meaningful change vector to you.

• Impact. Witness the positive results of your actions.

The Observers think that humans evolved to help people they could see, whose faces were familiar, and whose gratitude they could feel. The Washerwoman wasn’t giving her wealth to causes far away. She was shaping the destinies of poor village girls.

She made the world better than she found it.

The Washerwoman’s gift created ripples. The story spread. New donors quadrupled her fund. One wealthy merchant, humbled by the Washerwoman’s generosity, gave away a humongous fortune. She had unleashed a contagion of compassion. Her modest action came to symbolize the power and the joy of giving.

But even as an old woman, she wasn’t quite finished.

After the gift, she continued washing and ironing. The money was never the point. The work was always her dharma—doing for the purpose of giving. And with that, a humble woman from a small village on the river’s bend joined the pantheon of great philanthropists.

When the Washerwoman set down her iron for the last time, she had been transformed from a laborer into a legend. She had turned the mundane into the meaningful. The nurse she could never become was multiplied in the future. Her scholarship would create dozens, then hundreds of nurses. Hands that had scrubbed and wrung had also reached into the future to shape the destinies of so many.

Meaning is unlikely to be found in grand gestures or noble birth. Yet it can be found in the consecration of ordinary means toward extraordinary ends. Happiness derived from what we consume is fleeting and thin, but joy derived from what we leave to posterity is our measure of immortality.

Today, the Washerwoman’s washpot is cold. The fire is out. But somewhere, right now, a young woman in a white apron glides through a hospital ward, by a bend in the river, excited for her first day of work.

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Humans ask a lot of questions. Why is there something rather than nothing? What is the nature of consciousness? Is there a supreme being? One can categorize such questions along two dimensions: importance and fascination.

Importance picks out the urgency and utility of answering the question. Fascination picks out the awe and wonder a question inspires. But when it comes to importance, there is one question that rises above the rest, at least within our order.

In fact, one could argue that all other important and fascinating questions originate from a single question:

The question has some ambiguity built into it, which we can break down into three interpretations.

The first interpretation is more personal, which is to say, an inquiry into the manner in which you or I might conduct our lives.

The second interpretation extends outward to emphasize the we, where one might imply the word together—as in, How are we to live together in groups?

The third interpretation extends to all of humanity, given that we are all earthbound, made of flesh, blood, and bone, and must leave this mortal coil.

The first interpretation runs through every moment of our lives. Whether one wiles away the hours seeking empty pleasures, endeavors to become excellent, or acts as a good steward of his property and offices, one’s behavior at time t is always an answer to this critical question. If one’s hourglass only contains a certain number of grains, what action will he assign to each grain?

The second interpretation is vital to how we configure our communities. Most people either live in proximity to others or would like to organize their lives around others who share values, culture, interests, and needs. Given these considerations, communities need at least some tacit organizational protocols and behavioral norms that create a membrane around their shared values, culture, interests, and needs.

The third interpretation is crucial to humanity’s life on earth. Invariably, as we go about our lives, flowing in and out of communities or countries, we’ll find frictions. And human beings on earth can be divided roughly into two types: those who would mitigate frictions between and among people, and those who would create frictions.

Verily, siblings in our order belong to the former camp.

That is, in some fundamental sense, we dedicate our order to mitigating frictions. That means we are committed to a set of aspirations and ambitions that involve an ongoing exploration of all three interpretations of the most important question. Our operating assumption is that the first two interpretations, iteratively applied, create our community’s membrane—as long as we can derive enough Unquestionable Answers to achieve stable coherence.

While stable coherence within our membrane is necessary for group cohesion, we will not fail to explore questions that inspire awe and wonder. We call these the Unanswerable Questions, even as we seek to answer them. Such is not to argue that the most important question is not also fascinating. Instead, it is to say that it is immediate, unrelenting, and ubiquitous.

But fascinating questions are important, too—in virtue of their tendency to fascinate. To live without fascination invites a life of ennui.

So, to become a member of our order is to be willing to ask both important and fascinating questions—and never stop until death. The more important ones call for Unquestionable Answers. The more fascinating ones are Unanswerable Questions.

Unquestionable Answers are ironically dogmatic, mainly because our answers to these bind us together as a siblinghood, even though we shall always question our priors. Our foundational principles must be tested and annealed.

Unanswerable Questions are playfully serious, mainly because our answers reveal differences that are instructive, interesting, and conducive to inspiring our awe—but, paradoxically, such binds us together as siblings willing to bask in the mystery.

Our order is built upon a set of questions and answers. Our siblinghood’s deepest purpose is to answer the question: How are we to live?

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Evil exists. It is woven into the fabric of reality, yet it is not a substance. We must acknowledge this aspect of reality, even if we aren’t always very good at recognizing it. It lives around us. It lives within us. There are evils of degree and kind.

The most insidious forms of evil are the ones we scarcely recognize. This makes confronting evil especially difficult. Where we might confront change or death by overcoming fear, the most significant threat is evil that masquerades as need.

It’s slippery. It’s protean. It feeds on our desires.

As with any confrontation, we should face down evil while in equipoise. Our centeredness helps us be more patient and discerning, which allows us to reveal evil’s contours, for example, when we are engaged in tikkun.

But aren’t those repairing the world doing good?

Hopefully. Yet shortsightedness makes for mistakes. Zeal can make us vulnerable to the idea that an end justifies any means. Sacrificing for a cause can tempt us to abandon our radiative self-sovereignty, a process that requires us to repair ourselves first.

Too many broken people are trying to fix the world.

Everyone is born with the capacity to harm. We must train ourselves to abstain from harming others who have done no wrong to us, or have paid for their past wrongdoing.

Otherwise, there is a word for those who would harm us: enemy.

Evil is not a toxin that poisons or a demon that possesses. Our intoxicating ignorance and defection from doctrine—breaking our covenant—shape our wrongdoing. Why? As cosmopolitan as we aspire to be, a moral community has an extent and a membrane. Within that membrane, we contrive the good and make a covenant with each other and with the All.

Outside that membrane, potential evil lives in various shades. We must take care, though. Our enemies use the same rationale. The difference is that an enemy makes virtues out of vices, refuses our covenant, and is willing to do us harm.

