Dacia Iluministă

The Impossibility of Finite Creation:

“Nature is an infinite sphere, whose centre is everywhere and whose circumference is nowhere.” –Pascal

The Ancient Greeks typically believed that a stationary Earth was fixed at the centre of a finite universe, with the cosmic boundary set by the crystal sphere of fixed stars, and this view was adopted, with a refinement or two, by Abrahamism. Copernicus, although placing the Sun rather than the Earth at the centre of the universe, continued to advocate spheres, circular orbits and a finite universe. That said, Copernicus located the sphere of fixed stars so far away that the universe was now much vaster than anyone had ever previously suggested, and it was no longer much of a leap to consider that it might in fact be infinite. Although Copernicus didn’t take that step, his successor, Illuminatus Thomas Digges, certainly did.

Illuminists Nicholas of Cusa and Giordano Bruno both held that the idea of a finite universe was absurd because an infinite, omnipotent God would never tolerate bounds. He needed an infinite canvas for his infinite power and knowledge.

We might conclude that a finite universe was possible if God lavished infinite love on it, but we can rule that out thanks to the legions of damned (98.3% of humanity, apparently!) in Hell. “God” seems rather more inclined to infinite hate.

Nicholas and Bruno were both obsessed with infinity – infinity of space and time and spiritual infinity as well as physical infinity. Only infinity could reflect the infinite God. Finitude was a contradiction in terms in relation to the infinite God.

Bruno wrote: “The One Infinite is perfect; simply and of itself nothing can be greater or better than it. This is the one Whole everywhere, God, universal nature. Naught but the infinite can be a perfect image and reflection thereof, for the finite is imperfect; every sensible world is imperfect, wherefore evil and good, matter and form, light and darkness, sadness and joy unite, and all things are everywhere in change and motion. But all things come in infinity to the order of Unity, Truth and Goodness; whereby it is named universum.”

Bruno regarded infinity in terms of freedom. A finite universe was like a prison. Infinity destroyed the walls of the prison and allowed endless possibilities. Enormous, wide spaces were opened up physically as well as for the imagination. Inexhaustible treasures were now available: the ultimate cosmic treasure hoard.

Bruno wrote: “There is a single general space, a single vast immensity which we may freely call Void: in it are innumerable globes like this one on which we live and grow. This space we declare to be infinite.”

Elsewhere, he said: “Thus is the excellence of God magnified and the greatness of his kingdom made manifest; he is glorified not in one, but in countless suns; not in a single earth, but in a thousand, I say, in an infinity of worlds.”

Many people find infinity disturbing, but what are they so worried about? The basic unit of the physical universe is a galaxy. A galaxy is made up of more than a hundred billion stars. Each star is potentially the centre of a solar system, being orbited by several planets, one of which might be suitable for the evolution of life.

Our own solar system and galaxy is nothing other than a reflection of the pattern of the WHOLE UNIVERSE. There’s nothing out there that’s different. Infinity is just endless repetition of this pattern. If you know one element of the pattern you know the whole lot. By concentrating on our own world, we know how intelligent life on all worlds operates. Reason and logic are the same everywhere. All thinking beings think exactly as we do. They are all subject to the same psychological forces. They may have evolved radically different cultures from ours, but we would still recognise those cultures. Humanity itself could have developed differently. Across our website, we have illustrated key turning points in history where humanity might have gone down entirely different paths. Christianity might never have happened, nor Islam. Imagine a world without those pernicious religions. The Enlightenment might have swept away all monarchs and old religions.

Although history could have been drastically different, it would still have been recognisable. We can all imagine much better human races than the one we have now; but we can also imagine more horrific human races. Imagine the whole world under Sharia Law or Judaism. Life wouldn’t be worth living.

Don’t become obsessed with the possibilities of infinity. There’s nothing out there that’s new or alien. We have it all on our own doorstep. In fact we have it all within ourselves. We are made of stardust and we are a microcosm of the macrocosm. As above, so below. The answers to everything lie within ourselves. Look inwards, not outwards. YOU are the answer to your questions if you did but know it.

Bruno wrote, “Open the door through which we may look into the limitless, unified firmament! We are the door! You are the door!
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Mythos People versus Logos People:

A Mythos person – steeped in “story-thinking” based on emotion – is typically extraverted and belongs to the feeling and sensing personality types.

A Logos person – preoccupied with logic, philosophy, science and mathematics – is typically introverted and belongs to the thinking and intuitive personality types.

