To Light Up the Night

The next Samech-circle in our progression pertains to beauty or tiferet in the soul. On its surface, this would strike someone as a purely aesthetic quality, but in Kabbalah aesthetics carry significance that goes beyond the pleasure of the senses. To suggest that everything be contained in the circle of beauty (our figure of sameness) implies that the attractiveness of one thing is tied to the appeal of the whole. Technically, tiferet defines a state whereby the whole and the part forge a co-dependent bond–the detail shines when it takes everything into account just as the universal should radiate through the prism of the detail. Such a setup requires a delicate balance or fine tuning of our world. Once achieved, we may enhance or beautify all of reality by harmonizing it.

When we survey the vast landscapes of human experience, we cannot help but be disturbed by the ups and downs of its topography. Globalization advocacy aside, our inner world is not flat by any stretch of the imagination. Emotional chaos runs wild without any psychological interweaving and integration of the barrage of events that befall a person. Buying a new car and I should feel like dancing (at least in the commercial). Scratch the paint of this new object of obsession and I cannot be comforted. Life, with an absence of balance, is liable to oscillate between explosion and implosion. Saddling these sensations will give me more self-control and will certainly be better than riding the feelings bareback. If everything that happens to me happens to ME to the extent that I take everything personally, I will have no intervening spring coil that could serve as a dampener. I am consequently shocked and disturbed by both the good and bad.

All this goes a long way to explain tiferet or beauty as an emotive property of the soul. By giving me emotional balance, this mood stabilizer allows me to see the happenings of my life within the larger ecology of existence in toto. One could argue that the most important verse that aids in our intellectual digestion of this emotive-aesthetic quality comes from Psalms 16:8 where King David exclaims: “I have placed God before me always….” The Ba’al Shem Tov, when interpreting this phrase, emphasized the twofold meaning of the word ‘shiviti’ within which he simultaneously preserves a sense of  ‘placing or setting’ (la’seem) and ‘equality’ (shaveh). When combined into a single translation, these two senses mash into the idea of ‘placing equally.’ I place the Divine name (the Tetragrammaton which means ‘Being’ or ‘Reality’) before me always.”

Practically speaking, what does this mean that God is equally set before me always? As with all relationships we tend to pick and choose what we like and what we don’t like. If our loved one has pleasant qualities we may want to ascribe those qualities to him or her in such an expansive way that there is no room left over in the relationship for any qualities other than these select few. When our loved ones act in a manner that seems out of character and contrary to the way we want them to be, then we are forced to either ignore this behavior and deny that it’s really coming from them, or else we must come to terms with this atypical experience and learn to accept them for all that they are and not just all that we want them to be.

This same relationship advice holds true for our connection with the Divine: we tend to grant God an active role in our lives when everything is going according to plan or when we are pleasantly surprised, but when disaster strikes we cannot see how God is anywhere to be found. The reverse is also true. If we only want to blame a person or God for our troubles because everything wrong with the world and with my life cannot be my fault (I would have never ordered such things), but then something good happens–I make the deal, I get the job, I find love, my disease suddenly disappears–then that is all me or perhaps nobody. It just is.

Emotionally charged situations can readily be taken to even further extremes unless we categorically reject this dissociative disorder and accept that everything is connected–the whole in the part and the part in the whole. From the standpoint of tiferet (beauty), it is not enough for everyone to play the part, we have to play the whole as well. Likewise, the whole has to play its part which really amounts to the whole in the part.

Our perception of harmoniously blended reality then lends itself to a state of mental calmness and composure or what is commonly referred to as equanimity. Equanimity may be the perfect translation of shiviti or our ‘placing equally’ of the Divine name before us. Everything becomes unified. Like the trunk of the body to which all of the limbs (head, two arms and two legs) are joined, beauty really is the beauty of the body (as the expression goes in Tikunei Zohar ‘tiferet gufa’–’the beauty of the body). Psychically, when I feel myself extended in multiple directions (like the limbs), my re-centering or re-balancing entails coming back to some core sensibility that accepts everything in the relationship with the other, the world and even with Reality and Being (or the Divine name).

Keeping all of this in mind, we must try to distinguish this property of the soul which is sometimes called hishtavut or ‘equalizing’ from its forgeries. These impostor emotions pose as equanimity but deep down they are pathologies known to the world as stoicism and ambivalence. With fraudulent feelings such as these, a person is primarily concerned with the self and the risk of personal emotional injury. ‘I better not care because if I do I might get hurt.’ Of course these is nothing like apathy to produce the ‘big chill’ in life. All felt contact becomes vilified as a potential treat whether real or imaginary. By contrast, hishtavut ‘equalizes’ my acceptance of the entire relationship. It’s not about me and what ‘I’ like or don’t like in an ego driven accounting. Instead, I attach myself wholeheartedly to the other (human) and Other (Divine). I care with my entire being about Being, without exclusions.

The indifference (is indifference not another way of saying sameness as embodied in the Samech-circle?) is personal indifference–indifference to my own person as an end in and of itself. I am no longer evaluating everything from the standpoint of my being a solitary subject who can detach from a relationship to the whole. My pain is never simply my pain. My pleasure is never simple my pleasure. Under magnification I notice that it is also the pain and pleasure of the other and the pain and pleasure of the world.

In every situation I can then be maximally invested and attentive to the concerns of the relationship for I need not wait until the conditions are to my liking. I am given over in every moment equally and look to find the other/Other in everything. All experience is alike in this way. The similarity of my feelings is that they are always turned on and not turned off. Like a ‘hopeless‘ romantic who addresses his or her beloved saying: “I am just happy to spend time together. If it is just one more day, or one more hour or one more minute, that is all that matters. Whether we are raking leaves or going out for a fancy dinner, all I really want is that we get to be in each other’s company.” Everything is beautiful.

In Part 17 the figure of the Samech-circle morphs into overlapping time-cycles and the phenomenon of reincarnation.

http://www.interinclusion.org/inspirations/circus-of-dreams-part-17/

http://www.interinclusion.org/inspirations/circus-of-dreams-part-15/

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