‘Character building,’ in the language of Kabbalah, would be expressed as our self-conception or how we represent ourselves to ourselves looking in our own mind-mirror. Here ‘understanding’ that gestates my sense of self, eventually giving birth to a certain type of individual with a specific palette of emotions, is called binah which, once again, closely resembles the word boneh meaning ‘to build.’ To put it differently, my pre-reflective self lacks self knowledge. To conceive of who I am I need to engage in self-reflection (mirroring) so that I can form a relationship between me and myself. I relate to an image of myself which is circumscribed by the manner in which I comprehend myself amidst this reflexive act (I turn my attention on myself to become both the subject [knower] and the object [known entity]). The outcome of this process is a semblance of an independent identity that I can hold at arms length and say ‘this is me’ even though it is just a smaller version of myself in that all ‘brain children’ are born small and relatively undeveloped. Having just enough of my ‘full-scale self’ but not too much to handle underscores the practicality of putting together a version of me that fits into a resumé.

In an age of social networking, the importance of having a succinct profile that embodies much but not all of my personality cannot be underestimated. People increasingly relate not to other people but to other people’s profiles–to the distillation of one’s ‘infinite’ being, the digestible stenography of one’s public self encapsulated in a standard form which can be exchanged easily as social currency. ‘Likes: dogs, popcorn, ultimate Frisbee, Phish, classic Samurai films.’  ‘Warning: chews pencils when nervous. Avid bi-weekly bather.’ ‘Want ad: Rabbi seeking books. No questions asked.’ We must fit into the size of the box given to us. Photo goes here: _. Our social profile devolves into childlike crudeness. We relate to data clusters expecting to find a ‘live one’ swimming around in there. But can I reel you in just by reading your digital tattoo?

Continuing our descent through the Four Worlds, what we are now describing is the world of Formation. A world of forms recalls notions of archetypes or typology in general. When I channel myself into certain self-consistent patterns of self-expression and behavior, I may be said to be con-forming. Filling the mold, I compress my relatively borderless psychic inner space into an external format delimited by firm boundaries. Because the reduction is temporal as well as spatial I can advertise that this as an iteration of myself that you can relate to in 5 minutes or less–my life in an elevator pitch.

In terms of the powers of the soul, all of our middot (emotions or character attributes) are, generally speaking, massed into the world of Formation. They are born of cognitive parentage with the lion share of the work having been done in the mother of the mind (binah/understanding). These personality traits act like extensions of my embryonic self which live and breathe on their own while simultaneously eclipsing their earlier developmental stages and forgetting the time they spent in the warmth of an idea incubator. We can now comprehend the term zeir anpin or ‘small face’ (young children and especially infants have small faces) which is used in Kabbalah to denote the collection of feelings, instincts, qualities and traits–the summarizations of self that are transferable to the other through casual contact and everyday experience. I become all of these things to you. I assume this form when our relationship provides the mold. One half of the mold (underneath it all) comes from my cognitive construction while the other half, you impress upon me. My formative ‘I’ is squeezed into shape by the confluence of internal and external pressures.

The problem arises when we realize that not all forms are compatible. Some fit ‘hand in glove’ while others require considerable manipulation until there is any possibility of interfacing. Yet, there are also those social actors that seem to have no on-screen chemistry. All the coaching and direction just produces a comedy of errors as these two ‘misfit’ pieces turn and twist around each other as mis-placed persons. To unite ‘us’ might be tantamount to joining matter and anti-matter. Kaboom. In the smoking remains we are left wondering if it could have ever worked under some sort of exotic conditions.

When ‘you’ and ‘I’ are tough crystalline ‘forms,’ the degree of our plasticity or rigidity will factor in our ability to get along. The world of Formation corresponds to the relationship maintained through opposition (k’negdo) which means that it is a question of resistance levels and the intensity of opposition. This world is dominated by yetzerim or ‘drives’ such as the yetzer hatov or ‘good inclination’ verses the yetzer hara or ‘negative inclination.’ If I am overwhelmed by negative impulses I find myself ‘driven’ down the road to war while if I am inspired by my positive tendencies I will seek peace and accommodation. In the first situation I am willing to sacrifice the relationship in order to keep myself in proper form (I don’t want to get bent out of shape),  but in the second one I will stretch to the limit in order to make things work.

The Talmud addresses conflict potential, relationship survival and self-preservation ability all in a single parabolic precept (Ta’anit 20): “A person should always be flexible like a reed and not stiff like a cedar-tree.” Plasticity is the name of the game (at least if you want to stay in the game). The reed’s pliability ensures that it can survive the hurricane force winds that occasionally blast us in life. It will bend in any and all directions while maintaining its essential rootedness–the anchor of our personal identity. Such exceptional resilience contrasts with the rigidity of the cedar-tree which attempts to hold its ground without swaying. In doing so it must put up maximal resistance to the oppositional winds. This would be similar to a person who insists on remaining true to self in every detail of his or her desires, thoughts, feelings and habits no matter what.  A person who will stubbornly hold on to it all will either remain standing without regard for others or else buckle and break under pressure. Taken to such extremes where you either get the whole of me without compromise or you get none of me because I have become a broken person due to my relationship with you, is certainly a recipe for disaster.

While type-casting can be useful as a shortcut that saves us from having to really get to know another person, it also throws a number of significant interpersonal pitfalls in front of us. I might prematurely decide that you are not my type when it remains unclear if I really have a ‘type.’ Stereotyping reinforces all sorts of social conformities which shortchange both self and other and risk limiting our experience of our relationship to foreign and unrealistic expectations.

If we were to transpose our oppositional tendencies in relationships to our connection with the Divine Other, then we could come to see all spirituality as coercion. Reality has it out for me. I ‘rage against the machine’ of Existence.  Did God create me just to make my life difficult? Perhaps life is war. Such a person may feel like ‘God is punishing me so I am going to get back at God.’ Extending this ill-logic still further, a person could become convinced that even those matters where he or she agrees with the prescriptions of the Divine should be fought against because that would mean cooperating with the ‘enemy.’ And yet, there are medications for allergies. As long as we’re quarreling with the Creator, some channel remains open, however slight, through which we might one day return to a civil and maybe even intimate conversation. Counter intuitively ‘opposition’ means we still care, which is miles above apathy, for when the relationship deteriorates to the degree that it is not even worth fighting for (or over), we feel most alone.

In Part Nine we will attempt to diagnose the condition of loneliness as the consciousness of the world of Action.

http://www.interinclusion.org/inspirations/relationship-differences-fusion-and-defusion-part-9/

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