A study of well-socialised, extraverted school students in the Netherlands showed that they couldn’t get away from science subjects quickly enough.

Nearly all of the problems in our world arise from Mythos people. They are the ones who hate reason and logic, who have no respect for mathematics, science, philosophy and psychology, who flock to dumb Mythos religions and who form fanatical, irrational attachments to mad ideas.

All Abrahamists are Mythos people. They are the people of faith; the uttermost enemy of reason. Slaves, submissives and sheeple are overwhelmingly Mythos people. They are nostalgic, sentimental, other- and tradition-directed. They love spectacle. They are attracted to royalty. They love celebrities. They are driven by materialistic rather than spiritual values. Christians and Jews are extremely greedy capitalists. Muslims have a fake spirituality: the enormous prayer gatherings of the Muslims reveal that the most important thing for them is to be SEEN to be a good Muslim rather than to actually be a good Muslim.

One of the most disturbing elements of any analysis of how to improve the human race is that things would unquestionably vastly improve if we had a radically different type of humanity where Logos introverts were just as numerous as Mythos extraverts rather than outnumbered some 4 to 1. Certainly, any nation that wishes to become the greatest in the world must actively engage in a programme to enhance the Logos ability of citizens and make them much less susceptible to Mythos thinking. No.1 on the list of things to do is to remove the Mythos religions of Abrahamism from our culture. They are the source of nearly everything that is wrong with our world. They are the essence of irrationality, faith, simplistic parables, fanaticism and servility.

If we want a rational world, we cannot teach children irrationality and declare that irrationality (faith) is the key to life.

End the phoney war. Destroy Abrahamism. Build a new world order. Destroy the old, failed ways that brought us to where we are now – a world of almost universal misery and woe apart from the privileged elite who have never had it so good.
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Native American Spirituality:

“SS” Sent us a fascinating account of Native American spirituality:

Prior to the “arrival” (i.e. invasion) of the Europeans in 1492, there were several thousand different tribes, so the expression “Native American spirituality” suggests a commonality that just doesn’t exist. Native American spirituality encompasses a wide range of beliefs and practices and is far too broad a topic to limit to only a few pages. Instead, I will attempt to approach, with care and respect, some generalizations and touch upon the basic and common principles that each tribe shared.

Basically, the foundation of Native American spirituality is a mystical connection and interdependence between humans, animals, the land and all of Creation. It’s the respectful means of honoring spirituality, seeking knowledge and embracing the underlying respect for communion and harmony with nature that represent the core features found in a variety of Native American belief systems. Long before Darwin taught a similar truth, Native Americans saw no difference between man and his animal brothers and sisters.

Most of the indigenous cultures in North America had developed rational spiritual (religious) systems that included creation myths that were transmitted orally from one generation down to the next that explained the origins of their societies and all of existence.

Most Native Americans worshiped an omnipotent, omniscient Creator. The Master Spirit could assume a variety of forms as well as both genders. They also recognized and respected several lesser supernatural entities, including an evil god who dealt out suffering, disaster and death. The people were attentive to the heart of nature. Members of most tribes believed in an afterlife and the immortality of the human soul. Nature was the great equalizer. They thanked whatever animal they hunted and killed that gave up its life to feed the people because they knew that in due time, they would also share the equal fate of death.

Native American societies enlisted the aid of the supernatural in controlling the natural and social world and each tribe had its own set of religious rituals and ceremonies committed to that aim. An individual might try to entice or pacify powerful spiritual beings through private prayer or by sacrificing valuable items such as food, furs and tobacco. Entire villages would call upon shamans whom they believed had supernatural powers. It was the shaman’s role to seek assistance from the spirit world and Gods to ensure a successful hunt, victory in battle or a good harvest. Shaman abilities included controlling and manipulating weather conditions and predicting the future. They would also assist individuals with dream interpretations, curing illnesses or casting spells, etc.

There is a common concept of dual divinity found throughout the belief systems where a creator is responsible for the construction of the world and a mythical individual (hero or a trickster) that introduces culture, proper behavior and teaches the people the means of providing sustenance to the tribe. In addition, there are underworld spirits that control the weather and interact with humans or the Shaman.

Creation legends vary from tribe to tribe but recurring themes are quite common. The universe is seen as multi‐layered where humans climbed from an underworld to populate the Earth. Another common creation myth is the earth‐diver. The story goes that in the beginning there was only the sky above and the waters below. An animal (the creature can vary depending on the relevance to the tribe) dove below the primal waters and brought up mud and earth and other materials to form the land. It should be noted that a flooded earth is a consistent element presented in the mythology.

