Thoughts of the Day #1/2013: Elliot R. Wolfson (9)

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 dream and the prolepsis of redemption 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):

"The dream is a prolepsis of redemption, which is depicted as a seeing of the essence without any garment (beli levush), beholding the real, one might say, beyond the veil of metaphor. But Shneur Zalman and those who followed his path appropriated and elaborated the dialectic of disclosure and concealment enunciated by previous kabbalists, a dialectic especially conspicous in the sixteenth century, and thus they discerned that there can be no disclosure of the divine that is not concomitantly a concealment.

What is revealed is the infinite essence, but the infinite essence cannot be essentialized and remain the essence that is infinite; hence, what is revealed must always remain concealed, and the seeing without a garment amounts to seeing that there can be no seeing without a garment.

Utilizing apophatic modes of speech, it can be said of this essence that there "is no comprehension with respect to it" (ki ein bo shum tefisah), that is the "negation of thought" (afisat ha-ra'yon), the silence that is the "complete nullification of essence" (bittul ha-asmut mi-kol we-khol), the void (efes) that is "more than nothing" (mer eyder nisht), the "essential concealment that is not in existence at all, as it is also concealed itself" (he'lam ha-asmi she-eino bi-mesi'ut kelal we-hu he'lem gam le'asmo).

We can speak of the essence, so to speak, only to the extent that it is unspoken. The oneiric imagination is privileged, because the way to reach the unknowable and unnameable is through the mental faculty that combines opposites and thus points to the mystery of equanimity, the state of indifference wherein opposites are identical in their opposition.

Restoration to infinity - the mystical nuance of the traditional notion of repentance, teshuvah, which is etymologically from a root (shin waw beit) that means to return - is predicated on the removal of consciousness, which is indicative of exile, but also on the illumination of the supernal light, the vestment of concealment, since it is only by being concealed that the concealment can be revealed as concealed.

Through the dream, therefore, the schism between sleep and wakefulness, exile and redemption, is itself transcended in the luminal darkness where the difference between dark and light is no longer operative. Esoterically rendered, one will awaken to the dream no longer dreamt as a dream, the vision of truth imagined to be true."

- Elliot R. Wolfson, A Dream Interpreted within a Dream. Zone Books 2011, p. 216-217

Thanks for reading my blog !

Have a nice week !

Stay tuned and expect the unexpected!

(P.S. This photo is used with the very kind permission of Prof. Elliot R. Wolfson. Thank you very much)

Thoughts of the Day #33/2012: Elliot R. Wolfson (8)

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.

Thanks for reading my blog !

Have a nice week !

Stay tuned and expect the unexpected!

(P.S. This photo is used with the very kind permission of Prof. Elliot R. Wolfson. Thank you very much)

Thoughts of the Day #26/2012: Elliot R. Wolfson (7)

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 transcending transcendence 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):

"The transcendence I affirm transcends the idea of transcendence that unfailingly entails recourse to the theopoetic imagination, the figural iconization of the invisible in anthropomorphic and anthropopathic imagery.

I hasten to add that the transcendence I avow should not be interpreted atheistically, as the ineffable abyss one confronts in acknowledging that there is no God outside the cosmos, a stance that is the obverse of the theistic portrayal.

Others have argued that the property of ineffability can equally describe the respective experiences of the atheist and the theist, although the experiences plainly must be differentiated - for the former, the ineffable is linked to the void, for the latter, to the plenitude of being.

In my estimation, there is no need to bifurcate the two; even the locution "beyond the beyond" is inappropriate, since it still implies a boundary - albeit the boundary demarcated as being outside all boundaries - that must be breached.

Transcendence neither is nor is not this boundary, and consequently, the theist's sense of plenitude and the atheist's sense of void need not to be set in opposition. Logically, the transcendent is what is not, but this is only so because it is not what is.

Metaphorically, we may construe it as the plenitudinal vacuum, swarming with the fullness of being's nothingness, the intrinsic reality that intrinsically lacks reality, the ultimate emptiness that is itself empty, even of its own emptiness, and thus the space of nonlocality that resists the reification of nothing as something or of something as nothing."

- Elliot R. Wolfson, A Dream Interpreted within a Dream. Zone Books 2011, p. 27.

Thanks for reading my blog !

Have a nice week !

Stay tuned and expect the unexpected!

(P.S. This photo is used with the very kind permission of Prof. Elliot R. Wolfson. Thank you very much)