Signs are everywhere. Often ignored, they are subtlety crocheted into the fabric of reality, that is, if they are not constitutive of the fabric itself. We might think that this only pertains to clear markings born of convention. Stop on red. Go on green. Thumb extended on the side of the highway. A scowl. A grin. Numbers and letters. The whole circulation of significance crowds our field of experience with endless, prepackaged gesticulations in an ever undulating semantic web.

Yet, this does not mean that we know how to read them. We are often faced with the tripartite challenge of not wanting to miss something which is being said to us, or fearing that we might be overreaching and reading into things that simply aren’t there, or succumbing to the manifold distractions that feast upon our attention whilst jamming all other signals with a blinding focus on the domineering task at hand. It could be the bread crumbs or fine cream of a social exchange, the knocking of a vague feeling on the wall of our gut, the buzz of an elusive idea. Scaling up, might the details of our day to day wanderings form an exquisitely choreographed pattern for us to reflect upon, a Jamesian ‘figure in the carpet’ whose secret both attracts and confounds?

We ourselves are a matrix of signs. Our physical, and more importantly, our spiritual composition, rather than being merely a composite of brute chemicals and allusive vital forces, is ripe with discreet units of meaning whose deployment teams them together and orchestrates the music of life. Kabbalistic models for the psyche tend to break up and catalogue our inner-subjective experience along predetermined conceptual lines. But this is merely a reflection of Being in general. As we find in Deuteronomy 32:9 “For God’s [Yud-Hei-Vav-Hei] portion is His people…” wherein the name evoked is the Tetragrammaton (name of four letters) which itself designates “Being” or “Reality.” The minimal implication is that the Jewish people are somehow a ‘part’ or ‘portion’ of the Divine. By extension, from another level of perception, everything else in existence would have to be included–at least on an unconscious level–as Judaism maintains that there is nothing other than God, meaning that this, amongst a host of examples, demonstrates the particular as speaking to the universal. Explained in this fashion, evidence has been brought from this verse for the existence of a Godly soul.

Alternatively, some read the unvocalized word “amo” [His nation or people] as though it were sounded out as “emo” [with or close to Him]. The superimposition of both readings amounts to something akin to “His people are those who are close to Him” (in the existential manner of “Being-with”) and “those who are close to Him are considered as His people.” Here, created beings represent a “part” consciousness which nonetheless derives from the “whole” of Divinity. The big picture plays into the small picture. Not limited to isolated individual experiences, we are carried over into the collective as people who hold something in common–the realm of the inter-subjective.

However, all this analysis only scrapes the surface. The word “chelek” [part or portion] in the above cited verse, also registers a mark of distinction or chalak (again playing with a substitution of vowels). So too, it differentiates and divides. In other words, with Him, His people (collective subjective awareness) issues from the essential division which is His name Yud-Hei-Vav-Hei. These four letters originate our consciousness. They act as weigh stations with which we gauge the relative development of our internal awareness. Being with a big ‘B’ capitalizes our lowercase being. Of all the signs surrounding us and flowing though us, these are the most foundational. We may itemize them as follows:

Yud: [י] closely resembles a dot with a small tip crowning it. Figuratively, we are instructed by the kabbalists to consider it as a seed that fertilizes consciousness from out of the unconscious. As a kernel idea or seminal insight, this letter embodies our innovative faculty of intuition (chochmah).

Hei: [ה] can be imaged as a framing of the initial insight (Yud) in conceptual containers. This letter even suggests three dimensional development as it is comprised with three lines: two conjoined lines that establish length and width and a third detached line which, as the mystical tradition informed us, runs thought the page to fill the role of the depth dimension. Our system of thought that grasps and develops intuition in the womb of understanding (binah) relates to this level.

Vav: [ו] looks like a vertical line with a slight bend at the top. As with its form, the name Vav means a ‘hook’. Its about connection–especially emotional connection. Emotions (middot) are born out of the understanding of the previous level. They put me in touch with others and with myself. Our emotive experience branches out of our intellect and further situates us in the world.

Hei: [ה] same as before only this time the development and refraining is accomplished not within, but without. My external world contextualizes me (my insights, conceptions, and emotions) as I attempt to express myself and to act upon that world. This last stage announces a subject’s sovereignty and self-mastery over the objective sphere which qualifies it as a sense of kingdom or government (malchut) in Kabbalah.

