Tree of Life
Science and (not only) Judaic non-dual thought
Fowler Museum of Cultural History (source)
If they don’t deny it completely, people tend to imagine Absolute as an intelligent person, force, or some weird combination of both. Thus, an average person ends up somewhere on a spectrum from materialism to idealism respectively. Well, what can I say — both positions are wrong and, ironically, both for the very same reason.
Materialism as well as idealism are based on substances. Setting aside the fact that substantialism already requires space, this dualistic insistence on finding the “primordial ether” drives materialism toward what is known as hard problem of consciousness, and it also presents idealism with the insurmountable hurdle of an intelligent creative agent. While materialism bets on matter and idealism bets on information, even though they are equivalent, both presume that the Absolute is a thing.
Hence, materialist cannot fathom that matter is not “material” per se as, even as far as phenomena go, it’s just a condensed or restricted energy and information. Similarly, idealist cannot accept the idea that a bunch of randomly seeded data (which is already a phenomenon) can contain the blueprint of even life itself, exactly as a toolbox and a pile of wood already contain the blueprint of a table, chair, or a closet. (Another hurdle for an idealist then seems to be the fact that dead don’t disappear into thin air but also don’t retain their spatial coherence of an individual. This error also fuels all the other famous “woo-woos”.)
As it seems to me, the adherence to materialism and idealism respectively is first and foremost a psychological matter.
Materialist takes pride in strictly adhering to objectively observable and either hopes that he could eventually manipulate it to postpone or circumvent death or he wallows in martyrdom and depression. Idealist, on the other hand, hopes that death is not the end of an individual, because after all, even that you have a brain is just an image in your mind and if dreams can be manipulated …
Well, both positions are almost entirely missing the whole point — that the Universe is in essence unsubstantial does not mean that matter is not real. And of course, all talk about body and mind, or natural and supernatural, are misplaced — as software is always just hardware, mind is always body, and supernatural is at all times perfectly natural.
Anyway — people were trying to communicate this knowledge in many different ways for millennia. One such attempt is also the Kabbalistic tree of life, which is in essence a complete map of Universe (even if it’s a multiverse or a simulation). Though, I must add that, as with all other maps, even this diagram is a human one.
Few remarks to the image above: that halo of “no thing * light * no end” is literally Ayin Ohr Ein Sof and corresponds with Buddhist formless realms; “Aspire” means an unrestricted outward flow, in terms of concepts covering anything from loving-kindness, through affection, to motivation, ambition and unconstrained desire; similarly, “Absorb” represents a receptive “black hole” — whatever impulse, whatever data configuration, is aspired, it can be accommodated and absorbed.
Furthermore, “GATE” is the entrance to the “lower astral realm”, that is to say, the world of sorcery or, in other words, individual unconscious; peeking behind “VEIL” reveals the “upper astral realm” or the world of platonic ideas; and crossing the “RIFT” (or abyss) means going beyond conceptual knowledge (nothing from this “realm” and beyond is directly communicable in an unambiguous way).
Another thing to keep in mind is that the tree of life is not static. To tie it loosely to science (astro/physics, chemistry, biology, psychology), it looks something like this:
Here I must stress that even though the arrow depicts a direction in time (or entropy), all of that is happening at once. For example, right where you stand there are photons of Cosmic Microwave Background. You are immersed in CMB happening. Clearly, past echoes and mixes with present. And at present, human potential reaches to absolute self-realization.
Tree of life can be also drawn as a set of concentric circles — follow the yellow line of the lightning flash from top to bottom and imagine each sfira being within the previous one — from Ayin Ohr Ein Sof on the outside to a very small Kingdom in the center of the diagram, each a further refinement of the previous level of complexity. This basically represents the half-circle from “Big-Bang,” through “data” and “energy,” to “matter”. (I use “Big-Bang” in a sense of the beginning of Universe, no matter the particulars.)
Similarly, in very loose scientific terms which then depict the processes humming within humans and thus represent the half-circle from “matter” to “realization”, a concentric equivalent looks roughly like this:
As a bonus, I’ll finish with a map that depicts the same picture as all diagrams above. To discover how they correlate I leave to you as a homework, but I’ll give you a hint: you are that which is beyond Ayin, that which is unknowable, and yet, can be realized. Also, dreaming means lucid dreaming, and seeing correlates with mastery of wu-wei.
And finally, don’t worry if those diagrams seem to you like arbitrary ass-pulls. After self-realization, they will make perfect sense ;)
