The Song of the Unsong (Revision Thread Because Nobody Wanted to Do It)

[VeryGoofyToddler2]

Hi, this thread will be going over Unsong because the tiers need to be updated based on the current situation.

God:​

God is pretty reflective of the Kabbalah depiction of God and in essence monotheism in general. As such he created the Heaven and the Earth(Unsong: Prologue) as well as creating man and everything is his very own image as his divine energy structuring all of reality(Unsong: Chapter 1 - Dark Satanic Mills) To God nothing is a coincidence(Unsong: Chapter 1 - Dark Satanic Mills) and his name is transcendent with it being very long.(Unsong: Chapter 2 - Arise to Spiritual Strife)

Spoiler: Ontology

God is not some person on the literal sense but a force in a higher level than those on the grounded level.

“Seems clear enough to me,” said Bill Dodd. “God’s not a big guy in the sky. He’s just a force, like physical forces, but on a higher level. He doesn’t plan these things, any more than anyone plans gravity. It just happens.”

“So you’re denying the Bible?” Eli Foss said, somewhat less intimidating than intended due to a mouth full of pasta. “We’re sitting here at a table with an angel and a kabbalist, and you’re denying the Bible?”

“Look, we all know that the Bible was given by Uriel, not God. Most of it just records Uriel’s interventions in the world, which are usually well-intentioned but certainly not omniscient. Why not the Book of Job too? Job asks a hard question and gets yelled at. Sounds exactly like Uriel on a bad day. I can even imagine him going on about the Leviathan for like an hour, describing how interesting he finds each of its fins and teeth and things while Job gets more and more confused.”

A couple of people snorted.

“But Uriel,” said Eli Foss, “has always said he’s just trying to follow God’s plan, as he understands it.”

“The Pope says the same thing,” said Bill Dodd. “That doesn’t mean he’s met the guy.”

“Someone must have created the world!” protested Ally Hu. “And all the angels, and the Names, and the kabbalah!”

“I’m not saying there’s not a Creator force,” said Bill Dodd. “I’m just saying it shouldn’t be thought of as a person.”

“Thomas Aquinas,” said Zoe Farr, “tells us that God is not a person, not at all, not even close, but can sometimes be compared to one, since a person is the most intelligent entity we have to compare it to. It’s like how they used to say the brain was a telephone switchboard. It’s much more than that, but if all you have as a metaphor is a telephone switchboard, it’s better than nothing.”
- Chapter 5 - Never Seek To Tell Thy Love

As such God, the Devil, Angels, Demons, and all sort are on a metaphysical level. Forces rather than actual beings.

“I was raised Catholic,” said Zoe Farr. “In church school, we always learned that evil is just the absence of good. So God didn’t create evil, He just created a finite and limited amount of good, not always as much as we’d like. So people aren’t as nice as they could be, and sometimes the weather forms storms and tornadoes, but it’s not because there’s this active force called Evil out there, it’s just because the weather is doing its own thing unrestrained by God pouring infinite amounts of Good into it.”

“No!” said Ana forcefully, abandoning her role as referee and joining in the discussion. “That’s not right. There are certainly bad people who just fulfill their natural selfishness without having any good to get in the way. The bankers, CEOs of theonomics, UNSONG agents, cops, politicians. They just do what the system tells them, follow their incentives with no concern for the consequences. But then there are other people. Your sadists. Your serial killers. People who delight in causing other people pain. Elie Wiesel said the opposite of love wasn’t hate, it was indifference. I beg to differ. Any of you ever read about what the Japanese did to the Chinese in Nanking? The Nazis, you know, mostly they just wanted some people dead and went about it in a horrifically efficient way. The Japanese, they enjoyed it. They worked hard on it. They deviated from efficiency, from self-interest, they sacrificed their own self-interest to be as perfectly cruel as possible. And Hell. Thamiel and his demons. They’re not indifferent. They’re evil. There’s a difference.”

“I mean, it looks like there’s a difference to us,” said Zoe Farr, “but maybe on a metaphysical level, that sort of depravity is just what a total, absolute absence of good looks like.”

“I remember seeing a video,” said Ana “of the President’s summit with the Devil. It was in this big hall. First the President came in, and they all played the Star-Spangled Banner. Then Thamiel came in, and the band played…played the anthem of Hell. It was horrible. I didn’t even know instruments could make noises like that. They were all out of tune and fighting with each other and going at weird intervals that tricked the ear and made me want to pull my hair out.”

“So?” asked Zoe. “Maybe the Hell music was just the total absolute absence of good in music.”

“No,” said Ana. “There’s good music. And then there’s total silence. And then there’s that. It’s not silence. It’s the opposite of music.”

“Unsong,” I suggested.
- Chapter 5 - Never Seek To Tell Thy Love

God being One and also name is One:

“Cast abroad the rage of thy wrath: and behold every one that is proud, and abase him!”

“Okay,” said Ally Hu. “That’s enough.” She grabbed the Book of Job from Ana’s hands. Ana grabbed it back. A tug of war.

“Dessert’s ready!” said Erica.

“God is One and His Name is One,” insisted Pirindiel. “This is very important.”
- Chapter 5: Never Seek To Tell Thy Love

The explicit name of God also his true name(Shem haMephorash) gives wielder the power over all of Creation. (Important in the Creation portion about the importance of words and names):

It was my third week in Ithaca. I’d just finished moving my bed into my room with the help of one of the other group home residents, a tall Asian guy who didn’t like to talk very much. I was sweaty and thirsty, I’d gone into the common room to drink some Gatorade, and found Ana already there reading a book. We’d started talking, and somehow gotten onto the subject of the Shem haMephorash, the Explicit Name of God, the True Name, the Most Holy Name, which gave its wielder power over all Creation.
- Chapter 5: Never Seek To Tell Thy Love IV

God being Cantor conception of the absolute infinite: Divinity. One that supersedes all natural and ordinal numbers as well as any finite, transfinite, and infinite levels of infinity as it is the single complete unity of all numbers and levels.

Those who speak the Names of God aloud are called cantors and singers. Like everything, these terms have both overt and kabbalistic meanings.

The overt meaning of “cantor” is “someone who chants”.

The kabbalistic meaning is “someone who works with infinity”.

This reading we derive from Georg Cantor, the German mathematician who explored the cardinality of infinite sets. He found that though the natural numbers – 1, 2, 3 and so on – were infinite, still there were fewer of them than there were “real” numbers like root 2, pi, and 0.239567990052… Indeed, not only were there two different levels of infinity, but it seemed likely that there were an infinite number of different infinities (and maybe one extra, to describe the number of infinities there were?)

The overall effect on him was much like the man in the limerick:

There once was a fellow from Trinity,
Who took the square root of infinity.
But the number of digits,
Quite gave him the fidgets;
And he dropped Math and took up Divinity.

Cantor began talking about how his discoveries were direct and personal revelations from God, who wished him to preach the gospel of infinity so that an infinite Deity could be better understood. He posited an Absolute Infinite, beyond all the forms of infinity he had discovered, with which God might be identified. Finally, he declared:

“I have never proceeded from any Genus supremum of the actual infinite. Quite the contrary, I have rigorously proved that there is absolutely no Genus supremum of the actual infinite. What surpasses all that is finite and transfinite is no Genus; it is the single, completely individual unity in which everything is included, which includes the Absolute, incomprehensible to the human understanding. This is the Actus Purissimus, which by many is called God.”

When he finally made his discoveries public, he chose a curious notation:

“It has seemed to me for many years indispensable to fix the transfinite powers or cardinal numbers by some symbol, and after much wavering to and fro I have called upon the first letter of the Hebrew alphabet, aleph. The usual alphabets seem to me too much used to be fitted for this purpose; on the other hand, I didn’t want to invent a new sign.”

A pragmatic account, utterly without reference to a two-thousand-year-old tradition of using the aleph to signify God. Nothing is ever a coincidence. The genealogies say his grandparents were Sephardic Jews, and if they weren’t kabbalists I will eat my hat.
- Interlude ג: Cantors and Singers

God is both immaterial and ineffable.

“WE SAY THAT MAN WAS MADE IN THE IMAGE OF GOD,” said Uriel. “BUT GOD IS INEFFABLE AND WITHOUT PHYSICAL FORM. RESOLVE THE PARADOX.”
- Chapter 9: With Art Celestial

God is without parts in Creation but Creation relies on him or else things would not exist nor make sense. The Divinity being the ontological ground which its attribute brings about life.

After thinking about it a while, I’m cool with the Spanish using “El” as an article. There’s something very article-like (articular? articulate?) about God. You have your nouns – ie, everything in creation – and God isn’t a part of them, but without God they don’t fit together, they don’t make sense. The article is what instantiates vague concepts: “pollo loco” is a dream, something out of Briah, “el pollo loco” is more in Yetzirah, an object, a created being.