Native American beliefs and practices form a fully integrated and central part of their very being. There is no such thing as a definitive Native American religion. They did not have distinct prophets like those found in the western monotheistic religions of Judaism, Christianity and Islam. However, some “prophets” included White Buffalo Woman of the Lakota and Dakota tribes, Handsome Lake in the Iroquois Confederacy and Sweet Medicine of the Cheyenne.

Native American creation myths are also significantly different compared to Biblical Creation because these myths tell us that creation is an ongoing process that we are taking part in all the time. Creation isn’t something that happened 5,000 years ago or trillions of years ago. We are engaged in the Creation Story at this very moment.

Native American creation myths put humans in a very special place with respect to nature. People are not given authority or control over nature and other creatures. Instead, all co‐inhabitants of our planet (animals, plants and minerals) are our companions and guides. Mutual respect is required when interacting with animals, trees and birds. Mutual and deep respect is also necessary for natural forces such as the wind and rain. These beliefs forbid the despoiling of the environment for selfish reasons as well as produce a convincing spiritual angst when observing the mistreatment of any aspect of existence.

Native Americans did not differentiate between the supernatural and the natural. They saw the “material” and “spiritual” as an interconnected realm of being. In their view, humans, animals and plants play a part of divinity through their close connection with guardian spirits, (“supernatural” entities) who instilled their “natural” relatives with life and power.

Consciousness and spirituality are familiar subjects among traditional tribal beliefs. Everything possesses a spirit or a special sacred quality such as certain areas or land formations. To the Native American, the sacred element is not realized by building a church or the consecration of a temple but rather it is an element of the land itself. To the tribe, these locations are respected and cherished and are the destination they travel in order to pray, bury their dead, seek vision or fast. Western thought enables us to demolish a church and rebuild it at a new location or exhume our dead and relocate them to another cemetery. These practices are completely unfamiliar to Native American spirituality. The location or the place itself is what contains the sacred element.

Native American spirituality can be viewed as an attitude and appreciation for our existence. It doesn’t fit squarely into the physical and psychological realms of existence but it can tune us into the interconnectedness of everything and inspire us to a new way of being (or becoming) in the world. I for one, think it’s beautiful.

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Our Comment: Many thanks to “SS” for this insightful piece. Isn’t it time for a reappraisal of Native American spirituality? Modern America could learn a lot from the tribes that the US Army tried to exterminate. Would America be the monstrous palace of capitalist junk and trivia that it presently is if it had spent less time on Christianity and more time on Native American religious ideas?

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SS added: “We have conscious awareness but unfortunately most people see themselves as different from nature. Most indigenous people knew that they were from nature so they would treat the world as they would treat their own body.

“I’m also on board with Meritocracy based on social capitalism. In a factory of 2,500, I’m the only manager that runs their department meritoriously. Others notice and have tried to break it down with nepotism that runs rampant here but now they all know better than to try and fuck with me. I wouldn’t care if an applicant was the son or daughter of the CEO of the company. Prove your worth. I had to, so I expect nothing but the same from those in my department.

“I guess I should mention that I’m from Canada but I’ve been living and working in China for years. I came over here to pay off student loans, fell in love with the place and never left! In my free time, I study Metaphysical Theology.”

Well said!
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Kabbalah:

KABBALAH, the mystical Jewish tradition (“Kabbalah” actually means “tradition”) came to prominence in the Middle Ages thanks to the esoteric text the Zohar (the Book of “Splendour”), but its roots go back to ancient times and the outermost fringes of Judaic thought that were influenced by Gnosticism, Hermeticism and Neoplatonism. For that reason, mainstream Judaism hated Kabbalah and regarded it as heretical.

Kabbalah focused on cosmogony (the mythical/mystical account of the origin of the Universe), and the nature of God. It also had an “applied” strand whereby it tried to convert mystical knowledge into power over the real world. Thus Kabbalists were alchemists, numerologists, fortune tellers, psychics, clairvoyants, wonder workers and, above all, they specialised in the creation of artificial life. They were obsessed with the “golem” (Hebrew for “dumb or helpless”) – a creature composed of inanimate matter that could be brought to life by the most powerful and secret Kabbalistic knowledge concerning the true name of God. Adam was made of clay (“Adam” is Hebrew for “earth/clay”) and brought to life by God; Kabbalists thought they could do exactly the same thing with a clay golem (Frankenstein, made from parts of dead bodies, is also a kind of golem). The Brotherhood of the Shadows is the most secretive and powerful of modern Kabbalist groups and they are devoted to applying the most sophisticated modern science to Kabbalist mysticism in order to gain mastery of artificial life.

