Elliot R. Wolfson (*1956 )
(Professor Wolfson is author of several admirably deep and
thoughtful books. He is one of the leading scholars in the field of kabbalah,
mysticism and the phenomenology of mystical experience)
Today I want to present a passage about the problem of essence and the coincidence of opposites from Professor Wolfson's brilliant and absolutely outstanding book "A Dream Interpreted Within a Dream. Oneiropoiesis and the Prism of Imagination" (Zone Books, New York 2011):
"From the vantage point of the inessential essence, the essence whose essence it is to resist essentialization, opposites coincide, and therefore what appears to be false is true, just as what appears to be true is false. In uncovering the truth of the ruse that is the corporeal world, the dissonance between real and make-believe is effectively undermined.
The essential truth of (non)being, consequently, is neither true nor untrue, for to say that it is either true or untrue, for to say that it is either true or untrue would be too limited for the limitless truth of the essence.
As I have suggested elsewhere, to comprehend this meontological perspective, it is beneficial to adopt a logic akin to the madhyamaka, the middle way, in the Mahâyâna tradition, a logic that posits the identity of opposites in the opposition of their identity, a reclaiming of the middle excluded by the law of the excluded middle.
Betraying an affinity to the Buddhist wisdom, Habad speculation on the nature of being and nonbeing posits an emptiness - the void (efes) that is above the nothing (ayin) - in which all things become empty, even or especially of their own emptiness.
The comportment of the dream to combine conflictual images provides a mechanism by which one can reach the abyssal indifference of the essence of infinity (asmut ein sof). The imagination, accordingly, is allocated a prominent role on the pietistic path as the means by which the visible cosmos is exposed as the epiphany of the invisible and the mask of truth is unmasked as the only truth that cannot be (un)masked."
- Elliot R. Wolfson, A Dream Interpreted within a Dream. Zone Books 2011, p. 212-213.
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(P.S. This photo is used with the very kind permission of Prof. Elliot R. Wolfson. Thank you very much)