Ana and I had a long discussion about the Digrammaton once. Jesus calls himself the alpha and the omega, the beginning and end. It makes sense. The Hebrew equivalent would be aleph and tav. But the Digrammaton is aleph and lamed. Lamed is the middle letter of the Hebrew alphabet. Aleph-lamed, beginning and middle. “I am the alpha and the lambda, the beginning and the middle” doesn’t have the same ring to it. What’s up?

And Ana tried to tie this into her own theory of music vs. silence vs. unsong. There was good. There was neutral. And there was evil. Not just ones and zeroes, but ones and zeroes and negative ones. God took credit for the good. He even took credit for the neutral. But He didn’t take credit for the bad. That was on us. Draw a line from best to worst, and God is everything from beginning to middle. I protested, said that God had created evil along with everything else, that it was on Him, that He couldn’t just change His Name and hope to avoid detection. Ana didn’t have an answer then. Later, when she heard all of this explained in more detail, she realized it was the key to the whole mystery, that anyone who understood the Digrammaton would understand the Shem haMephorash too, and everything else beside. But that was still long in the future.

There is even a Monogrammaton. The sages took the twenty-two letters of the Hebrew alphabet, and decided that exactly one of them was a Name of God. That letter is “he”. It’s the fifth letter, and it makes an hhhhhh sound like English H. The sages say that the breath makes a hhhhhhhh sound, which I guess it sort of does. Breath is the animating spirit of human existence, God is the animating spirit of the world. It sort of checks out.

“He” is pronounced like “hey” or “hay”. “Hey” is a word we call to get someone’s attention. Attention is consciousness, the highest level of thought, corresponding to the sephirah Keter. When we shout “Hey!” at someone, we are speaking a holy Name of God, invoking the Monogrammaton to call forth the Divine within them. “Hay” is a thing that cows eat. Cows eat hay and we eat cows. We never touch hay, but it is indirectly sustaining us. It is the ontological ground, the secret that gives us life although we know it not.

But “he” is spelled as “he”. A long time ago, Ana said the Holy Explicit Name of God was “Juan”, because “God is Juan and His Name is Juan.” We both laughed it off, but later I was looking through my trusty King James Version and started noticing things. Psalm 95:7, “He is our God”. Psalm 100:3, “It is He that hath made us.” Job 37:23, “He is excellent in power and in judgment.” All of these have an overt English meaning. But they are, in their own way, invoking the Monogrammaton.

And “he” corresponds to the English letter H. H is for hydrogen, the very beginning of the periodic table, the building block out of which everything else is made. H is the fundamental unit of matter in the universe. H, the saying goes, is a colorless odorless gas which, given enough time, tends to turn into people. How would that make sense unless H was God, the organizing and ordering principle of the Cosmos, He who creates all things?
- Interlude ד: N-Grammata

God is too powerful to be conceptualized since even his shortest name is too big to fit and any amount of his divine energy could destroy the Universe. The only way he can interact is through the divine energy of the Sefirot:

Malachi 3 describes God as “like a refiner’s fire”, but only because the ancient Hebrews didn’t know the word “H-bomb”. God is infinite energy, uncontrollable power, likely to scorch and burn anything He touches. If God even touched the Universe for a second with His little finger, it would shatter like a dropped egg. So how does God create the universe? How does He sustain it?

Ha’Ari proposes a system that my 21st century mind can’t help but compare to electrical transformers. If electricity went straight from a nuclear plant to the light bulb in your house, your light bulb would blow up. Instead, the electricity goes from the plant to a huge transformer that can handle it and make it a little less powerful, then from there to a smaller transformer that can handle that level of power and make it a little less powerful in turn, and so on to your lightbulb. God’s power, then, passed through the ten sephirot as “transformers” that converted it to a voltage capable of affecting the world.

Since Luria didn’t have that metaphor, he talked about “vessels” instead. Think of those artsy fountains where the water falls into one pot, fills it up, then overflows into another pot lower down, then into another even lower pot, and so on until it reaches the bottom. Luria imagined ten vessels, gently transferring the water from God all the way down the world, making the divine energy more finite at each level until finally it reached us.

That was the plan, anyway. The first pot worked as intended. The second and third also worked as intended. The fourth was just a little too weak, couldn’t handle the sheer nuclear blast of divinity, and exploded. That meant the full power of the third pot flowed down into the fifth pot, so the fifth also exploded, and so on all the way down to the last pot, which was at least as much “the bottom of the fountain” as a pot in itself and so didn’t explode. It just cracked open a little bit.

That last cracked pot was the material world, the universe we live in. It’s filled with the shards of the six broken sephirot above it, not to mention chunks of itself pried loose in the blast. Seven pots worth of debris. And remember, these pots were designed to control divine power, so they’re made of special God-resistant material; separated from their purpose they become the klipot, powers opposed to God. We’ve got all of this high-voltage divine energy flowing into us that we’re not supposed to be able to bear, shooting off huge streams of sparks in every direction, but it’s all so choked up with God-resistant klipot that we’re missing most of it. On the human level, all of this chaos and unfiltered light and god-resistant shards and brokenness manifests as disorder. The reason evil exists is that we’re living in the middle of a pot with a crack in it.
- Interlude ו: There’s A Hole in My Bucket

In theory, we ought to be able to swim around the bottom of the fountain, hunt for the debris, and build it back into functional God-deflectors. Then we need to take the sparks of divine light and use them as an energy source to power the deflectors, and finally arrange the whole system in exactly such a way as to correctly channel the power of God at a human-bearable level. In practice we are sex-obsessed murder-monkeys and all of this is way above our pay grade. The debris and sparks are stuck in the spiritual world and we probably can’t even find them, let alone start building complicated metaphysical machinery with them. So Henry/Ha’Ari asks Liza/God for help: with what can we effect tikkun, the rectification of the world?

And Liza replies: “With straw, dear Henry.”

Straw is a kind of hay. Hay is the Monogrammaton, the shortest Name of God. The universe can only be made whole through divine intervention.

But the straw is too long; even the shortest Name of God is too big to fit. Any dose of God would burn the universe to ashes; that’s how this whole problem started. With what shall I cut it, dear Liza, dear Liza? How can God be channeled and applied to the universe safely?

And Liza replies: “With a knife, dear Henry.”

Knife in Biblical Hebrew is “zayin”. Zayin is also the seventh letter of the Hebrew alphabet, represented by a pictograph of a knife or sword. But on Torah scrolls the scribes add a little crown to the hilt, which has led to a whole host of alternative interpretations. Some say it represents a king, some a scepter, and some a comet – this last being aided by a Hebrew pun in which “scepter” and “comet” are the same word. All of these meanings come together in the Star Prophecy of Numbers 24:17 – “I behold him, though not near: a star shall come out of Jacob, and scepter/comet out of Israel”. The prophecy goes on to explain that this will be a great ruler who conquers all of Israel’s enemies – neatly tying together the themes of king, scepter, comet, and sword.
- Interlude ו: There’s A Hole in My Bucket

God being purely ontological when compared to the world:

“AND I HAVE NEVER SEEN ANYTHING TO CONVINCE ME THAT GOD PLAYS AN ACTIVE PART IN THE UNIVERSE. HIS ROLE SEEMS TO BE ENTIRELY ONTOLOGICAL.”
- Chapter 16: If Perchance With Iron Power He Mighr Advert His Own Despair

“UM,” said Uriel. “GOD’S PRESENCE IN THE UNIVERSE IS MORE FOCUSED ON ONTOLOGY THAN REAL ESTATE ARBITRATION.”
- Chapter 34: Why Wilt Thou Rend Thyself Apart, Jerusalem

God is perfect can exist as just himself as ultimate divinity. To create the world, he decided to bring about duality, division, and all forms of dichotomy since the Universe requires Evil as it is imperfect, unlike God. God at in its primal state(Perfection) is just pure Nothing without division or differentiation.

The most famous question in theology is “Why did God create a universe filled with so much that is evil?” The classical answers tend to be kind of weaselly, and center around something like free will or necessary principles or mysterious ways. Something along the lines of “Even though God’s omnipotent, creating a universe without evil just isn’t possible.”

But here we have God buying evil with two silver coins. Buying to me represents an intentional action. Let’s go further – buying represents a sacrifice. Buying is when you sacrifice something dear to you to get something you want even more. Evil isn’t something God couldn’t figure out how to avoid, it’s something He covets.

What did God sacrifice for the sake of evil? Two silver coins. We immediately notice the number “two”. Two is not typically associated with God. God is One. Two is right out. The kabbalists identify the worst demon, the nadir of all demons, as Thamiel, whose name means “duality in God”. Two is dissonance, divorce, division, dilemmas, distance, discrimination, diabolism.

This, then, was God’s sacrifice. In order to create evil, He took up duality.

“Why would God want to create evil? God is pure Good!”