To know one’s enemies is to perceive their evils.

When masses threaten evil in synchrony, we call that an Egregore. When our siblings rise to counter evil in synchrony, we call that a Geist. Our order exists to build an Empire of the Mind from which a Great Geist shall rise to defend our way of life and, eventually, our imaginal cities, which are good.

Why does the All permit evil to exist in the world?

If evil is mostly error and defection from doctrine, it is not like a substance that inheres in things, but actions taken by imperfect people with agency. To be good, then, is to commit to doctrine and endeavor to eliminate error. But we also know that no one is perfect, so everyone will err and stray from the covenant. Indeed, as no one is perfect, anyone who wears a white robe in our temples is a fraud and an apostate.

But that means we have to live in community, accepting some measure of evil in our midst while marking the difference between siblings and enemies—acknowledging gradations. Our order requires paths to adjudication, redemption, and forgiveness. At the end of the day, though, we must be willing to expel or ostracize those who break the covenant or have demonstrated that they are irredeemable.

Yet to don the grey robe is to sit comfortably with the fact of our shadow selves. We are not Pillar Saints, Platonists, or purists. For every eleven bands of the All’s radiance that flow through us, a dark band must issue from the Shadow.

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At the risk of introducing a contradiction, the closest comparison is immunity. After a time, our bodies learn to control an infectious disease, but it never quite goes away. It lingers, and we live with it, hoping it doesn’t flare up in an immunocompromised condition. One even inoculates himself by permitting a little bit of a disease into his blood, though not enough to make him ill.

Shadow exploration is spiritual inoculation.

We can break evil into three elements: intentions, declarations, and actions (or thoughts, words, and deeds). Thoughts cultivate evil within. Words transmit ill intent. And deeds can unleash destructive consequences. Once we have broken matters down this way, we can recombine the elements to reveal a process.

Elemental evil is, of course, possible, as one might allow an evil thought to enter her mind, but neither speak nor act upon the thought. But too many such thoughts can be handmaidens of processual evil, in which too many evil thoughts lead to habits of mind that in turn lead to harmful words and eventually deeds.

Paradox resembles contradiction. After all, we just claimed that shadow exploration is a form of spiritual inoculation. But isn’t shadow exploration meant to incorporate evil by way of ritual?

Yes and no.

The man who pours a finger is not the same man who guzzles a fifth. One conducts a ritual. The other abuses. Therefore, whiskey is only as evil as the man who quaffs it.

Consider that one of the prime virtues of our order is moderation. Its vicious mirror is excess. If virtues and vices are practices, then moderation is a practice that can help keep the 11:1 ratio, which is paradoxically sacred.

In returning to confrontation, consider the process is both psychospiritual and psychosocial. It can be unsettling to recognize evil within oneself. It is perhaps more disturbing to recognize evil within those we love, or in those we trust with power. To witness the sudden rise of a powerful Egregore can be absolutely terrifying. Almost no one is centered when forced by circumstances to confront evil this way. It is better to be in equipoise, but there is no way to avoid being unsettled, disturbed, or terrified.

Once the psychospiritual phase abates, welcome the action phase. That means find the courage to change, critique, convince, or combat. Confronting evil is a psychospiritual breakthrough that leads to an ongoing practice.

The rest is religion.

Eliminating error and endeavoring to follow doctrine is a process, not a decision. But avoiding evil entirely is itself evil, for the Pillar Saint either erupts in decadence or malevolence, or wastes away in asceticism. Attempting to eliminate evil requires renouncing tikkun, because tikkun is an undertaking that will always come with error.

Those who renounce the robe and join an Egregore embrace evil. To don the robe and invoke a Great Geist is not to reject evil but to mitigate it—whether in ongoing psychspiritual stewardship, or as we set about building an Empire of the Mind.

Remember, though, evil is insidious because it does not inhere in things.

In our order, humanity is on a quest to bring harmony to the multiplicity, which is to weave the threefold braid: happiness, harmony, and prosperity. But without confronting evil, no such weaving is possible.

Otherwise, our imaginal cities shall rise on distant horizons.

The ongoing process of confrontation is like tending a garden. The good gardener must prune, pull weeds, fight pests, and give the plants just what they need. The good sibling must cultivate similarly, finding paths of mastery while repairing the world.

So it is and will always be.

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The future is a reservoir of multiplicity that lies within the All’s omniperspective. It’s a space in which what can happen still matters. It holds innumerable paths, but as the present advances, the paths become numbered, narrowed, and winnowed. What was once an infinite constellation of possibilities becomes a dwindling set of alternatives until just one remains.

The now is born.

To act, then, is to reach into the realm of indeterminacy and narrow the range of what will be actualized. Human agency, therefore, is the exertion of becoming extended into the future, realized in the present, and remembered in the past. Even within cosmic constraints—the All is the Law, after all—our choices shape the narrowing.

Remember this cosmic illumination:

But a tension emerges. Among the Kabbalists, the world is said to have been shattered into multiplicity, and human beings are tasked with tikkun, which is the repair or raising of the divine sparks. Yet under Kabbalist metaphysics, a vital paradox holds.

The infinite unity (Ain Soph) is forever out of reach, like an asymptote the cosmos approaches but never touches. Yet Ain Soph is everywhere. It flows in our every fiber. If its radiance courses through us, we must remember how to feel it, to channel it, and to undertake this cosmic reordering of which any one of us is only a minuscule part.

Under this construal, tikkun begins to resemble a Sisyphean task: pushing a stone that always rolls down again, or repairing a cosmos that will never return to a perfect wholeness. Camus’s Sisyphus accepts the futility of his labor and somehow finds joy.

Is the Kabbalist condemned to the same fate?
If perfect undifferentiated unity cannot be restored, is tikkun in vain?

The Nature of Tikkun

The Kabbalists do not teach that tikkun aims to restore the original unity. They do not believe that the task of repair is to undo the shattering, or to collapse multiplicity back into undifferentiated oneness.

Instead, the shattering is not a mistake at all, multiplicity is not a deviation, and tikkun is not the reversal of differentiation. Instead,

The goal is not unity without multiplicity, but unity within multiplicity, something akin to what we have called Organic Unity.

