You can go your own way! 

Go your own way 

You can call it another lonely day 

Another lonely day 

You can go your own way! 

Go your own way

– Fleetwood Mac

Sometimes our desire for self-expression cannot escape the counterforce of our own gravity which causes us to fall back into the singularity of ourselves. Our attempts to break out of our solitude and enter into relationships with others are thwarted by the fear of coming face to face with our own lack of completion. We may indefinitely postpone social engagement as long as our imagination is able to pick up the slack and supply our thoughts and feelings with hypothetical companions with which to inwardly converse. The prospect of remaining all alone is compounded once we situate ourselves within the  milieu of the world of Action.

Within the system of worlds, the world of Action represents more than the bottom floor. Action or ‘asiyah’ in Hebrew, conveys a sense of completion. If we were to borrow an analogy from pottery, then the world of Creation would correspond to the ‘lump of clay’ that we’ve detected as the general existence of some substance (‘something is there’). Next, molding that clay would relate to the world of Formation (‘there is something specific with definite qualities and characteristics’). Once the shaped object comes out of the kiln, glazed and all, it’s a finished product, a done-deal. Similarly, for a person to consider himself or herself a fixed or finished object such as this (where we are at the end of the process that generated us, that made us who we are) imperils our relatability. Thus fashioned, the solidified and concretized contours of our personal space present a firm barrier to the outside world. Riveted to my essential being, I may begin to wonder if anyone can traverse the ‘infinite’ distance between my withdrawn interior and the outer shell or public persona I put forth. I disappear behind my appearances. As in/dividuals we are indivisible. How can I take a chip off a piece of me and transfer it to you? Wouldn’t that leave me broken?

Since I perceive myself in the world of Action as a self-sufficient, autonomous being, I can run into you and you can bounce off of me, but our exchange only results in the interplay of external forces. Presented in this light, my participation is a kind of social bumper cars, still leaving the inner me untouched. Even when the room is full with other people, I have judged the condition of my loneliness to be unsurmountable. Distrusting all forms of communication, I doubt anyone will ever know the real me in that I cannot accurately or fully represent myself. For that, they would have to be me and no one can be me because only I’m me. If per chance, someone else could experience what it means to be me, then I would no longer be me. I would lose my sense of self-containment. Thus, this level exemplifies the negative state of levado (apart, alone) that existed before a companion was introduced to Adam. Given that we are all Adam, we can assert that the condition of existential loneliness is the primal backdrop against which all relationships with others are consummated.

In terms of the powers of the soul, the world of Action is associated with malchut or ‘kingdom.’ A kingdom implies an independent agent (king) whose self-mastery can be extended to those around him. Idiomatically, one’s kingdom refers to all manners of expression. Our self-expression makes our wishes and desires, thoughts and feelings known to others. Here the difficulty lies in maintaining control over one’s kingdom–to wield the tools of communication accurately and effectively convey something that resembles the inner me. When we broadcast on the usual channels–the ones that the general public is likely to tune into–then I have to go with the program and attempt to fit-in when the conventions of the day may or may not jive with my own preferred modality of communication. On the other hand, should I use a private channel which transmits in a language that is entirely of my own invention, it is highly unlikely that anyone will pick up on it. Using allusions that are exceptionally close to my heart and extremely personal may be lost on others and regarded as self-indulgent. Remaining reluctant to leave my ‘home-world,’ I resist learning to relate to others in a common language.

Malchut or kingdom is occasionally spoken of as a demut [דמות] or ‘resemblance.’ Does my outer self resemble my inner self? I also carry a self-image (how I think I look and come across) that is inflected between me and myself. This image is called a tzelem and it already entails the reduction of my infinite possibilities of self to a finite personality profile. When I take a picture of myself I see all of my characteristics or middot [מדות] in a straightforward fashion but when I attempt to reproduce them I only manage to capture the afterimage or residual resemblance that entails an inversion of those characteristics. Consequently the kabbalists underscore how the external resemblance or demut [דמות] is literally a permutation of the world for middot [מדות] or emotive attributes and character traits.

When I further consider this ‘afterimage’ or ‘negative’ of the self that is the nature of all my (self) expression, I may see that what remains is just a ‘trace absence’ of where I once was. The residual impression that I make upon you comes from my footprints and not my feet. You detect what I’m internally experiencing through the signals I’m relaying which are constitutive of your impression of me. But I don’t want to give you the wrong impression. Worse still, I might become so attached to the unalterable perfection of my experiences, that I might think that all impressions you might have of me are unrepresentative of how I truly am. The same holds in reverse. I’m left with my impression or picture of you (particularly the photographic negative) rather than you yourself. This danger of trading the living person for their afterimage can easily be found reflected in the lyrical sentiment of the popular songs such as the following:

I’ve been looking so long at these pictures of you

That I almost believe that they’re real

I’ve been living so long with my pictures of you

That I almost believe that the pictures are

All I can feel

–The Cure

Perhaps this is why we so often feel ourselves to be at a loss for words? I have nothing left to say to you because I can’t be confident that the words I am speaking will say what I want them to say. Despairing eventual incomplete communication, I give up prematurely and swallow my thoughts and emotions in a silence of solitude.

Finally, this same condition of solitude manifests itself in our relationship with the Divine Other. In the world of Action, I might think of the coarse materialism as the be all and end all of my existence. The self apparent autonomy of my physical substance seems to deny its own creation. Impersonal forces shaped me, forces which have now withdrawn into oblivion.

Boiling it all down, even if I can get beyond the semblance of an atheistic universe and admit a God, I still wonder can God really get me? Does God understand what I’m going through or what I want to say? Existential loneliness exceeds the need for human companionship. By addressing the issue of my relationship with the Divine (to become conscious that I am never alone) also opens up the possibility of the Divine assistance in breaching my social isolation. As we see in Genesis (2:18), it is God who plays matchmaker and introduces a soul mate for Adam. From this we can surmise that the dimension of Divinity takes us out of our interpersonal solitude and performs the ‘miraculous’ bridging of self and other.

In Part Ten, we will examine four senses of separation and difference that can befall our relationships.

http://www.interinclusion.org/inspirations/relationship-differences-fusion-and-defusion-part-8/

http://www.interinclusion.org/inspirations/relationship-differences-fusion-and-defusion-part-10/

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