Exactly. The creation of anything at all other than God requires evil. God is perfect. Everything else is imperfect. Imperfection contains evil by definition. Two scoops of evil is the first ingredient in the recipe for creating universes. Finitude is evil. Form is evil. Without evil all you have is God, who, as the kabbalists tell us, is pure Nothing. If you want something, evil is part of the deal.

Now count the number of creatures in the song. God, angel, butcher, ox, water, fire, stick, dog, cat, goat. Ten steps from God to goat. This is the same description of the ten sephirot we’ve found elsewhere, the ten levels by which God’s ineffability connects to the sinful material world without destroying it. This is not a coincidence because nothing is ever a coincidence. Had Gadya isn’t just a silly children’s song about the stages of advancement of the human soul, the appropriate rituals for celebrating Passover in the Temple, the ancient Sumerian pantheon, and the historical conquests of King Tiglath-Pileser III. It’s also a blueprint for the creation of the universe. Just like everything else.
- Chapter 18: That The Children Of Jerusalem May Be Saved From Slavery (Passover Bonus Chapter)

Alll hierarchies end in God whom also exists above all things:

Rabbi Reuben Margolis relates the song to a Midrash. King Nimrod of Sumer demands Abraham worship the Fire God. Abraham refuses, saying that rain extinguishes fire, so if anything he should worship rain. Nimrod says okay, fine, worship the Rain God. But Abraham refuses again, saying that wind drives away the rain clouds, so if anything, he should worship wind. So Nimrod commands he worship the Wind God, and then other things happen, and finally Nimrod tries to kill Abraham and God saves him. The lesson is that all hierarchies end in God, who is above all things.
-Chapter 18: That The Children Of Jerusalem May Be Saved From Slavery I (Passover Bonus Chapter)

Divinity had existed before Time had existed when Angels would gloss over the incomprehensible nature of God who was everywhere when everything hadn't yet existed.

The angels had loads of knowledge. Most of it was theology. A lot of it wasn’t very good. The hope that they might have special access to God turned out to be kind of a dud. They remembered they had been created, way back before Time was a thing. They knew about God, they wouldn’t shut up about Him, but it was all incomprehensible, made the sort of mysticism humans came up with seem perfectly clear by comparison.

An exchange of technology?

The angels had no technology. They didn’t even seem to know many Divine Names, and the few they did know they wouldn’t say. Threats, blackmail, even torture seemed not to faze angels in the slightest, and don’t ask me to tell you the story of how we learned that information because this was back during the Nixon administration, when the country Did What It Had To Do because By Golly The Russians Would and We Couldn’t Fall Behind.

A military alliance?

Now we’re talking. The angels appeared to be able to smite things with flaming swords that they conjured out of nowhere. But they had no concept of strategy or geopolitics. When we asked if they would help us against the Russians, they just wanted to know if the Russians were evil. When we said yes, they asked why we weren’t at war with them already. When we tried to explain that you don’t just go to war, you build alliances and gradually box in your enemy and try to use their reluctance to fight to gain concessions from them without anything ever breaking out into open conflict which would be disastrous to both sides, the angels didn’t get it.

Evildoer? Smite. Not an evildoer? Live in peace.

Attempts to get the angels to participate in any of the processes of modern civilization were similar failures. The angels didn’t get economics; God would provide. The angels didn’t get the UN; why would you talk to evildoers instead of smiting them? The angels didn’t get the requests that their bastions to be opened up to tourists and archaeologists. God was the only thing worth knowing about, and God was everywhere alike.
- Chapter 19: The Form Of The Angelic Land II

God’s divine energy used by Uriel could “peel” apart Space.

“I PEELED APART SPACE SO THAT TWO ISRAELS EXIST IN THE SAME SPOT. ONE OF THEM CONTAINS ONLY JEWS, THE OTHER CONTAINS ONLY PALESTINIANS. ANY JEWISH PERSON WHO ENTERS THE COUNTRY WILL FIND THEMSELVES IN THE JEWISH ONE. ANY MUSLIM PERSON WHO ENTERS THE COUNTRY WILL FIND THEMSELVES IN THE PALESTINIAN ONE. ANY CHRISTIAN OR ATHEIST OR SO ON WILL FIND THEMSELVES IN A SUPERPOSITION OF BOTH STATES. IT WILL PROBABLY BE VERY CONFUSING.”
- Chapter 36: My Father’s Business

God is divinely simple:

“See, there’s this idea called divine simplicity. People keep asking, okay, so God created the Universe, but who created God? The answer is that God doesn’t need creating. He’s perfectly simple. He’s just a natural thing for there to be. People act like you need God to explain why the universe isn’t just nothing. But why should the Universe be nothing? Why shouldn’t it be, I don’t know, a piece of bread? The only reason people think ‘nothing’ needs no explanation, but a piece of bread does need an explanation, is that nothing is simpler than bread. Well, God is just as simple as nothing. So there.”
- Interlude ס: Binary

God is everywhere due to omnipresence therefore he can not be summoned.

“Father,” said the Comet King, ignoring everything he had just said, “if you were going to devise a placebomantic ritual to summon God, how would you do it?”

“That’s easy. I wouldn’t. You don’t summon God.”

“But suppose that billions of people were suffering, and the only way to save them was to learn the Most Holy Name of God, which has to come from His own lips, and you thought – what’s there to lose? – and decided to summon Him anyway. How would you do it?”

Father Ellis thought for a while. “No. I still wouldn’t. The point is, you can’t summon God. He’s already everywhere.”
- Chapter 71: But For Another Gives Its Ease II

God is also logically necessary:

“God is One and His Name is One. God is One with His Name. People always say God isn’t a person, but then what is He? To me, He’s always been a sort of logical necessity. The necessity for everything in the cosmos to be as good as possible. Understand goodness and you understand God. Understand God and you understand His Name. Understand the Name and you can remake the world. That’s the kabbalah. The rest is just commentary. Excruciating, unbearable commentary that kills everyone you love.”
- Chapter 72: And Builds Heaven on Hell’s Despair

Like all things God itself has many names alongside an inner essence like that of humans and their divine spark(neshamah) as opposed to a normal soul(ruach). This is indirectly referencing that God also has a sort of “deeper” form that also cannot be named this is indirectly referencing the “essence” of divinity which to God is the Atzmus:

Four hundred years earlier, an old man in Prague had explained to his students that yes, you could make a golem, you could bestow upon it the nefesh, the animal soul. With sufficient enlightenment, you could even bestow upon it the ruach, the moral soul. But the neshamah, the divine spark, you could not bestow upon it, for that was a greater work, and would require a greater Name than any ever discovered.
- Chapter 1 - Dark Satanic Mills

When Ana was using an example of digital binary, she used God after contracting himself from his perfection while staying perfect to describe the world as being the essence of his perfection. That the contrast to God’s binary digit as “God is One(1)” would be the binary digit of 0: Nothingness(What God was before contraction). If you remove the need of duality, references, and binary digits with the absence of thought you get only perfect essence of Divinity or the complete absence of anything other than itself: Atzmus.

“I’m getting to Leibniz! Right now we’re at information theory. A well-defined mathematical explanation of simplicity. We can measure the complexity of a concept in bits. The number of binary digits it would take to specify the concept in some reasonable encoding system. We can do it with numbers. The numbers 0 and 1 are one bit. Two is 10, three is 11; those are two bits. Four is 100, five is 101, six is 110, seven is 111; so three bits. And so on. We can do it with computer programs; just count how many bits and bytes they take up on a computer. We can do it with images if you can get them into a format like .gif or .jpg. And we can do it with material objects. All you have to do is figure out how long it would take to write a program that specifies a description of the material object to the right level of complexity. There are already weather simulators. However many bits the most efficient one of those is, that’s how complex the weather is.”

“And God?” asked Zoe Farr.

“God is one bit. The bit ‘1’”.

“I find that…counterintuitive,” was the best Zoe could answer.

“Well, it’s easy to represent nothingness. That’s just the bit ‘0’. God is the opposite of that. Complete fullness. Perfection in every respect. This kind of stuff is beyond space – our modern theories of space take a bunch of bits to specify – but if it helps, imagine God as being space filled with the maximum amount of power and intelligence and goodness and everything else that it can hold, stretching on to infinity.”

“The maximum amount of purple?” I objected.

“Sure. And the maximum amount of red, green, blue, et cetera.”

“So God is kind of an off-shade of brown, is what you’re telling me,” I told Ana. “Because in third grade I tried mixing all the colors of paint together, and that was what I got.”

“Well, what color should He be?”

“Brilliant golden light,” suggested Erica.

“Exodus 20:23,” I objected. “You shall not make a god out of gold.”

“And,” said Ana, “if you don’t think God can be brown, then you’re racist.”

“But,” said Erica, “if God contains everything alike, then He is evil as well as good. Weakness as well as strength. Sadness as well as happiness.”
- Interlude ס: Binary

“I know the answer to this one,” said Zoe. “Goodness is the same as existence. To exist infinitely is to be infinitely good. A human who was really human, who fulfilled her humanity to the utmost degree, would be a truly excellent human, one who was good at being a human and exemplified all the human virtues. Insofar as you are less of a human than that person, you exist less than them. God is pure existence, so He has to be pure good as well.”