In Kabbalah, God in his essence is unknowable and is called “Infinity” (Ein Sof). The gulf between the infinite and finite worlds is bridged by a series of emanations (“sephirot”), which are progressively more accessible and knowable to the human mind. Most people can grasp the sephirot furthest from God, but to master the higher sephirot requires the esoteric knowledge of Kabbalah.

The sephirot are God’s actions in the world and he can be known through these actions (though not ultimately known since he is unknowable in the last degree). Human beings as images of God are microcosms of the macrocosm. The sephirot are reflected in each human being, and so fully understanding ourselves gives us the best and surest knowledge of God. Yet there is an implication that some part of the human being – the divine spark, the soul – is part of God and hence as ultimately unknowable as God himself.

Kabbalah provides the intellectual basis of Hasidic Judaism and is also favoured by many liberal Jews of a more experimental and spiritual kind. Together with Hinduism and Neoplatonism, Kabbalah influenced the modern Theosophical movement (theosophy means “wisdom about God” and is an attempt to attain a mystical insight into God’s nature).
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The Many Faces of the Jewish God:

IN KABBALAH, the highest manifestation of God – God the Transcendent – isn’t, strictly speaking, Ein Sof at all. It’s actually Nothing! In Hebrew, “Ein” means “No thing.” God is nowhere. God is Absolute Nothing. He is beyond existence. But then comes God’s second manifestation – “Ein Sof”, meaning infinite, boundless, limitless, without end i.e. God is everywhere; God is Absolutely Everything. If Ein is zero then Ein Sof is one. Ein and Ein Sof together are the totality of what is and is not.

Ein is God as Transcendence. Ein Sof is God as Immanence.It is said that Ein Sof has no attributes because attributes are properties of the finite domain, and Ein Sof is infinite. Equally, Ein – no thing – is without attributes. Therefore God has no attributes at all. He can’t be defined, described, comprehended, brought into rational understanding or anything else. He is beyond all of that. He is like the ineffable “One” of Neoplatonism, the mysterious and mystical source of everything.

From the endless, unfathomable Ein Sof God Source emanate ten realms of existence (like the emanations of Neoplatonism), each less glorious than the former, until we arrive at the final realm, the shabbiest of all, furthest from the divine light of God – and here our world is located. The ten emanations – called Sephirot – can be regarded as ten creative energy realms that intervene between the infinite, unknowable God (Ein Sof) and our created, finite world. Our task is to ascend through those realms, just as Dante’s Christian soul had to ascend through the crystal spheres to get to the Empyrean.

The Ein/Ein Sof scheme is similar to Hegel’s. He said that the cosmic dialectic begins with the thesis of “being” and antithesis of “nothing”, leading to the synthesis of “becoming”, which then relentlessly drives the universe forward dialectically until it culminates in the Absolute.

The Kabbalists have “nothing” (Ein) and “being” (Ein Sof – the infinite) underlying existence. Both are God, but at the stages before he gives rise to the world of limited things in which we exist.

To say that God created the world from nothing becomes a rather different concept from the one familiar to most people. If God IS nothing then God created the universe from HIMSELF, which immediately means that Creation is not separate from God after all, but absolutely imbued with God. There is nothing but God. Therefore this is suspiciously like pantheism.

Kabbalah says that the reason for existence is that “God wished to behold God”. In Hegel, God, as he is in himself, must alienate himself in the physical universe in order to become self-conscious and thus see and know himself. (Self-consciousness arises only through being aware of a consciousness that is different from your own and which you cannot subsume, hence self-consciousness needs multiplicity.) In other words, the physical world of alienation and multiplicity provides the mirror that God uses to behold himself.

Kabbalah then takes the strange step of claiming that as an act of free will, the Ein Sof was withdrawn from a particular place, allowing void to form, into which the mirror of existence could be placed. This cosmic act of withdrawal is known as Zimzum (“contraction”), and rabbis declare; “God’s place is the world, but the world is not God’s place.”