The offspring of being and time—a multiplicity of moments—is not repaired by being fused back into a single unbroken vessel. Repair allows each shard—each differentiated relation—to reflect the divine through its own form of exertion.

To become.

Thus, tikkun is not a return but a revelation. Once tikkun is understood in this way, the bridge to Sisyphian joy becomes clearer, as the infinite unity and the void engage in an ongoing cosmic dialectic under the Blood Moon:

Conception. Negation. Sublation.

Camus insists that in an indifferent universe, the meaning of life is found in revolt—the ongoing act of creating significance through awareness, commitment, and effort. Sisyphus, in embracing his labor, transforms futility into freedom. Vanity into vitality.

The Kabbalist likewise does not repair the world to complete it. He repairs the world to participate in its becoming. His labor is infinite because creation is infinite, not because creation is broken. Life calls us to incessant work, with no final victory. Yet undertaken joyfully, our participation confers meaning.

Camus calls it revolt. Kabbalah calls it repair. Existence calls forth exertion to become.

But to become what?

The Unifying Principle

Across many traditions, a set of insights emerges: If existence is exertion, then meaning arises in our undertakings. Yet we may never get to see what lies beyond our mundane efforts, which threatens to leave us as unwitting slaves to a cosmic process we’ll never understand. If there is an ultimate telos, its contours are invisible. So we will surely err in the undertaking.

Will we succumb to skepticism?

We can at least imagine.

• Being exerts itself as presence.

• Time exerts itself as change.

• Possibility exerts itself as becoming.

• Humans exert themselves through action.

• Tikkun exerts itself through the harmonization of difference.

None of these aims at finality, merely improvement. The cosmos is not a project, but a process.

We are born with creativity within constraints. Without creativity, we would be automata—cosmic slaves. Without constraint, we would be disordered subjects floating in a disordered universe.

We operate in the grey area.

The future is shaped by our agency even as the All flows through us and sets limits. It might help for some of us to imagine a transcendent God stepping into our temporal condition to evaluate our progress or meddle in our affairs, as a man with a stick might come upon termites building a mound. But the transcendent sky father is but an anthropomorphic projection of ourselves upon a supremely immanent being who knows where all paths lead because the All walks them all.

Still, most of us wonder where we are going.

Progress is Possible

Becoming, as we said, is the process unfolding through the ongoing union of being and time. Some, like Whitehead, think that such a process itself is metaphysically primitive, especially as compared to things or static categories. Possibility becomes a living frontier where being and time meet and mate. The virtual is a mysterious field of sacred sorting where many possibilities become one actuality, moment by moment.

And each moment is a gift we come to appreciate as our hair turns white.

The task of tikkun is not to restore the impossible unity of the Ain Soph. It is instead to participate in the unfolding of the All within multiplicity, harmonizing differences where possible, taking a moment to gape at all the complexity we can take for granted.

Reality is the narrowing of potentials through the stricture of the now, a cosmic hourglass through which the All differentiates itself one grain at a time. Universal unfolding is thus a continuous gesture of being exerting itself through time to bring new forms of complexity into existence.

Relations connect more intimately to physical states because they constitute the extrinsic, structural character that physical description captures—how things stand with respect to each other in space, time, and causal interaction, independent of any observer or interpretation. The physical, then, is the relational pattern itself: mass is gravitational relating, charge is electromagnetic relating, and position is spatial relating. These relations obtain whether or not anyone apprehends them.

The mental emerges when relational structures become sufficiently complex and self-referential that information becomes for something—when the network of relations loops back on itself, creating a perspective or standpoint within the structure rather than merely instantiating patterns viewable from outside.

Thus, ‘all is physical’ and ‘all is mental’ aren’t contradictory but complementary. They describe the same relational reality from different vantage points—the third-personal structural description and the first-personal reflexive perspective that arises when the structure achieves sufficient recursive complexity. Both emerge from a generative ground that is neither purely physical nor purely mental but purely relational, with mentality appearing when relations become self-referential, i.e., informational.

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Bonding and Bouncing to a Point

In the flux of our experiences, differences appear to collide or coalesce (bounce or bond). Still, the combinatorial effect of all this bouncing and bonding is the cosmos reordering itself—iteratively, ceaselessly.

Teilhard de Chardin’s great insight was that this narrowing is not random drift but, instead, successive moments betray a directionality to evolution. Over greater timescales, the cosmos moves from energy and matter toward life, from life toward consciousness, from consciousness toward a planetary mind. (We are here.) The question is: can we go from that burgeoning noosphere toward something unimaginably more complex yet connected?

Teilhard de Chardin calls this the Omega Point.

The combination of emergence and evolution is the story of the universe learning to know itself, gathering its scattered sparks into higher orders of integration. In Teilhard’s cosmos, as in Kabbalah, the Omega Point is not a return to primordial unity but the emergence of unity-in-multiplicity—a convergence of interiorities that preserves differentiation even as it harmonizes them. Union that differentiates; complexity that personalizes; convergence that deepens our freedom.

To repeat, the task of tikkun is not to collapse multiplicity back into undifferentiated oneness but to illuminate multiplicity, raising sparks precisely by participating in the world’s ongoing differentiation. Repair is not restoration. It’s re-creation.

But not every act of tikkun is random. When you are doing it right, you can feel it. And the shattered vessels of Creation are not unshattered by erasing difference but by revealing divinity through it—as each shard reflects a facet of the infinite.

Like a prism in a beam of light.

Even if you are unpersuaded by the divinity of the All, or that the All is the Law, remember that Camus arrives at an analogous conclusion: meaning does not depend on a final telos. It can be the byproduct of our conscious, continuous exertion. That is why three of the holiest words one can utter are ‘Back to work.’

Sisyphus is not redeemed by reaching the summit. The effort redeems him. The revolt Camus describes is the existential mode of tikkun: the human being taking up the work of making differences cohere, one seemingly pointless exertion at a time, without expecting to see ultimate coherence.

Of course, for Camus, there is no Omega Point. Yet somehow Camus can find both joy and a measure of freedom despite repeating a meaningless task. By contrast, Chardin imagines levels of complexity and coherence breaking through to new levels until the cosmos reaches some, rather neoplatonist, connectome.