“No,” I said. “That’s assuming the conclusion. It’s saying that humans exist to be good. Why can’t humans exist to be bad? There are three numbers that need no justification – zero, infinity, and negative infinity.”

“Negative infinity isn’t simple!” said Ana. “You have to put the minus sign in front of it! That’s a whole extra pen stroke!”

“That’s only convention,” Erica protested.

“SPARROWS CAN’T HAVE NEGATIVE NUMBER OF WINGS!”

“Aren’t religious people always talking about how the Bible is a source of absolute values?” I proposed.

“Maybe,” said Eli seriously “existence is like distance. There’s only one direction you can go. God went that direction and we called it ‘good’. Bad is something else.”

“Bad is just the absence of God,” said Zoe.

“We’ve had this discussion!” said Ana. “No it isn’t! Nothingness is the absence of God! Hitler requires a design decision! Four arms on the swastika! Two sides to the mustache! One ********!”

“I thought that was a myth,” I said.

“I still don’t get how this is Leibniz,” said Zoe. “Or the creation of the world.”

“Leibniz was studying the I Ching, and he noticed that its yin and yang sticks, when arranged in hexagrams, corresponded to a new form of arithmetic, because he was Leibniz and of course he noticed that. So he invented binary numbers and wrote a letter to the Duke of Brunswick saying that he had explained how God could create the universe out of nothing. It goes like this. You’ve got God, who is 1. You’ve got nothingness, which is 0. And that’s all you need to create everything. 1s and 0s arranged in a long enough string.”

“How, exactly?”
- Interlude ס: Binary

“The kabbalistic conception is that God withdrew from Himself to create the world. I, for example, am beautiful and intelligent, but not so physically strong. God is perfectly beautiful and intelligent and strong, so by withdrawing a little bit of His beauty and intelligence, and a lot of His strength, and some other things, we end up with an Ana.”

“Except you’re not an off-shade of brown,” said Erica.

“And also, God mostly just withdrew from the original universe in such a way that made it have laws of physics that generated you,” I added.

“Same difference,” said Ana.

“How did God decide which 1s to change to 0s?” asked Erica.

“And there’s the rub,” said Ana. “To change any 1s to 0s at all is making the world worse. Less Godly. Creation was taking something that was already perfect – divinity – and making it worse for no reason. A wise woman once said that those who ask how a perfect God create a universe filled with so much that is evil miss a greater conundrum – why would a perfect God create a universe at all?”

We were all silent just a little too long.

“I have a question,” Zoe Farr said, finally. “If God is just the binary digit 1, and nothingness is the binary digit 0, and the both contain one bit of information – then isn’t neither one the simplest thing? Wouldn’t the simplest thing be zero bits, neither God nor nothingness?”

“That’s Atzmus and you’re not supposed to talk about it!” said Ana.

“Okay, jeez,” said Zoe.

“Any other dumb objections?” Ana asked, play-acting a death glare at all of us.

“I might have one,” said Eli Foss. “I…appreciate what you’re trying to do, Ana, but I have to remind you that kabbalah isn’t just the word for whatever cool theory you happen to come up with by combining information theory and the I Ching and the doctrine of divine simplicity. It literally means ‘received tradition’. It’s a body of work that’s been designed and created according to specific rules set forth by the rabbis, and it’s within the tradition of a relatively insular religion that’s really strongly against mixing its concepts with those of other ideas, especially ones from different faiths the way that the I Ching is from Daoism. So I think your theory is interesting. But it isn’t kabbalah. It’s not from the ARI, or the Baal Shem Tov, or anybody like that. So when you say that it’s the kabbalistic theory of the world, I think you need to walk that back a little unless you think real orthodox kabbalists are actually going around saying that God is just the binary digit ‘1’.”
- Interlude ס: Binary

Spoiler: Emanation/Sefirot/Klipot

The world runs in the structure of Adam Kadmon(Epilouge) and the divine energy that emanated down from God. As such each Sephirah represent a divine attribute of God using Adam Kadmon as the presence point for the the Four Worlds:

“IN KABBALAH,” Uriel continued “WE RECOGNIZE CERTAIN DIVISIONS OF ADAM KADMON AS ESPECIALLY IMPORTANT. A FOURFOLD DIVISION, WHICH WE INTERPRET AS FOUR WORLDS. A TENFOLD DIVISION, WHICH WE INTERPRET AS TEN SEPHIROT. A TWENTY-TWO-FOLD DIVISION, WHICH WE INTERPRET AS TWENTY-TWO PATHS BETWEEN SEPHIROT. AND A SEVENTY-TWO-FOLD DIVISION, WHICH WE INTERPRET AS THE SEVENTY-TWO-FOLD EXPLICIT NAME OF GOD. BY UNDERSTANDING ALL OF THESE DIVISIONS, WE LEARN THE STRUCTURE OF ADAM KADMON AND THEREFORE THE ORGANIZATIONAL PRINCIPLES OF THE UNIVERSE. ONCE THE ORGANIZATIONAL PRINCIPLES OF THE UNIVERSE ARE UNDERSTOOD, THEY CAN BE CHANGED. IT IS AS EASY AS SHOOTING FISH IN A BARREL.”

“You’re doing it on purpose now!”

“THERE ARE MANY FISH METAPHORS.”

“Wait a second. If you can create stoves and ketchup bottles ex nihilo, how come you can’t create food ex nihilo for me?”

“THE MOST BASIC DIVISION IN THE MYSTICAL BODY OF GOD IS THE TEN SEPHIROT. SEPHIRAH IS A HEBREW WORD RELATED TO THE ENGLISH “SAPPHIRE”, BECAUSE THE SAGES IMAGINED THEM AS SAPPHIRE-LIKE JEWELS ARRANGED IN A STRING. THE TEN SEPHIROT ARE A SERIES OF STAGES OR LEVELS OR JEWELS THROUGH WHICH DIVINE POWER FLOWS IN ITS MOVEMENT FROM GOD TO THE FINITE WORLD. EACH ONE CORRESPONDS TO A SPECIFIC DIVINE ATTRIBUTE. THE FIRST REPRESENTS THE WILL OF GOD. THE SECOND REPRESENTS THE WISDOM OF GOD. AND SO ON.”

A spark appeared on Uriel’s finger, and in lines of fire he traced a diagram into the sky in front of him.



“THERE ARE TWENTY-TWO DIFFERENT PATHS BETWEEN THESE JEWELS. EACH CORRESPONDS TO A PARTICULAR HEBREW LETTER.”
- Chapter 9: With Art Celestial

A man. A plan. A canal.

But what about Panama? Well, imagine the map of the mystical body of God overlaid upon a map of the Western Hemisphere – because we’re kabbalists and this is by no means the weirdest thing that we do. What sort of correspondences do we find?

None at all, because we’ve forgotten the lesson Uriel taught Sohu all those years ago; we see God face to face, so our left is His right and vice versa. So overlay the mystical body of God on the Western Hemisphere and flip it around the vertical axis. Now what?

Keter, sephirah corresponding to the ineffable crown of God, lands at the North Pole, the uninhabitable crown of the world. Malkuth, the sephirah corresponding to the feet of God, lands in Patagonia, whose name means “land of big feet” (don’t ask me, ask early Spanish explorers). The center of Malkuth, corresponding to the world of Assiah, sits on the Argentine city of Ushuaia – in Hebrew the two words would be identical. Just below Malkuth lies the realm of the Devil; just below Patagonia lies Cape Horn.

We’ve got a correspondence, so we go down the line.

Chokhmah represents divine knowledge shooting downward, the spirit of prophecy; it falls upon Juneau, Alaska. The Name of God corresponding to Chokhmah is Jah; the name of the city is therefore a kabbalistic reference to divine knowledge as “Jah knows”.

Binah representing the receptive mind as it gains understanding. It falls upon Boston – home of Harvard and MIT.

Hesed, representing loving kindness, falls upon San Francisco Bay, recalling our previous discussions about St. Francis, the hippie movement, and California as positive affect. Chesed is often considered the right hand of God; we already know how this symbol relates to San Francisco through Psalm 89:13.

Gevurah, representing law and justice, falls upon Washington DC. It is the left hand of God, wielding His punishing sword.

Netzach represents endurance and eternity, kind of like the slow but steady and long-lived tortoises after whom the Galapagos is named.

Hod represents splendor, endless forms bursting into life – and it falls right in the middle of the Amazon.

Yesod is interconnectedness and communication, also associated with silver and the moon. It falls upon the Rio de la Plata region of Argentina, named for its many interconnecting rivers and its copious silver reserves under the Earth.
- Chapter 39: Fearful Symmetry III

“TELL ME,” said Uriel, “ABOUT THE WORD ‘KABBALAH’ ITSELF”.