This “manoeuvre” is logically absurd. We already know that God himself is void (Ein – nothing), so if Ein Sof withdraws from any location, it simply reveals Ein. It is IMPOSSIBLE for Kabbalah to logically arrive at the position it does. It does so in order to separate God from Creation, even though the two cannot be separated. This is the stage where Kabbalah radically departs from Illuminism, Gnosticism, Hermeticism and Neoplatonism and becomes pure Jewish mysticism.

No intellectually honest person or religion could define God as “everything and nothing” (immanent and transcendent) and then arrive at the position that God can vacate part of existence. By definition, there is no scope for anything that is not-God. The heretical Jewish philosopher Spinoza understood this all too clearly. He’s often accused of being an atheist although he’s actually a pantheist: God is everything and everywhere.

Spinoza, a brilliant logician, might be said to be the only Jew who actually understood what Ein and Ein Sof implied. Other Jews shied away from the logical conclusion while Spinoza did not. He was a philosopher of integrity who went where logic dictated, not where theology pointed. Kabbalists wanted to have their cake and eat it.

Rabbi Nachman of Breslav said: “Only in the future will it be possible to understand the Zimzum that brought the ‘Empty Space’ into being, for we have to say of it two contradictory things: (1) the Empty Space came about through the Zimzum, where, as it were, He ‘limited’ His Godliness and contracted it from there, and it is as though in that place there is no Godliness and (2) the absolute truth is that Godliness must nevertheless be present there, for certainly nothing can exist without His giving it life.”

This, manifestly, is a paradox. You should always be on the alert when you encounter the word “paradox”. What it signifies is either that there’s a true phenomenon that’s hard to conceptualise in any familiar and common sense way, or that someone is talking absolute nonsense and wants to maintain two contradictory positions at once (“doublethink”). In these latter cases, there is no paradox at all. There is simply an error being described as a paradox to avoid calling it what it is.

Kabbalists say that if the “Infinite” did not restrict itself then nothing other than God could exist because God’s totality would overwhelm everything else. So, the argument goes, the immanent Infinite (God) withdraws itself from the area of the finite, and in that area he takes a transcendent role, standing above it, so to speak, but still in control of it.

What is Hegel’s (and Illuminism’s) answer to this “paradox”? It is that God does not withdraw himself from anything. The concept of Zimzum is absurd and kills off Kabbalah as a serious system of thought. The real cause of the Zimzum problem is that Jews can’t conceive of God as anything other than perfect. For them, imperfection can exist only where God is not. Zimzum is the idiotic contention that omnipresent perfection is able to contract part of itself to create a Godless void (nevertheless transcended by God). This instantly contradicts the original definition of God being everywhere.

The Kabbalists could have begun with a definition that God isn’t everywhere or isn’t perfect, but of course that would limit him and thus render him not God. So, they are between a logical rock and a hard place, and, as all bogus religions do, they create a specious argument that sounds profound but is nonsense. The easy and honest escape route is to acknowledge that God is indeed everywhere, but he is not perfect. God is EVOLVING towards perfection; he does not begin as perfection. He starts as infinite potential capable of being transformed into infinite actualisation.

There is no contradiction in a God of Becoming being both infinite and finite. The Infinite God is God in himself, but he is not complete and whole. He NEEDS the finite world; he needs to separate himself into infinite FINITE PARTS to create multiplicity, to create a dialectical competition for power between different centres of power. Through their conflict – through the dialectic of thesis, antithesis and synthesis – God pulls himself up by his own bootstraps to his Absolute Self.

We are all part of God and we can all become God. We ourselves are monads: souls associated with the number zero which have infinite capacity. The definition of God applies to all of us. We all begin as potential and we are all trying to optimise that potential. Before the birth of the finite world, before true differentiation and individuation entered the world, we all existed as one vast Zero.

Each of us is a zero, but the zeros put together form “Zero”: the collection of all zeros. An infinite number of zeros (dimensionless points) can be superimposed on one another. How is one to be distinguished from the other? What separates them? They can all share the same content because they all exist together. That is why Zero is “God in himself”.

Outside space and time, the collection of undifferentiated zeros represents a single God. It is via dimensionality (space and time) that the monads can start having a separate existence and be differentiated one from the other. Each monad can then grow to fulfil its own divine potential. At the “end of time”, all the perfected zeros come back together at a dimensionless point. But now “Zero” is the God of all Gods, the Absolute God, the Omega Point of existence.

The cosmic journey is: dimensionless existence (pure mind) generates dimensional existence (the material world with which the dimensionless world interacts) where all minds are individuated and perfected, and dimensional existence then returns to dimensionless existence but at an infinitely higher level where infinite potential has been converted to infinite actualisation. The universe has gone as far as it can. It is now PERFECTION.

