What does it mean to be different? Conceptions of difference have become the nitroglycerin of our contemporary social-political discourse. Handle with care. Analogical thinking has privileged our commonality, similarity and sameness for so long that we all too often overlook how this can result in the demonization of difference. Simultaneously however, another kind of conversation is taking place that elevates difference past the milestones of mere ‘acceptance’ of the other all the way to the throne of cultural mediation. Rather than denigrate difference, let us celebrate it. According to this view we should let differences be and embrace them without melting everyone down in the caldron of conformity. Yet surprisingly, this later revolutionary revelation that was ushered in under the banner of heterology also (paradoxically) provided the grounds for our becoming in-different.

Difference and sameness are themselves a married pair of conceptual cohorts according to Kabbalah. Diversity is the auxiliary of homogeneity and vice versa. Recent political memory carries this entanglement of sameness and difference in the contradictory legal stipulation that suggests that people are ‘different but equal.’ Without running through the range of uses and abuses of this loaded phrase, let us simply explore some of the underlying value judgements and then highlight them within the context of the four types of relationships or marriages that we’ve been discussing up until now.

If my ethical treatment of the other is predicated upon our uncovering a common denominator, then any entertainment of differences could produce a mass of storm clouds that might obscure our sense of sameness. Unable to access a point of commonality, society has long been tempted to disregard the moral responsibility that we have one to the other. Difference would then seem to be a tool of power and suppression. It implies an asymmetry that places the similar on top and the dissimilar below. Difference breeds rejection.

However, many would argue (the philosopher Emmanuel Levinas chief amongst them) that this configuration of values is the inheritance of Greek philosophic thinking. For Levinas, there is a profound alternative that comes to us via the Hebraic tradition. In the light of the Torah, this asymmetry is preserved but reversed. We find this thinking embedded in the Hebrew language itself which informs us that our principle ethical responsibility or achrayut [אחריות] stems from our relationship to the other or acher [אחר]. It is the person who I may have nothing in common with that I have the greatest burden of responsibility. I have to be extra concerned with how I treat you when we are different.

In the first instance of difference, we sense that the differences are not merely to make things distinct or separate for reasons of utility. There is a dark and suppressive side to difference, the tenor of which we hear every time someone says: ‘I don’t like you, you’re not like me.’ By contrast when we enjoy and admire diversity (‘why would I want everyone to be like me–that’s boring’) we speak of each person being different in the sense of being unique or special. I’m special. You’re special. We’re all unique. Maybe what we all have in common (here comes ‘sameness’ creeping back in) is that we’re all different? Moreover, would we not also be deeply offended if we thought we were all identical or mathematically equal? Artificially combining or lumping together a mixed bag of people and personalities hits us with the full force and violence of reductionism (common denominators) and generalization. When we pass under the razor’s edge we are shorn from the marks of distinction that enable us to be recognized as individuals. After all, do we not all aspire to be incomparable? No-thing and no-one compares to you. The infinite value of each individual makes us priceless and irreplaceable.

Returning to our set of relationships and the systems of worlds that they coincide with, we can now overlay an additional group of terms that are synonymous with ‘difference’ with which we can create further intersections to spur the circulation of ideas. Beginning with the world of Emanation and the relationship of selfless devotion to or for the other, we have to make use of extremely sensitive instruments in order to detect the imposition of differences at this level. The basic reason for this is that the nature of the world of Emanation is to be unified. In point of fact, this world is often referred to as the world of unity. By entering into it, we are guaranteed to undergo de-differentiation with the erosion of the self-other distinction. I cannot tell where I leave off and you begin in that we are all swimming in the same ocean of Divine revelation.

Mysticism has long been associated with positive quests for ‘in-difference’ or non-duality which is the case in this world, relatively speaking. Despite the collapse of our platform of independence and the narration of our ego-odyssey which is experientially comparable to life in the lower worlds, taking up residence in the world of Emanation does not mean the complete liquidation of the self. My ‘I’ ascends and undergoes a metamorphosis into a trans-personal self–a self bound in the nexus of relationships with a feeling of at-one-ment.

Considering that my role in this world is to be to or for the other, we might have the lingering question as to ‘who’ is being dedicated or ‘what’ is given over? If I totally lose myself, then what could I possible bring to the relationship? There would be no-body home. The mistaken translation of this experience into the language of self-abnegation suggests that any semblance of my personhood is dumped in a fusion furnace or acid bath–that ‘I’ vanish without a trace. But nothing could be farther from the truth. Such examples imply that the substance or higher order of existence that I’m being absorbed into is something external to me. Yet, in Kabbalah the category of holiness only applies to that which possesses the ‘interinclusion’ of everything in all. In other words, the unity is also within me. Discovering it is like turning on hitherto inaccessible dimensions within myself–that I am really me when I am more than just me.

What is surprising is that some subtle distinctions do persist in this highest spiritual world. Granted the distinctions are made with the soft side of a feather, but we can derive great benefit from them when they are driven home within our consciousness. We might think of them as infinitesimal distinctions wherein the separation is kept to the minimum required to continue the process of Creation and to operate semi-separate divisions in our mind like the play of light and shadow which complement and originate from a single object.

The distinction of this type of distinction is a familiar one to those accustomed to basic Jewish observances. Torah-based ritualistic practices are saturated with instances of the word havdalah, our first of four terms that means separation/distinction. One of the prime examples of which comes straight out of the havdalah ceremony that concludes the Sabbath. It refers to the positive potential (blessing) in recognizing the difference between the sacred (kodesh) and the profane (chol). As we mentioned above, the nature of the sacred or holy is to have the quality of interinclusion which me might express as that which contains ‘difference in itself’ (the transpersonal) while the profane rejects and denies difference preferring instead only self-similitude. It solidifies sameness by purging difference. Once ‘outcast’ I can encounter the other only through external relations. ‘You’ are not within ‘me.’ Consequently, our relationship can only be between us as opposed to being within us. Thus, there is the most fundamentally acute spiritual difference between that which rejects difference (the profane) and that which incorporates difference within it (the sacred).

Our exploration of this theme continues in Part Eleven as we move on to address soft verses hard distinctions.

http://www.interinclusion.org/inspirations/relationship-differences-fusion-and-defusion-part-11/

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