“Well,” said Sohu, “the Hebrew root contains the three letters kuf, bet, and lamed, and means ‘tradition’. Kuf connects Binah to Hesed, and Bet goes from Chokmah to Hesed, so both cross the Abyss and symbolize something transmitted from God to Man. Lamed, on the other hand, goes to Yesod, which signals the background superstructure of the universe. So the whole effect is one of hidden knowledge that points to the Divine, meaning that the connotations of the individual letters perfectly match the connotation of the word, exactly as would be expected.”

“THAT IS VERY GOOD. GO ON.”

“We find analogues in almost every other language. For example, the Arabic ‘qibla’ means the direction you face to pray, which is also about pointing to the Divine, albeit in a more literal sense. In Hindu myth, the sage who brought the secret divine knowledge to Earth was named ‘Kapila’. The Latin ‘capella’ means cloak, which is also about secrets and hidden things, as is the English ‘cabal’, and even the English ‘cable’ if you think of it as an undersea cable transmitting information below the surface. Also some version of the word ‘chaplain’ or ‘kaplan’ means ‘priest’ in pretty much every European language.”
- Chapter 44: A World Within Opening Its Gates I

“WE DISTINGUISH AMONG FOUR TYPES OF KABBALAH, CORRESPONDING TO THE FOUR WORLDS. THE THEORETICAL KABBALAH CORRESPONDS TO THE WORLD OF ATZILUTH. IT IS THE ANALYSIS OF THE FORM OF ADAM KADMON. THIS FORM IS UNTOUCHABLE AND THE SLIGHTEST CHANGE TO IT WOULD PROBABLY DESTROY THE WORLD.”

“That’s what we’ve been learning so far?” asked Sohu.

“YES. BELOW THIS, CORRESPONDING TO THE WORLD OF BRIAH, IS THE CELESTIAL KABBALAH. THIS IS THE MANIPULATION OF THE RULES BY WHICH THE FORM OF ADAM KADMON PRODUCES EFFECTS IN THE PHYSICAL WORLD. IT IS THE FORM OF KABBALAH WHICH I USE TO RUN THE UNIVERSE. I AM THE ONLY ENTITY WHO UNDERSTANDS THIS FORM, BUT ONE DAY YOU WILL BE CAPABLE OF LEARNING IT AS WELL.”

“Okay.”

“BELOW THAT, CORRESPONDING TO THE WORLD OF YETZIRAH, IS THE APPLIED KABBALAH. THIS IS THE MANIPULATION OF THE LOWER-LEVEL CONCEPTS AND ARCHETYPES. THE ANGELS AND SOME OF THE GREATEST SAGES HAVE MASTERED IT. SO HAVE YOUR SISTERS AND BROTHER.”

“And below that is…”

“THE WORLDLY KABBALAH. THE USE OF DIVINE NAMES. ANY HUMAN CAN MASTER IT, ONCE THE APPROPRIATE NAMES ARE KNOWN. YOU MAY LEARN THESE ON YOUR OWN. WE WILL START WITH THE APPLIED KABBALAH.”

“Okay,” said Sohu. “Teach me applied kabbalah.”
“YETZIRAH IS THE WORLD JUST ABOVE MATERIAL REALITY,” said Uriel. “IT IS THE WORLD OF ARCHETYPES…”
- Chapter 44: A World Within Opening Its Gates II

Uriel cleared his throat to get Sohu’s attention. When she was looking at him, he disintegrated into a bolt of lightning, then reappeared a mile above her head.

“NOW YOU TRY,” he said.

“Humans can’t do that!” she protested.

“YOUR FATHER CAN.”

“My father does a lot of things.”

“YES. THAT ONE IS CALLED KEFITZAT HADERECH. IT MEANS SHORTENING THE PATH. IT WAS PERFORMED BY THE GREATEST SAGES OF OLDEN DAYS. TODAY WE WILL LEARN IT.”

“What? You’re going to teach me to teleport? Uriel, you are the best!”

“YOU ARE AN EMANATION OF DIVINE STRUCTURE, PASSING FROM ATZILUTH TO BRIAH TO YETZIRAH TO THE PHYSICAL WORLD. THE SECRET OF TELEPORTATION IS EMANATING INTO THE PHYSICAL WORLD SOMEWHERE ELSE. SIT DOWN AND CLOSE YOUR EYES.”

Sohu did as directed.

“IN THIS WORLD, YOU ARE A BODY. IN YETZIRAH, THE DREAM WORLD, YOU ARE A COLLECTION OF THOUGHTS AND POSSIBILITIES AND ARCHETYPES. GO TO THAT WORLD.”

“How?”

“YOU DO IT EVERY NIGHT. NOW YOU WILL DO IT WHEN WAKING. STOP THINKING IN TERMS OF THINGS AND THINK OF THE MEANINGS BEHIND THEM.”

“I don’t know the meanings behind things!”

“YES YOU DO. THEY ARE THE CORRESPONDENCES YOU HAVE BEEN WORKING WITH FOR YEARS. SPACE IS A METAPHOR. TIME IS A METAPHOR. ALL THE CLOUDS AROUND US ARE METAPHORS. MY VOICE IS A METAPHOR. TAKE ONE STEP IN THE DIRECTION OF THE THING THAT THEY ARE METAPHORS FOR.”

“I don’t think the clouds are a metaphor.”

“EVERYTHING IS A METAPHOR. EVEN IF THERE WERE A CASE OF SOMETHING NOT BEING A METAPHOR, THE EXISTENCE OF THE CASE WOULD DEFINITELY BE A METAPHOR FOR SOMETHING.”

“What are the clouds a metaphor for?”

“WHAT ARE THE LINGUISTIC CORRESPONDENCES OF THE WORD CLOUD?”
- Chapter 44: A World Within Opening Its Gates III

Before he could turn his gaze south, he felt it. Something was happening. A pulse from Gevurah. Harshness. Destruction. A pulse from Yesod. Mechanism. Nature. Balance.

Uriel reached out and felt the Tree, teased the sephirot back into balance. He was among them and he was of them, he partook of them and he maintained them. They were his children, and they would be safe in his care.

He opened his eyes. A missile pierced the cloud-wall of the hurricane.

“A MESSAGE,” he said, intrigued. “SOMEBODY WANTS TO TALK TO ME. I HOPE IT IS FROM A FRIEND.”

He caught it in his outstretched hand. The message was very small. He held it right up to his eyes so he could see it clearly.

The message was: Sorry.

Then there was fire, and hurricane and archangel and machinery alike disintegrated into nothingness before the awesome power of the Wrathful Name of God.
- Chapter 63: My Wrath Burns To The Top of Heaven

But who was the Comet King? He was angelic, and his sword was angelic, but angels powered the violet sail, and no two were alike. If the secret of the black sail was just angels or their artifacts, Amoxiel would have opened it long ago. Think like a kabbalist. Seven sails for the seven sublunary sephirot. The red sail for the material world, that was Malkuth. The orange sail for ritual magic, that could be Netzach. The yellow for kabbalah, that was Yesod, the foundation, the superstructure of the world. The green sail for music, that was beauty, Tiferet. The blue sail for prayer, that was Hod. The violet sail for angels, that was Chesed, righteousness.

That left Gevurah. Severity. God’s goodness dealt out in a form that looks like harshness. The judgment all must fear.
- Chapter 67: The Night Of Enitharom’s Joy II

I saw her marshal her powers. Symbols blazed around her, circling like fireflies, shooting off ten-colored light in all directions. I felt the mountains shake as she gathered strength. Whole passages of Torah, entire facets of Adam Kadmon multiplied and congealed around her, patterns of dizzying complexity.
- Chapter 72: And Builds Heaven In Hell’s Despair II

The first three highest Sephirot are connected to each other in the same vein that others “trinity” are connected. This sort of Supernal Triad originates the transcendent and ineffable essence of God:

We compare it to three other famous trinities. Everyone knows the Christian Trinity – Father, Son, and Holy Ghost. But the Buddhists have a similarly central concept called the Three Jewels – Buddha, Dharma, and Sangha. The Buddha is the enlightened being. The dharma is the moral law, or the natural law, or duty; there’s no good English translation, so take your pick. Sangha corresponds almost precisely to “church”, not in the sense of a building but in the sense of “Catholic Church”, where it means an entire community of believers.

The kabbalists have their own trinity: the Supernal Triad of the first three sephirot. Kether is the transcendent heavenly aspect of God. Binah is a perfectly receptive vessel sometimes likened to the uterus. And Chokmah is likened to lightning – the bolt that originates in Kether and strikes Binah, impregnating it with divine essence.

These three trinities all correspond nicely to one another. They all have a human aspect: the Son, the Sangha, Binah, looking for answers but seeing the majesty of God’s plan only imperfectly. They all have an ineffable divine component: the Father, the Buddha, Kether, abiding in the secret order of the universe and seeing its full glory. And they all have a force that connects the other two: the Holy Spirit, the Dharma, Chokhmah, the potential for uniting the human and divine.