The crucial conceptual difference between Illuminism and Kabbalah is that Illuminism is about the evolution of perfection whereas Kabbalah is about eternal perfection “imperfecting” itself in a particular place in order to “see itself”. But clearly it couldn’t have been perfect if a) it had a need to see itself and b) is able to create a non-perfect zone. How can perfection give rise to imperfection? It’s impossible. This is the age-old “paradox” of why a perfect being chooses to make a less perfect universe. Clearly, no such phenomenon can ever happen. All Creation religions involving a perfect Creator who creates imperfection are simply ludicrous and incredible.

Illuminism is about transforming potential into perfection. Abrahamism is about perfection making itself less perfect for no plausible reason. Jehovah’s created world is by definition less perfect than Jehovah. Why would perfection have any desire to gaze at imperfection? Even to have such a desire points to an intrinsic deficiency in God, hence he is imperfect.

All of the problems concerning God stem from the nonsensical idea that God is eternally perfect. As soon as that fallacy is recognised, religion makes perfect sense. How can an all-powerful, morally perfect being create an imperfect world of evil? Impossible, right? But there’s no mystery if God was not all-powerful or morally perfect to begin with. Rather, he is evolving towards those qualities.

Becoming (evolution) is the core of existence, not being (immutable, eternal perfection). This is the ancient debate between Heraclitus and Parmenides. Why did Plato’s brilliant system fail? It was because his Perfect Forms were pure being rather than evolving Forms.

One way or another, the “becoming versus being” debate is at the centre of nearly all intellectual disputes, and there can be no doubt that evolution (becoming) is the winner. Any anti-evolutionary theory of being (which includes Abrahamism) is automatically WRONG.

Having separated God from the void via Zimzum, Kabbalists then contradict themselves by saying that God must continuously maintain the created universe, hence not be absent from it: “The Divine life-force which brings all creatures into existence must constantly be present within them… were this life-force to forsake any created being for even one brief moment, it would revert to a state of utter nothingness, as before the creation.” (Yosef Wineberg).

Creation therefore requires God’s immanence, even though we were told that Zimzum was all about removing God’s immanence. No amount of pretentious posturing and pseudo-profundity can get around the fundamental contradiction (it’s certainly not a paradox since it’s just wrong).

The Wikipedia entry on Zimzum muddies the situation even further: “This paradox is strengthened by reference to the closely related doctrine of divine simplicity, which holds that God is absolutely simple, containing no element of form or structure whatsoever. This gives rise to two difficulties. Firstly, according to this doctrine, it is impossible for God to shrink or expand (physically or metaphorically) – an obvious contradiction to the above. Secondly, according to this doctrine, if God’s creative will is present, then He must be present in total – whereas the Zimzum, on the other hand, results in, and requires, a ‘partial Presence’ as above.

“The paradox has an additional aspect, in that the Zimzum results in a perception of the world being imperfect despite God’s omniperfect Presence being everywhere. As a result, some Kabbalists saw the Zimzum as a cosmic illusion.”

So now the whole thing is an ILLUSION! Well that’s one way out of the problem. Jehovah has become rather like Maya of Hinduism: a cosmic illusionist intent on deceiving us. But what’s the point of this illusion? Why does a perfect being have to resort to playing mind tricks (on himself!)?

Kabalah, more and more, looks like Jewish Hinduism. It even has the concept of reincarnation. Who would have thought that the Jews and Indians had so much in common?! It has been said that Ein Sof is the impersonal part of God and that this is reminiscent of the Buddhist Nirvana. In fact, Nirvana looks much more like Ein given that Nirvana is typically described as Nothingness, the Void, the “Extinguishing”, the “blowing out”. So perhaps Kabbalists are really Jewish Buddhists who are willing to contemplate a more personalised God than the abstract Nirvana of Buddhism.

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Zimzum is connected to the concept of exile and alienation from God. It is a place of flaws and imperfection. The task of humanity is to repair the problems of the world to allow reconciliation and union with God. The Jews claim that this is done by obeying endless rules and commandments (over six hundred of them!) Judaism is a rule-book religion for autistics and victims of obsessive compulsive disorder. It has absolutely nothing to do with perfection. It’s about slavish, mindless obedience.

Hear this: no slave will ever attain the kingdom of God. No one who obeys mindless commandments will ever be spiritually enlightened.
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