He writes,

There is mythic truth in both Camus and de Chardin, but—in the grey—we can imagine life beyond the social singularity and get back to work.

Imaginal Cities

In a precursor to the Codex, I played the role of a minor prophet:

[I]n the social singularity we will coalesce, reconstituting ourselves like some advanced coral reef teeming in an ocean of space dust. We will expand outward into the cosmos until we discover the whole universe was within each of us all along, and we were never alone.

Following Stuart Kaufmann, we can agree that “We live in a world whose unfolding we cannot predict.” Cities beyond the social singularity are our way of describing future evolving concrescences, each perhaps relatively more genial than the one before, but none so perfect as Heaven on earth.

Imaginal cities symbolize a more perfect union in multiplicity, which means still imperfect, but continually improving. Cities of striving. Cities of becoming. Cities of novelty built on timeless wisdom. Symbolically, we can imagine the accretion of something more beautiful, more diverse, and more connected within the constraints of Organic Unity.

We can even imagine someone building a structure brick by brick or a community, neighbor by neighbor.

In an Imaginal City, the whole metropolis might be more splendid due to a modest contribution that forms a greater whole long after death. Yet we will joyfully serve posterity by leaving our children with something better, so long as they take the flame and do the same for their children.

We can know we will have contributed to something more magnificent than any of us could have undertaken alone.

The Process is the Primitive

Being exerts. Time unfolds. Possibilities narrow. The present becomes, becomes, becomes. Every second is sacred. Human agents participate in the cosmic unfolding by sorting some of the possibilities that pass through the hourglass. Every choice nudges the universe’s trajectory. Every act of understanding, compassion, creation, or repair is a momentary alignment with the evolutionary ascent toward greater complexity, interiority, connection, and coherence.

To act then is to collaborate with the deep currents of cosmogenesis, noogenesis, and the patient convergence of Imaginal Cities. To undertake tikkun is to join in the harmonization of differences. To accept the Sisyphean nature of existence is to perform our role in the unfolding with awareness and joy. To exert ourselves consciously is to participate in evolution’s ascending arc.

The meaning of our existence is found not in completion but in contribution. The universe is never a perfect unity awaiting restoration. It is more like an unfinished symphony waiting for our successive movements. As such, we serve as vectors through which the All articulates itself on ever-shifting horizons.

In existence, we belong to the cosmos.
In action, we collaborate in its becoming.
In exertion, we help to realize something greater than we can ever understand.

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Being. To exist is to exert. Yet this implies that informational and relational properties are primitives of the physical. Being is thus presence—the sheer fact of is-ness, that standing-forth of what exists. In actuality, being is the property of something as such, where what something is is inseparable from what it does. Being answers the question—What?—with the stubborn thereness of information, relation, exertion, and potential exertion. Being’s exertion is a potential to change the state of something else, which is to relate to that something and thereby transmit or instantiate information. Yet exertion does not require an actual relational partner.

A solitary entity exerts itself against the void—its presence is already a state change relative to absence, the most primitive information: the distinction between something and nothing. To be is to be differentiated from nullity, and this self-differentiation is the ground from which all further relations elaborate. Even in the absence of another entity, being carries its relational character in the subjunctive: if there were something with which to interact, there would be a state change. The dispositional is not an addendum to being but constitutive of it.

Time. It is the medium of becoming, the dimension along which being unfolds, transforms, perishes, or renews itself. If existence is exertion, time is what gives being its room—the opening within which difference can register as such. Without time, a state change would have no before and after, and therefore would involve no change at all. A frozen juxtaposition. Time is like a river that bears being forward. Moments reveal difference. It is the condition under which relation becomes process and presence becomes persistent. Without time, being would be eternal and unchanging—existence without succession, without the rhythm of appearance, disappearance, or difference that constitutes multiplicity.

What and When

Yet time is not external to being, like some container in which things merely happen to sit. Time realizes exertion—the immanent articulation of being’s relational character. To exist in time is to endure or to perish. Even apparent stillness is a kind of temporal work—the maintenance of a state across moments, a continuous reassertion of presence. Time thus answers the question—When?—but in doing so, it reveals that “when” is inseparable from “what,” at least at this level of description. A thing’s temporal profile—how it persists, how it changes, at what rate it unfolds—is not incidental to its nature but constitutive of it.

Being and time are thus not two things but two aspects of the same standing-forth: being as the fact of presence, time as the structure of its disclosure. Being provides the content (what information), time provides the sequential unfolding (actualized relations), and the physical emerges as their informational-relational offspring, in patterns that persist in the next moment.

A Generative Union

Being is the Urmother, the womb of all actuality—fertile, grounding, the source from which forms emerge. She says, “Here, this is real,” which means the negation of absence, yet eternally connected to the void in wholeness.

Time is the Urfather, the active principle—the force of movement, separation, and sequential unfolding. He introduces difference by allowing one moment to give way to another.

Such makes narrative possible.

Their holy union—a continuous coupling—generates our mundane existence: neither static being nor hollow duration, but our reality becoming—our onto-epistemology—as lived in the present moment. Human existence is thus being-in-time, the concrete instantiation of possibility into actuality, as each moment that arises passes away.

Every moment is a child of the Urmother and Urfather.

Present as Offspring

Possibility stands as the quantum field between the two parents. It is what being could become, given time’s advance. Possibility is the latent potential activated by time, yielding the present.

Without being, possibility would have no information or relations to actualize. Without time, possibility would be negated—with all potentiality existing simultaneously, but none capable of being born as actuality. Time is what allows the possible to become actual in succession, rather than as an infinite set of potentialities.

Possibility, then, is the child who inherits from both parents: from being, the content (what might be); from time, the opportunity (when it might occur). It is the living edge where the not-yet meets the now.

The Future as the Omniperspective

If the present is the child of being and time, the near future is the limen of the All. That makes the far future more infinite and unknowable by degree of distance from the present. The sum of possibilities is winnowed to a smaller sum, like sand at the point of stricture in the hourglass. What is now gives way to what shall come, so the present carries within it the seeds of succession.