Ordinary mortals. The divine order. A connection between them.
- Chapter 39: Fearful Symmetry III

As such Tiferet is the center sefirot of the tree reflecting whatever it sees since its connected to all the sefirot in the Tree of Life:

“TIFERET,” he says. “THE SUN, BEAUTY, MIRACLES. BUT ALSO REVERSAL. A MIRROR SET AT THE CENTER OF THE TREE, REFLECTING WHATEVER IT SEES.” He stares more intently now. “A PULSE OF ENERGY FROM BINAH TO HESED, THEN A RETURN PULSE FROM HESED TO BINAH. THE LETTER KUF. BUT DOUBLED. REFLECTED.” Now he pauses. “SOMETHING IS MISSING. TIFERET ARCING DOWNWARD TO NETZACH. A YUD. TWO KUFS REFLECTED ABOUT A YUD.”

The colored streams of letters around his head whirl more wildly now.

“KUF. YUD. KUF. A KAYAK. SOMETHING IMPORTANT IS HAPPENING INVOLVING A KAYAK.”

The streams slow down. Somewhere in the wide world, something is happening involving a kayak, something important enough to disturb the subtle threads of the machinery of Heaven. Is it a prophet being carried down a river in Asia? A future king traversing an ocean in Europe? Is the kayak metaphorical? On the River of Time? On the Ocean of Knowledge? Might it…
- Chapter 3: On A Could I Saw A Child

But I bring this up because in the very center of the Tree lies Tiferet, the Heart of God, the Sephirah of Miracles. It stands at the center of the Tree of Life and joins the two halves of the mystic body, connecting to everything. Not just connecting everything, but reflecting everything, a mirror that transforms and displays everything it sees. And it falls smack dab upon the Panama Canal. The center of the whole system, the key to the mystery.

A man. A plan. A canal. Panama.
- Chapter 39: Fearful Symmetry III

As such the higher worlds cannot be reached by humans, if it were to then they would pass by like shadows:

“IT HAS BEEN BROKEN FOR FIVE WEEKS AND FIVE DAYS. I THINK IT BROKE WHEN I RELOADED NEW ZEALAND FROM A BACKUP COPY, BUT I DO NOT KNOW WHY. MY SYNCHRONIZATION WAS IMPECCABLE AND THE CHANGE PROPAGATED SIMULTANEOUSLY ACROSS ALL SEPHIROT. I THINK SOMEBODY BOILED A GOAT IN ITS MOTHER’S MILK. IT IS ALWAYS THAT. I KEEP TELLING PEOPLE NOT TO DO IT, BUT NOBODY LISTENS.”

Sohu looked at him dubiously, then gently laid her paddle down across her lap. “If you teach me the kabbalah, I could try to help you fix continental drift.”

“NO,” said Uriel. “I WORK CELESTIAL KABBALAH. IT IS BEYOND THE REACH OF HUMANS. IF YOU TRIED TO TOUCH THE EMANATIONS OF THE HIGHER WORLDS, THEY WOULD PASS THROUGH YOUR HANDS LIKE SHADOWS.”
- Chapter 3: On A Cloud I Saw A Child

The Kilpot are shells that covered the divine light from the Tree of Life.

Two years ago I’d been exactly where I wanted to be, a Stanford undergrad studying the applied kabbalah on a nice scholarship. I’d just finished a class on klipot and was playing around a bit – in the theoretical kabbalah, klipot are these sort of demonic scleroses that encrust the divine light and make it inaccessible, but in the applied kabbalah the word is used to describe cryptographic transformations of the Names of God that allow them to be used without revealing them to listeners. Imagine you’ve discovered a Name that lets you cure cancer, and you want to cure a customer’s cancer but don’t want them to learn the Name themselves so they can steal your business. Instead of speaking the Name aloud, you apply a cipher to it – if you want, change all the As to Es and all the Bs to Zs, so that ABBA becomes EZZE – and speak the cipher while holding the original fixed in your mind. The Name has the desired effect, and your ungrateful customer is left with nothing but the meaningless word “EZZE”, which absent the plaintext version is of no use to anybody.

Problem is, all the Names follow certain numerological rules. The Maharaj Rankings are the most famous, but there are over a dozen. So by working backwards from a klipah it’s usually possible to narrow down the plaintext Name to a very small collection of possibilities, which you can then check by hand – or by mouth, as the case may be. You end up with a race between rightsholders of Names trying to develop better and better klipot, and everyone else trying to discover better and better ways of breaking them. Well, I joined Team Everyone Else in college and came up with a pretty nifty new algorithm for breaking NEHEMOTH, one of the big klipot used by the Gogmagog corporation, with about one percent as much hassle as anyone else had come up with. My advisor told me not to publish and I ignored him. Turned out giant evil corporations don’t like having their multi-billion dollar properties rendered useless. Nothing I’d done was illegal per se, but they put pressure on Stanford to expel me, expel me they did, and a few months later their Applied Kabbalah department had a new professorship endowed with Gogmagog money and I was broke and living with my mother. Not that I’m bitter.
- Chapter 5: Never Seek To Tell Thy Love II

The right Sefirots in the Tree of Life are representative of God’s mercy as opposed to the left side representing his need of justice with the middle being balance/union between the two.

“OKAY.” Sohu tried to read his face. Was she disappointing him? “TODAY WE WILL LEARN ABOUT THE TWO PILLARS ON THE TREE OF LIFE. THE RIGHT PILLAR CONSISTS OF CHOKHMAH, CHESED, AND NETZACH. IT REPRESENTS THE RIGHT HAND OF GOD AND IS ASSOCIATED WITH MERCY. THE LEFT PILLAR CONSISTS OF BINAH, GEVURAH, AND HOD. IT REPRESENTS THE LEFT HAND OF GOD AND IS ASSOCIATED WITH JUSTICE. MY BOOK ON EDUCATION SAYS I SHOULD STOP TO SEE IF YOU HAVE ANY QUESTIONS. DO YOU HAVE ANY QUESTIONS?”

She didn’t want to disappoint him further. She tried to think of a question. “Um. You talk about these correspondences all the time. So…uh…how does this correspond to human politics. We also talk about a right side and a left side, but in human politics the Right is usually more concerned with justice, and the Left is usually more concerned with mercy. How come in kabbalah it’s the opposite of that?”

“THAT IS AN EXCELLENT QUESTION. YOUR HOMEWORK FOR NEXT WEEK IS TO FIGURE OUT THE ANSWER.”

Oh. So it was going to be one of those types of lessons. Sohu scowled.

“IT IS A COMMON MISCONCEPTION THAT THE RIGHT HAND IS GOOD AND THE LEFT EVIL. AS ASPECTS OF THE DEITY, BOTH ARE GOOD AND NECESSARY TO PRODUCE BALANCE. THE RIGHT HAND CREATES AND SUSTAINS. THE LEFT HAND DIRECTS AND PURIFIES. BUT AFTER THE SHATTERING OF THE VESSELS, WHEN ALL ASPECTS LOST THEIR CONNECTION TO SUPERNAL DIVINITY, THE RIGHT HAND BECAME AIMLESS IN ITS BLESSINGS, AND THE LEFT SWITCHED FROM THE CAREFUL DIRECTION OF A LOVING FATHER, TO PUNISHMENT FOR ITS OWN SAKE. THE MIDDLE PILLAR REPRESENTS THE COMPROMISE BETWEEN THESE TWO EXTREMES. BALANCE. UNION. HIDE.”
- Chapter 13: Chapter Of Eternal Death

“TELL ME ABOUT THE WORD WATER”.

Sohu sat on her cloud, snacking on manna with ketchup on top. He had been doing this increasingly often over the past few weeks, asking her to tell him about a word, never satisfied with the amount of meaning she was able to wring from it. It didn’t matter how many connections she drew, how many languages she was able to weave together, he would always just say something like “YES, BUT WHAT DO YOU MAKE OF PROTO-NABATEAN, IN WHICH THE SAME WORD REFERS TO AN OBSCURE KIND OF COOKING-IMPLEMENT?” and she would have to admit that, for some reason, that had never crossed her mind.

She sighed theatrically, but gave no further protest. “In Proto-Semitic,” she said, “it is akwa. In Proto-Eurasiatic, also akwa. In Proto-Amerind, akwa again. So we’re getting a very strong aleph-kaf-vav vibe. Aleph connects Chesed to Gevurah, and kaf connects Chesed to Binah, and vav connects Binah to Keter, so we’re getting two paths out of Chesed, one all the way up to Kether, and the other down to Gevurah.”

“GO ON.”