Without repeating all of the details, we might summarize this quad-core processing of experience within consciousness as the fertilization of the mind that then gestates and produces emotional ‘offspring’ which, in turn, propel a person towards action and self-expression. The entire process trickles down from the unconscious which is itself unrepresentable. Thus, it has no ‘letter’ of its own. The best we get is an allusion to it. The tip of the Yud, like an extended arrow pointing to what is beyond, hints at the unconscious crown (keter).

Here is where we can take a hint.

Some difference of opinion exists as to whether the Yud has this kotz [crownlet or upwardly pointed tip atop the letter] exclusively. Most reserve this distinguishing mark, the stretching or extending beyond the bounds of the letter–the hyper-literal transgression of self-contained semiosis–for the Yud alone. From this, we might infer that intuition functions as that the key zone of transition from the unconscious into consciousness. Ferried over from the dark side, the sudden and unexpected spark of an intuitive insight brings only a faint trace of its concealed origin. It comes from nowhere, from the intangible and unrepresentable no-thingness of the unconscious crown.

All of this informs our sense of intuition. It can neither be completely justified within the normative cognitive arena and subsumed within the conceptual sphere, nor even be fully grasped. When it breaks through the seemingly impenetrable membrane that separates the conscious mind from the unconscious, its jump makes an impression and withdraws. Intuition hints at something more. The ‘something more’ is the unconscious crown.

The Chassidic masters, beginning with the Baal Shem Tov (1698-1760), teach that the unconscious is actually a consciousness without restraint–an awareness of the whole. Intuition, by contrast, only chips away at the whole. Yet, it is not exactly a isolated part either. Rather, it serves to stream the experience of the whole into the consciousness of the part. Taking from the popular phrase of the Baal Shem Tov: “If you grasp part of the essence you grasp onto all of it,” we may assert that through the prism of the part one beholds the whole at the intuitive level. Signifying beyond itself, the part becomes metaphoric of the whole. Continually streaming, this flow copies the unconscious whole (that which cannot be differentiated or contained within consciousness) into consciousness via allusion.

Within the unconscious, everything is connected everywhere. Signs are present but chaotic. Excessive connections overload the mind which attempts to prune and straighten this convoluted thicket where all levels are present within all levels. Intuition, by comparison, has sense of a part or particular level that contains all levels within it. Rather than the whole within the whole (incomprehensible), we are limited to the part that contains the whole (barely comprehensible); it at least hints at the whole.

Given this description, we can contend that the intuitive person gets the hint. It doesn’t need to be spelled out. Nothing need be brought totally out in the open. The taste of the unconscious is most palatable from the horizon of consciousness itself. From here we can explain why the Yud always possesses as part of its body the kotz, or tip, pointing beyond. Intuition does not just transport insight from the unconscious reservoir, bringing the outside in. It also operates as the implication of a beyond consciousness (an unconscious) within consciousness, an intimation of the outside on the inside.

Passed down from the Arizal (Rabbi Yitzchak Luria 1534-1572) via the author of the kabbalistic work Mishnat Chassidim, Rabbi Immanuel Chai Riki (1688-1743), is the opinion that each letter of the Tetragrammaton [Yud-Hei-Vav-Hei] should be written with a kotz [crownlet or pointing tip]. What does this modification do to our sense of self as an unfolding of these four conscious levels [intuition, comprehension, emotion, and self-expression]? Rather than assigning intuition a monopoly stake in ‘pointing beyond’ or ‘hinting’ at the unconscious, the Arizal maintains that a more detailed consideration of each of these four levels reveals that they are all co-present to the unconscious and each have an immediate relation to it.

Having already dealt with intuition, we can now say that comprehension too has a non-explicit aspect that contains more than it can contain in the spirit of Descartes’ ‘idea of the infinite’ (the one idea amongst others whose content overflows or shatters its finite cognitive vessel even as it suggests it). Emotive experience likewise evades total conscious awareness. Could this not be the reason that we cannot come to terms with what we are feeling even as we are feeling it? Are not some emotions too nebulous to be seized upon in our internal reflection? Do they not evaporate at the edges and extremities?

Finally, our various modes of acting upon the outside world, of pouring our thoughts and feelings into our expressiveness, of our striving to communicate something of ourselves, come without labels and proper identification. We may even lose ourselves in the journey to the outside. Can we really give all of our inner self over? Does not every saying presuppose an unsaid? Written between the lines of this extroversion of a person that aims at self-mastery and complete control over one’s domain, we can detect the unmastered and uncontrolled impulses that operate beneath the radar.

For the Arizal, the hints of the unconscious are ubiquitous, as a passe-partout upon which each of these four pictures of consciousness are mounted.

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