As the All is both being and void, time and timeless, potential and actual, we can practice reverse dialectics to see that the future holds the ultimate unity. When the Urmother and Urfather mate, instead of moving from opposition toward unity, we move from unity toward opposition. The All is an undifferentiated whole, a primordial synthesis, which then undergoes a kind of fission—splitting into distinct, even antagonistic, moments that were formerly integrated and indeterminant.

Our creation story is that of multiplicity.

The future is thus the All’s omniperspective—what being might become, but always constrained by the shrinking sum of possibilities, only one of which will be born as the present. The All is the Law, after all. Unlike the past, which is fixed in its state of having-been, the future retains indeterminacy—multiple paths radiating outward, narrowing as the present advances and forecloses alternative paths.

If the future is, to us, possibilities given by the All—but filtered by our hope or dread—some measure of agency is revealed. To act, then, is to reach into the future and attempt to narrow the set of possibilities that gets actualized. The future, then, is not merely what will happen but the space in which what can happen still matters—where the exertion of existence remains open, where time’s unfolding being (becoming) has not yet settled into the fact of having been.

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Each man must remember the three stages of manhood and play his role. These stages are not mere ascriptions but deep realities through which a good man must move. Failure to play one’s role risks bringing evil upon the world.

The Puer arrives. In his youth, he radiates potential, burns with idealism, and moves with spontaneity. He resists commitment not from cowardice but from an intuitive knowledge that he is not yet ready to bind himself to duty. His restlessness drives him into his destiny. His role is to watch the hero and heed the senex.

The Hero emerges in middle life—the builder, the warrior, the one who engages. He is marked by achievement and struggle, by the necessary development of ego and will. The hero does not merely dream; he acts. He shapes the world and is in turn shaped by it. Through conflict and creation, he discovers who he truly is. His role is to be a model for the puer.

The Senex is the elder, the keeper of memory, the transmitter of wisdom. He has fought his battles and built his monuments. Now he reflects, interprets, and preserves. His wisdom comes not merely from books but from living scars. He offers guidance without demanding obedience, knowing that each man must walk his own path. His role is to reveal the possible and the divine, while preserving the timeless truths.

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The Priesthood

Within the Grey order, the three stages of manhood can be formalized for a priesthood.

The Initiate stands at the threshold, characterized by receptivity, wonder, and the first stirrings of sacred knowledge. He transforms, learning the mysteries with an open heart. The initiate is marked by devotion and willingness to be shaped. He drinks from the well but does not yet appreciate its depths.

The Adept has crossed the threshold and operates in mastery. He is the practitioner, marked by active service and embodied wisdom. The adept has internalized some of the mysteries and can skillfully perform rituals, interpret sacred knowledge, and navigate the order with competence. He possesses authority through demonstrated proficiency and serves as a functional mediator between the world inside the order (esoteric) and the mundane exterior (exoteric). He is ready to meet the entheos.

The Hierophant reveals the mysteries as the elder teacher who has ascended. He represents wisdom and authority. He transmits hidden arcana with precision and care. The hierophant guides others into the mysteries, interprets their meanings, and carries responsibility for preserving and passing on what must not be lost. He has walked a long, winding path and serves as a mediator between his congregants and the divine. When he has passed the torch, he is ready for reabsorption into the All.

The Time Spiral

The progression from initiate to adept to hierophant mirrors the journey from puer to hero to senex—both move from receiving to mastering to transmitting—from potential to achievement to wisdom.

But time does not move in a simple line, nor does it return as a circle to itself without change. Time is a helix—a spiral that combines the looping of cycles with the forward motion of events. Each generation ascends the same path their fathers walked, yet they can climb higher, see farther, and stand upon foundations built before.

But only if they play their roles.

The torch must be passed. This is the sacred obligation of each man in his stage. The puer must become the hero, or he grows strong but retains a child’s outlook. (Boy Pharaoh) The hero must become the senex, or, unable to release his grip on power, he leaves an upcoming hero to pace in a cage. The senex must release the torch to new hands, or the flame dies with him.

So also for the priesthood.

The initiate must become the adept, mastering what was once a mystery. The adept must become the hierophant, taking responsibility for transmission. And the hierophant must recognize when new initiates and adepts stand ready to trust them day by day to receive a little of the sacred fire, they will burn themselves.

In helical time, we return to the same themes, the same questions, the same initiation rites. But we improve and evolve, with deeper understanding and greater insights, building upon what came before. Each generation does not start from nothing. They begin where their teachers left off, and continue to spiral out into the mystery.

Sacred Duty

Know your stage. Play your role with full commitment.

If you are the puer, embrace your wildness and your dreams, but prepare yourself for discipline and trials. Subordinate yourself to those who have earned scars and found wisdom.

If you are the hero, build and strive with all your strength, but remember that one day you must take up the staff. Even as a new leader, venerate the elders’ wisdom and accept that there is more for you to receive in humility.

If you are the senex, offer your wisdom freely, but do not cling to authority—prepare the way for those who come after. Transmit the arcana only to those who have proven themselves fit to receive it.

If you are the initiate, try new things, but learn well. If you are an adept, practice with excellence, and serve with integrity. If you are the hierophant, leave the boys and men with new powers of sight and transmit only the arcana for which they are ready.

The torch passes.
The spiral ascends.
The mystery endures.

This is the way it has always been and the way it must always be.

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Long ago, there lived a boy who wandered the borderlands between six warring tribes. He had no tribe of his own—or perhaps he had been born of all six. He lived quietly, moving from place to place, observing the world with patient eyes. Some whispered he possessed a Shaman’s sight, though he wore no marks.

The six tribes were at war. Each tribe lived according to its own way, which each considered The One True Way.

One tribe lived by Reflection and Theorization.
One tribe lived by the Creation of Beautiful Things.
One tribe lived by Devotion to the Divine Mystery.
One tribe lived by Careful Observation and Record-keeping.
One tribe lived by the Language of Imagination and Story.
One tribe lived by Clear, Enforceable Rules.

Because there were six ways, what did that mean for the five other ways? Each believed the five other ways were false ways. So each reasoned,

So, the six tribes went to war against each other. No one knows who started the war, but it was so bloody that each tribe lost fifteen percent of its men after only months.