“So we’re invoking Chesed, the kindness of God. Compare Psalm 65: “You visit the Earth and water it, you greatly enrich it with the river of God, which is full of water.” But we’re also invoking Gevurah, the severity of God. Water is the kindess of God, but also His severity; think Noah’s flood, where it was His severity that punished the wicked, but His kindness that saved Noah and promised never again to flood the Earth. We’ve got Binah, the understanding of God. Spiritual growth. Compare John 4:14: “Whosoever drinketh of the water that I give him shall never thirst; the water that I shall give him shall be a well of water springing up into eternal life.” And finally, we’ve got Kether. The crown of God. Human beings are 66% water. The human brain is something like 90%. Human beings are made in God’s own image. Therefore, Kether.
- Chapter 26: For Not One Sparrow Can Suffer And The Whole Universe Not Suffer Also.

“OF ALL KABBALISTIC CORRESPONDENCES, THE MOST IMPORTANT IS THE CLAIM THAT GOD MADE MAN IN HIS OWN IMAGE. EXPLAIN HOW THE STRUCTURE OF DIVINITY CORRESPONDS TO THE HUMAN BODY.”

“The ten fingers are the ten sephirot, the ten emanations by which God manipulates the material world. The bilateral symmetry is the two branches of the Tree of Life, which correspond to the two human arms. The right branch is called Mercy and the left branch is called Severity.”

“SEVERAL MONTHS AGO, I GAVE YOU A HOMEWORK ASSIGNMENT. YOU WERE TO FIGURE OUT WHY IN HUMAN POLITICS, THE RIGHT-WING TENDS TO BE CONCERNED WITH JUSTICE AND THE LEFT-WING WITH MERCY, EVEN THOUGHT THESE ARE THE OPPOSITES OF THE KABBALISTIC CORRESPONDENCES.”
- Chapter 32: The Human Form Divine II

The Comet King smiled. “And that,” he said, “is why the Leviathan does not bother me.” He motioned for Ellis to sit down. “The ritual should conform to the Bible, of course,” he said. “And the Bible says that if you seek God, you will find Him, if you seek with all your heart. So. We have our ship, All Your Heart. Seven earthly sails for the seven earthly sephirot, three hidden in other planes. But the sails themselves aren’t enough. We need ritual. So we enact them in order. Various adventures, activating each aspect of God in turn. We start in my Kingdom. We go to San Francisco, the Foundation, where Heaven meets Earth. We shine with Glory. We win a Victory. We cross through Tiferet via the Canal. We cross Chesed by committing an act of great kindness, then Gevurah with an act of great harshness. We pass Da’at and its dark night, its collapse of everything earthly and recognizable. Now here we are. Binah, understanding. And Chokhmah, Wisdom. Which you have just displayed. Leaving us at the end of our road.”
- Chapter 71: But For Another Gives Its Ease II

The higher worlds are not bound within space-time. The world once being emanated with divine energy was changed into forms of mathematics:

“I have determined the basic structure of the world. The way God becomes finite. The machinery that transmutes divinity into finitude is based on a series of ten sapphires. They are not exactly located within space-time, but you can think of them as sort of coextensive with the outside of the crystal sphere surrounding the world.”

Gabriel noticed that, as usual, the only time Uriel got any emotion in his voice, the only time he would even make eye contact, was when he was talking about something totally irrelevant and uninteresting.

“This is the Tree of Life. It converts pure structure into material reality through a series of four levels. There is a bottleneck in the last one which connects the sapphire called Yesod to the one called Malkuth. By filtering this bottleneck, I can control the flow of the divine light of higher spheres from entering the physical world.”

“The divine light sustains existence. Any impediment to its radiance would make the universe crumble into dust.”
“No. I can shift the world into a different stable equilibrium which can run indefinitely on an internal mechanism independent of the divine light.”

“How?”

“With math. I am changing the world into math.”

The horror struck Gabriel at that moment. He – and Zadkiel, Michael, all the others – had dismissed Uriel as an idiot, too obsessed with his charts and correspondences to participate in the governance of Heaven, an empty mind turned in on itself in a tragic waste of an archangelic seat. They had been blind. He wasn’t just an idiot, he was a maniac. Samyazaz had a ziggurat obsession, he remembered that, but never in Samyazaz’s most grandiose dreams would he have tried to turn the whole world into a ziggurat. His thoughts turned to Thamiel. No one knew entirely what he was, save that he was obsessed with evil, and was trying to turn the whole world into evil. And now Uriel –

“You cannot change the world into math. That does not even make sense.”

“I can,” said Uriel. “I will show you.”

He motioned with his hand, and a series of objects and creatures flew up from the world below him. Uriel dismissed in turn a giant grouper, a giraffe, and a mountain, until he was left with a huge redwood tree, its uprooted bottom looking strangely naked in the storm-tossed air.
- Chapter 20: When The Stars Threw Down Their Spears

The higher worlds are not made of matter but various forms of subtle structures from what empowers the material world:

“THE USE OF KABBALAH TO AFFECT THE PHYSICAL WORLD IS DONE PRIMARILY UPON THE PLANES OF YETZIRAH AND BRIAH. THESE PLANES ARE NOT CONSTRUCTED OF MATTER BUT OF VARIOUS FORMS OF SUBTLE STRUCTURE. UNTIL YOU UNDERSTAND THE CORRESPONDENCES AND THE STRUCTURE, YOU CANNOT HOPE TO INFLUENCE THEM CONSISTENTLY.”
- Chapter 26: For Not One Sparrow Can Suffer And The Whole Universe Not Suffer Also

Creation:​

Creation is created(Unsong: Chapter 5 - Never Seek To Tell Thy Love, Part III) by God which its history began with the Big Bang when the Universe cooled down from symmetry(God is perfectly symmetrical before any contraction) broke into the laws of physics.(Unsong: Interlude ב - The Code of the World) The world itself shaped through a perspective that every part is of the whole which was said to be Adam Kadmon, primordial father:

Here we also see the same division between semantic and phonetic4 aspects as in the Confucius example: Washington’s successor was named “Adams” and came from Massachussetts. Note that the Biblical Adam was created beside the Tree of Knowledge, and John Adams was born in Braintree.

Other correspondences are spread even further afield. Moses’ wife was named Zipporah, Hebrew for “female bird”, but her American counterpart doesn’t show up until LBJ. It took all the way until the turn of the millennium before America listened to a bush and then got stuck wandering in a desert without an exit strategy.

Twist and stretch as it may, the underlying unity always finds a way to express itself. If you’re a science type, think of the cells in the human body. Every cell has the same genes and DNA, but stick one in the brain and it’ll become a brain cell; stick it in the skin and it’ll become a skin cell. A single code giving rise to infinite variety. If you don’t understand the deep structure they all share, you’ll never reallyunderstand brains or skin or anything else.

The Torah is the deep structure of the universe, and ‘structure’ is exactly the word for it. It’s pure. Utterly formal. Meaningless on its own. But stick it in a situation, and its underlying logic starts to clothe itself in worldly things. Certain substructures get expressed, certain others shrivel away. Certain relationships make themselves known. Finally, you get a thing. Box turtles. International communism. Africa. Whatever. If you’re not looking for the structure, you won’t find it. If you are, it’s obvious.
At the crucial moment in the Hebrew Bible, a man named Moses is born, ordains new laws, and changes the destiny of Israel. If you’re a Biblical Hebrew, then to you that’s the Torah. If you’re an angel, the Torah is something different. And if you’re God 974 generations before the creation of the world, the Torah is all of these things and none, just a set of paths and relationships and dependencies pregnant with infinite possibilities. A seed.h

Understand the seed, and you understand everything that grows from it. This is the kabbalah. The rest is just commentary. Super-important commentary. The kind of commentary that’s the difference between a sloughed-off skin cell and a thinking brain.
- Interlude ב: The Code of the World

Spoiler: Structure of Reality

Adam Kadmon is the blueprint for both man and the Universe itself which each things representing a facet of Adam and each part contains the whole.

“RABBI AKIVA PROPOSED THAT THE VERSE HAS BEEN MISINTERPRETED. ‘GOD MADE MAN IN HIS IMAGE’ MEANS ‘GOD MADE MAN ACCORDING TO AN IMAGE BELONGING TO GOD’. IN OTHER WORDS, MAN WAS BUILT TO A SPECIFIC CELESTIAL BLUEPRINT. WE CALL THAT BLUEPRINT ADAM KADMON, MEANING ‘ORIGINAL MAN’. ADAM KADMON IS THE BLUEPRINT NOT ONLY FOR MAN, BUT FOR THE ENTIRE UNIVERSE. THE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN THIS BLUEPRINT AND THE UNIVERSE ITSELF IS THE BASIS OF KABBALAH.”

Sohu cut through a scale, and was rewarded with a spurt of blood for her efforts. She shrieked and almost fell off the cloud.

“Aaak!” she said. Then: “Sorry. I was listening. Really.”