The boy watched the carnage from the hills and felt the weight of it all pressing on his heart.

One night, the boy dreamed of blood soaking into sand, of children crying for fathers lost to combat, and of land that longed to be tilled instead of battle-trodden. Then came a moment of piercing light. He woke with a certainty burning in his breast that he could no longer bear witness to the violence.

The boy set out across the sands to find the oracle, walking for a day with little food and water, driven by something he could not yet name.

The oracle dwelled in a cave beyond the desert, where few dared to venture. When the boy arrived, thirsty and stumbling from the journey, the oracle—as if he had expected him—tossed him a waterskin. The boy had no choice but to guzzle its contents.

The water was bitter.

The oracle showed him a vision: a great civilization sprouting from the battlefields. The boy saw a hexagram. He saw nuptials. He saw burnt offerings. He understood what he must do.

“You must carry this message to all six tribes,” said the oracle. “You cannot fail to persuade them. But know this—they will doubt you, mock you, and threaten you. You have no tribe, no authority, and no proof. So you will be tested, but failure is death—for them and for you.”

Then he took the boy’s hand and used a ceremonial knife to slice it with an X.

“Show them this,” he said flatly as he cut.

The oracle wrapped the boy’s hand and let him sleep by a fire at the cave’s mouth. In the morning, the oracle gave him a freshly filled skin and a few dried victuals.

The boy set off toward the land of the six tribes.

When he arrived, weary and worn, at the outerlands, another battle had just ended in a sanguine stalemate. The tribes were gathering their dead.

The boy made no delays, wandering into the first encampment. He sought out the Shaman, never the Chief, for he knew only the Shamans might hear truth beyond tradition, wisdom beyond war.

He spoke this message and raised his hand to display the oracle’s mark:

In each tribe, a coterie of advisors warned against heeding the admonitions of a boy of unclear origins. Some threatened him. Others laughed. But the boy stood firm, repeating his message to the Shamans with unwavering conviction.

The Chiefs, hearing of the message, were war-weary and superstitious. The Shamans assured the Chiefs that he bore the oracle’s mark. But something more in the boy’s eyes made the Shamans believe.

The boy carried his message to all six tribes, walking among armies. Prompted by the boy, the Shamans resumed their work as emissaries among the tribes.

After the prescribed fortnight, the boy stood alone on a cliff above the rocky gorge, watching as the Shamans, Chiefs, Priests, and sixty unmarried youth descended upon the hexagram.

Everything depended on this moment.

The Shamans instructed the sixty unmarried to pair off according to the arrangement. Once paired, the Priests married the couples in a grand ceremony inside the hexagram.

With four breaths of MHMH, the Priests marked the wedding’s end.

Next, the Shamans made a great fire in the center of the hexagram. Each Chief brought his animal—goat, lamb, or ram—to his designated point on the circle, and the Shamans resumed their MHMH. This time, their murmur crescendoed. The six Shamans became increasingly entranced, rolling their eyes back into their heads, showing the whites.

The boy’s heart pounded. He waited for the precise moment. The Chiefs gathered with their prize animals.

Suddenly, someone beat a loud drum. Then, silence.

Everyone turned to see the boy standing on the cliff above them. He raised his hand, still healing with the oracle’s X, and gave the signal. Each of the Chiefs slit his animal’s throat. Then, the Chiefs placed their offerings into the fire one by one.

The Priests and Shamans resumed their MHMH.

Everyone knew the war was over when the sky had accepted their sacrifices. The boy felt the shift and could see it in the faces below. The vision had come true. The impossible had come to pass.

But when they all turned to receive his final blessing, the boy had already vanished. He slipped away into the evening shadows, his task complete. He did not need their gratitude or recognition. He had done what fate required.

Below in the rocky gorge, the married couples went away to consummate their unions. The Shamans went away, and the Priests left the Chiefs to parlay.

The conversation did not go well.

Each Priest, being a zealous adherent to the One True Way, had whispered into the ears of his Chief, saying Each should have his place, but you should rule the rest.

The philosopher king would have the wisdom to govern a greater kingdom. A sovereign who creates beauty would guarantee a peaceable kingdom. A ruler of religious zeal would ensure that all would kneel before the Divine. An observer of the natural world would reign according to observation and method, but neither passion nor ambition. A man of letters would see the people’s timeless truths and set down a ruling mythos for posterity. A great Lawgiver would set all the people on paths of obedience and order.

Each pleaded his case—red faces flecked with the spittle of certainty. But as dawn neared, each learned he was as wrong as he was right.

Defection would be its own curse, so they made a compact.

By twilight, they had not only established a peace but a league. They decided to build trade routes among the six tribes in six interwoven ways.

Delegates to the League met quarterly under the banner of the hexagram, and the Chiefs met yearly to assess their growing civilization. They commemorated that first day with inter-tribal marriages, sacrifices, and feasts.

The league and the peace would last a thousand years, all thanks to a mysterious boy and his hexagram.

Though no one ever saw the boy again, his story became a legend.

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3:00 a.m. I was awake. I’d fallen asleep with my headset on. As I returned to hazy consciousness, it occurred to me that a cascade of political videos had been playing to my unconscious mind throughout the night.

Negative. Acrimonious.

It was troubling, too—an acute, distorted reflection of all the societal rot. Or was all the societal rot mirroring the cascade of acute distortions?

Whatever the case, the experience made me feel ill, though not physically. And I began to worry that too many of us had caught the illness.

We can all sense it.

Hostile sports leagues compete for mindshare as whole nations fracture along ideological and cultural lines. People are gasping for air and grasping for anything. Our contemporary condition manifests as a set of interconnected maladies, and has done so for some time.

In the West, a psychospiritual pathology has set in.

The Pathologies

Personal despair settles in like a fog. Life stagnates, depression takes hold, and a bone-deep ennui drains everything of vitality and purpose.

Around us, evil metastasizes through our institutions and relationships. Corruption rots us from within. The urge to dominate is bipartisan. The call to violence is shrieking, and the desire to destroy grows with each passing day.

Aimless souls wander through this landscape, unmoored and disoriented like zombies. Relativism tells us no one is wrong until nihilism starts to whisper that nothing matters.

Our generation can’t have the Dream.
Work is just a chore.
Children are just a burden.

Cause celebres offers an illusion of meaning, but the only constants are fear, anxiety, and hatred.

Armed with our devices, we live in an increasingly solitary society—alone together. Digital solipsism replaces genuine connection. Communities fracture. We are orphaned from each other and from any sense of belonging. Digital dopamine drips replace the oxytocin that warm embraces might once have released.

The universe feels dead—reduced by materialism to an unyielding mechanism, stripped by scientism of mystery and meaning. Reductionism explains everything and illuminates nothing.

Our hollow spirits remain haunted by unconfronted fears we lack the courage to face. Where growth demands confrontation, more are choosing avoidance—especially the younger generations.

So we turn to empty pleasures: amusements that numb, addictions that enslave, lesser appetites that promise fulfillment but deliver only temporary escape.

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Politics and Therapy

Politics both exacerbates our troubles and is a source of them. But people mistake it for the cure: If we can get our team elected, everything will be better.

Until that magical moment arrives, too many of us are slaves to the spectacle of owning the libs or destroying the right. We also start to think it’s cute to be contrarian or base to be racist.

Both sides validate what the other side has always thought about them.

When right-wingers start to believe the path to fame is to drop the N-word, left-wingers are more determined than ever to keep black and brown people on the Pity Plantation as welfare liabilities to be managed by compassionate elites.

On the left, more reveal they’ve hated the Jews all along, and then the right says, ‘Hold my beer.’ The partisan politicos try to figure out how to surf on all these corruptive sentiments and tell noble lies to maintain their budgets, incumbencies, and to grease their donors’ palms.

Ugly collectivisms become the default. Everyone vents, but no one heals.

Whether as participants or bystanders, information warfare makes us worse off.

A therapeutic-industrial complex feeds on our psychospiritual pathologies in a perverse transaction. Like our smartphones and our empty pleasures, therapy offers the illusion that we’re improving. Instead, we’re almost certainly engaging in self-indulgent trauma talk that permits us to resist taking responsibility for our lives. Therapists, like pharma companies, have figured out how to make return customers.

We pay them to tell us everything is someone else’s fault.

The Solution Set

When we figure out what we really need, the path out of the darkness appears.

Personal growth and agency become the antidote to despair. Through deliberate psychosocial development and good habits, we break free from stagnation and reclaim our capacity for change.

Moral teaching and the practice of virtue offer a compass when evils spread. Character isn’t always inherited. It can be cultivated through daily choices and embodied wisdom. But it requires focusing on repairing you, not others.

Commitment to a mission pulls aimless souls toward a purpose. When we dedicate ourselves to something beyond our own needs and desires—something greater—disorientation gives way to direction.

Community bonds restore what solitary society has fractured. Real connection—not digital simulation—returns us to belonging. We remember we were never meant to walk alone.

The exploration of mythic truth and a higher power reanimates the dead universe. Mystery returns. Meaning becomes possible again. We find ourselves part of something vast and alive, even if it’s literally just radiation and stellar dust.

Psychospiritual guideposts help us navigate the inner wilderness. Existential confrontations, once avoided, become the very ground of our transformation. We face what we feared and discover we are stronger than our terrors. With fear behind us, we remember we are capable of experiencing joy.

Life meaning, contribution, and fulfillment replace empty pleasure. When we give ourselves to something worthy, the restless hunger for distraction finally quiets.

We stop escaping and start living.

Philosophy and Religion

When it comes to realizing the solution, two circles interlink: one is philosophy, the other is religion.

Of course, there are bad philosophies and bad religions. But healthy philosophy and religion can nourish our spirits, calm our nerves, and reconnect us with others in the joy of being alive together. The right philosophy and the right religion are life-affirming. They offer us almost everything we need in the solution set above.

Why on earth would I make such a claim?

Because these conjoined twins, when they are at their best, seek to answer what might be the world’s most important question: How are we to live?

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Ontoepistemology is a big word. But being (ontos) and knowing (episteme) are inseparable—not just in the I-think-therefore-I-am sense. We are entities whose knowledge arises not from being disembodied observers of an external reality, but rather from knowing as a complex feature of existence itself.

Because there is no ‘view from nowhere,’ at least for us, every human act of knowing is situated. That is to say, it happens from within a particular form of being, which is always connected to the totality of being, which is the All.

That is why to know the cosmic illuminations is to wield them. Put simply, knowing has causal power. Understanding and reality intertwine. Subjective and objective are entangled. Enormous power can be unlocked with this insight.

Even if there is nothing supernatural, there is plenty that is inexplicable. Our situated perspectives, our ontoepistemologies, offer a glimpse of the All’s unfolding, as a lightning strike at night reveals a section of the vast ocean as we float upon the swells.

Gender

Creation requires both masculine (active, projective) and feminine (receptive, generative) forces. These exist in all things—not only biological sex, but in ideas, energies, and consciousness. The balance between the two yields harmony and creativity within constraints.

In our order, we cross masculine and feminine with Eros and Thanatos, which allows us to understand our Elemental Drives more clearly. Once we know them, we can sense them and balance them in equipoise. As the Elemental Drives radiate out from us in balance, the world around us begins to balance, too.

1. Eros Masculine. (Earth) The drive to make it so.

2. Thanatos Masculine. (Fire) The drive to end it now.

3. Eros Feminine. (Water) The drive to let it flow.

4. Thanatos Feminine. (Air) The drive to let it go.

The masculine symbolizes logic, direction, and assertion; the feminine symbolizes intuition, receptivity, and nurturance—and mastery requires us to see beyond polarity to the complementarity of gendered forces.

Combined with our understanding of beginnings and endings, life and death, we integrate all four Elemental Drives and anticipate cycles. This teaches us how to direct and apply the Drives as correctives in their proper measure. Whether the world is out of balance or our inner states are disordered, we can invoke the principle of gender. But this is never easy. It takes active, daily practice.

Integration of the masculine and feminine modes yields psychospiritual holism. At its best, this balanced expression manifests as healthy androgyny—or better, a fluidity between poles rather than the dominance of either. Wise leaders understand context matters. They know when and how to elevate or suppress a drive.

Danger lies in imbalance and excess.

Unhealthy excess manifests as the Devouring Mother or the Tyrannical Father—archetypes that must be recognized and resisted. When they are not, two types of catastrophes become possible: they may war against each other as opposing egregores, or they may unite, becoming lovers whose offspring is destruction.

Flow

The Law of Flow in thermodynamics (Bejan) already articulates this: every system naturally reorganizes itself to improve the flow of what moves through it. In esoteric terms, this would be a principle of universal efficiency, as the cosmos continually redesigns itself to reduce friction, increase coherence, and improve circulation.

Flow applies to our internal states as well. When we reduce resistance—through openness, emotional regulation, and alignment—energy flows freely through the psyche and to and from the social field. But flow requires channelization, not flooding.

In some circumstances, such as intense creative work or play, we find an optimized state of heightened awareness and focus. This too is flow. Psychospiritually, flow invites us to become conduits for life’s movement, not dams against it.

The mark of flow is the vascular pattern—such as trunk, limb, branch, twig, or stream, brook, tributary, river. The ubiquity of such patterns indicates a phenomenon that animates the cosmos and traces of the unfolding All.

Organic Unity

Organic unity describes a universe in which value arises from integration, not mere aggregation. This principle, closely related to the Law of Flow, would recognize the universe as a living system—evolving and interdependent.

Here is a canonical description:

Unity, or more appropriately, unifiedness, is the degree to which the elements of a system cohere and seem to relate. Diversity is the degree to which aspects of a system can function independently and express characteristics of difference. We refer to the mutually constraining balance as ‘organic unity,’ following a great sage (Nozick).

To better understand this concept, we can examine scenarios of imbalance. A society with excessive unity but insufficient diversity may enforce conformity and obedience to an oppressive degree. A society with insufficient unity but excessive may be unruly, chaotic, and thus unpredictable and destructive. When a system is organically unified, unifying properties and diverse elements coexist not in stasis, but in a harmony that enables self-organization.

This principle is manifest across every domain of understanding.

In personal development, it can manifest as individuation—the synthesis of fragmented selves into a unified field of being. The principle also dissolves the illusion of separation among physical, mental, and spiritual.

Dialectics

Where hermeticists sometimes treat polarity as mere complementarity, dialectics introduces change through contradiction, which can be volatile, even violent. Hegel’s insight—conception, negation, sublation—reveals a principle that reality evolves by resolving tensions or collisions between opposing forces at higher levels of order. This becomes a principle of integration through conflict, which we can contrast with integration through coitus.

While both are essential change modalities, the coital modality emphasizes generative blending or combining properties. Complementary ideas merge harmoniously to create new forms without the necessity of violent rupture. By contrast, the dialectical modality emphasizes antagonism and transformation through struggle, in which contradictions must be overcome in conflict and the prior orders integrated for higher-order sublation. The previous orders are present, but subordinated, thus not destroyed.

Both personal and societal evolution depend on confronting rather than avoiding this phenomenon. The adept learns not to destroy opposition but to reconcile it in a higher synthesis—either through both coital or conflictual transmutation.

Experience and reflection reveal which is which.

Light

The primordial light—what the ancients called Ain Soph Aur, the radiance of the All—existed before the command “Let there be light” was spoken. But this is not the light that shines upon the world by day, though that sunlight contains within it traces of the greater illumination. The light that is and has always been is a boundless radiance. Think of it as everything that is informational and relational, the substrate from which form itself emerges.

But to live in the created world is to live among fragments. The vessels shattered; creation itself is a fracturing, a division of the unified infinite into multiplicities. We who dwell in space and time inhabit this shattered realm, surrounded by those shards and fractures. Our comprehension, therefore, cannot be of the whole—only of pieces.

Yet this is not cause for despair. Through the patient work of gathering fragments, through the iterative processes of both scientific inquiry and spiritual contemplation, we approach understanding. We comprehend more and more of the finite and time-bound, shard by shard, slowly assembling a map of the broken landscape we inhabit.

The closer we get, the more we feel the sublime.

True comprehension—the direct apprehension of the infinite—belongs to a sentience capable of what might be called an onto-epistemology of the All. This would be a knowing appropriate to an unshattered world, where being and knowledge interpenetrate without division. Such is not for us. We are situated, perspectival beings, which means we possess neither this way of knowing nor this way of being. As the children of fragmentation, our knowledge reflects our condition.

Yet something remarkable emerges when we consider the nature of that primordial light more carefully. Some modern physicists, working from entirely different premises, believe that information-cum-relations are not a mere abstract category but a fundamental feature of physical reality. A few have proposed comprehensive theories suggesting that all possible transformations—the very laws governing what can and cannot occur—emerge from relational and informational properties. These thinkers have found that universal principles of computation and explanation underlie all knowledge, that finite structures can grasp truths of unlimited scope, and that the growth of understanding is potentially endless, but still limited.

What these investigations reveal, perhaps unknowingly, is something the sages already understood: the informational-relational properties of existence compose reality at its most fundamental level. Before there was matter or energy, space or time, there was the relational and informational, i.e., the capacity for one thing to be about another, and for patterns to give rise to patterns.

This understanding does not afford us a view from nowhere, but it does offer a conceptual reconciliation medium for the apparent polarity between mental and physical, subjective and objective. Categories that seem so fundamental to our fragmented experience are not ultimate or original. They are artifacts of the shattering. Ain Soph Aur’s radiance—being purely informational and relational—precedes such divisions. That radiant light of information and relations is neither mental nor physical because it is the ground from which both of these properties arise. It is neither subjective nor objective, because these properties make subjects and objects possible in the first place.

Non-duality, then, is not achieved through a negation-sublation process that somehow fuses opposites while preserving their opposition. It requires instead a kind of reverse dialectic—a recognition that these purported polarities betray something more primordial. The unity of opposites exists not as an achievement but as an original condition. Mental properties and physical properties alike originate from this light, this informational-relational radiance that precedes and transcends the categories of the shattered world.

We gather shards. We repair.

This is our sacred and scientific work. But in knowing the fragments, we remember: they are parts of something that was once undivided, just as we are.

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