“NOVICES IN KABBALAH EXPECT THERE TO BE A SIMPLE CORRESPONDENCE BETWEEN ASPECTS OF ADAM KADMON AND OBJECTS IN THE UNIVERSE. FOR EXAMPLE, ONE PART OF ADAM KADMON MIGHT DESCRIBE HUMANS, ANOTHER MIGHT DESCRIBE TREES, AND ANOTHER MIGHT DESCRIBE THE STARS. THEY BELIEVE YOU CAN CARVE UP THE DIFFERENT FEATURES OF THE UNIVERSE, MUCH LIKE CARVING A FISH, AND SIMPLY…”

“No,” said Sohu, who was still trying to wipe blood off herself. “No fish-carving metaphors.”

“THEY BELIEVE YOU CAN CARVE UP THE DIFFERENT FEATURES OF THE UNIVERSE, ENTIRELY UNLIKE CARVING A FISH,” the angel corrected himself. “BUT IN FACT EVERY PART OF THE BLUEPRINT IS CONTAINED IN EVERY OBJECT AS WELL AS IN THE ENTIRETY OF THE UNIVERSE. THINK OF IT AS A FRACTAL, IN WHICH EVERY PART CONTAINS THE WHOLE. IT MAY BE TRANSFORMED ALMOST BEYOND RECOGNITION. BUT THE WHOLE IS THERE. THUS, STUDYING ANY OBJECT GIVES US CERTAIN DOMAIN-GENERAL KNOWLEDGE WHICH APPLIES TO EVERY OTHER OBJECT. HOWEVER, BECAUSE ADAM KADMON IS ARRANGED IN A WAY DRAMATICALLY DIFFERENTLY FROM HOW OUR OWN MINDS ARRANGE INFORMATION, THIS KNOWLEDGE IS FIENDISHLY DIFFICULT TO DETECT AND APPLY. YOU MUST FIRST CUT THROUGH THE THICK SKIN OF CONTINGENT APPEARANCES BEFORE REACHING THE HEART OF -”

“No. Cutting. Metaphors,” Sohu told the archangel. She had finally made a good incision and was slowly pulling things out of the fish, sorting them by apparent edibility.

“THE BIBLE IS AN ESPECIALLY CLEAR EXAMPLE OF A SYSTEM WHICH IS ISOMORPHIC TO ADAM KADMON. SO ARE ALL HUMAN LANGUAGES. SO IS THE HUMAN BODY. SO IS THE TAROT. SO ARE THE WORKS OF WILLIAM BLAKE. SO IS THE SKY AND CONSTELLATIONS.”
- Chapter 9: With Art Celestial

As such words define everything as that's the way of knowledge to connect to the highest of their intellect to the secrets of the Universe:

She shut her book with great force. “Did you really say ‘just a word’? You call yourself a kabbalist! Words have power! Words are the only tools we have to connect the highest levels of our intellect to the mysteries of reality! Once we describe something with a word, things happen! It’s been given a life of its own! The angels are on notice, working their secret little works around it, starting reverberations that echo across the entire structure! Words are the vestment of divinity, the innermost garments of Juan!”
- Chapter 5: Never Seek To Tell Thy Love IV

“Okay,” she said. “So a while ago I was thinking – Aaron, you’ll like this – you know how there have been later additions to the Bible, like the end of Mark 16 or the part in John 7-8? And kabbalists have mostly ignored those, first of all out of totally unjustifiedprejudice against the New Testament, and second of all because, well, if they were added in by later readers they can’t metaphorically represent the secret structure of the universe? But I thought – what if the later additions to the Bible metaphorically represent later additions to the secret structure of the universe? So I ran a couple of them through Rubenstein’s Sieve and normalized the results, divided the whole thing by “aleph-tet-nun” as the most appropriate Boston Triplet, and sure enough I got five subfactors, one of which gets the right Maharaj Rank for a potential Name. After like a week of trying I was able to free it from a relatively weak klipah…”
- Chapter 5: Never Seek To Tell Thy Love V

Not to mention that Reality is filled with patterns as such maps and territory are a representation of Adam Kadmon and that of the divine order that brings all this belongs only to God:

In traditional semiotics, reality is represented by symbols which are themselves inert. In kabbalah, reality and symbols alike are representations of Adam Kadmon. The territory is a representation of Adam Kadmon, and the map is a representation of the territory and Adam Kadmon. Differences between the map and the territory may not be mere mistakes, but evolutions of the representational schema that affect both alike. The territory has power over the map, but the map also has power over the territory. This is the kabbalah. The rest is just commentary.

When map and the territory both depend on each other, to assert copyright is a dangerous act. The two cartographers stuck their name on the map to claim dominion, but dominion over the divine order producing both map and territory belongs only to God.
- Chapter 8: Laughing To Scorn Thy Laws and Terror

The structure of the world was based on the divine emanation that follows in the sphere. It also was changed from that divine light into substrates of mathematical structure in the ontological layer of the base Universe.

“UM, ACTUALLY, THOUGH THE FLOW OF UNCONDITIONED LIGHT EMANATING FROM THE UPPER SPHERES IS IN THEORY PERFECTLY MATCHED BY THE FLOW OF CONDITIONED LIGHT REFLECTING FROM THE LOWER, THE CHANNELS ARE NOT SYMMETRICAL, AND BY A SPIRITUAL LAW ISOMORPHIC TO THE SECOND LAW OF THERMODYNAMICS IT IS NOT ALWAYS POSSIBLE TO RETRACE A PARTICULAR COMBINATION OF SPIRITTUAL PATHS WITHOUT SOLVING AN NP-COMPLETE PROBLEM WITH A SIZE APPROXIMATELLY EQUAL TO THE NUMBER OF ATOMS IN THE UNIVERSE TIMES THE NUMBER OF DIVINE NITZUTZOT.”
-Chapter 16: If Perchance With Iron Power He Mighr Advert His Own Despair

“A LONG TIME AGO THERE WAS A WAR IN HEAVEN. ALL OF THE ARCHANGELS FOUGHT THAMIEL, AND THAMIEL WON. I DID NOT LIKE THIS RESULT, SO I ADDED A NEW STRUCTURE AT THE ONTOLOGICAL BASE OF THE UNIVERSE, A LAYER THAT REINTERPRETS ADAM KADMON. I CONVERTED THE WORLD FROM A SUBSTRATE OF DIVINE LIGHT TO A SUBSTRATE OF MATHEMATICS. THIS PREVENTED ANGELS AND DEMONS FROM EXISTING IN ANY MORE THAN A METAPHORICAL WAY. WHEN THE DIVINE LIGHT ENTERED THE UNIVERSE I CHANNELED IT INTO A RESERVOIR SO THAT IT DID NOT INTERFERE WITH THE CLOCKWORK.”

“And then we crashed Apollo 8 into the edge of the world.”


“YOU WENT BEYOND THE EDGE OF THE WORLD AND RECITED THE BIBLE. YOU INJECTED THE CODE FOR THE ORIGINAL SYSTEM VIA A BUFFER OVERFLOW ATTACK. MY SYSTEM WAS CATASTROPHICALLY DESTABILIZED. EVEN DRAWING ON THE RESERVES OF DIVINE LIGHT I HAD COLLECTED OVER MILLENNIA, I WAS ONLY ABLE TO PARTIALLY STABILIZE IT. SCIENCE AND MATHEMATICS STILL WORK, AND THE SUPERNATURAL IS LIMITED TO A FRACTION OF ITS TRUE POWER. BUT IT REQUIRES A CONSTANT INFUSION OF DIVINE LIGHT TO MAINTAIN EVEN THIS LIMITED FUNCTIONALITY.”
-Chapter 16: If Perchance With Iron Power He Mighr Advert His Own Despair

• Twelve Dimensions (Chapter 20: When The Stars Threw Down Their Spears)
• There's an example of the Universe being spatially bound. (Chapter 70: Nor For Itself Hath Any Care II)

TL; DR(Summary):​

This verse is quite confusing in its cosmological structure so I'll just do a Q&A on what has been accepted now.

Q&A:​

Q: Since the previous tearing system relied on cardinality on jumping levels of infinity as layers into Outerversal and High Outerversal. Would that mean that this verse in its physical structure gets downgraded to High 1-B+?

A: No, not really. Reading off most of the interludes was quite unique in its view of describing most philosophical view of the structure of the Unsong verse. Throughout the story, Malkuth, the physical Universe was described to be spatiality bounded with the energy of Tiferet as these Sefirot are not bounded by space-time. Meaning the levels of infinity would only apply to the physical level of existence since the higher spheres are without time and don't occupy space. At first, the verse looked like it hinges on just being High 1-B+ except for God but it was clear that this only applied to the composition of ontology of the default existence as shown when Uriel was changing the physical Universe to be comprised of Math rather than being connected through the divine energy that circumvents the Tree of Life.

Q: How do we scale the Tree of Life and how would we incorporate the logic of the Four Worlds?

A: The Tree of Life is quite an interesting structure. We know that this is essentially the vessel to which God can enemante his energy without destroying it just by occupying space since he's aspatial and atemproal nothing can approach God without being directly linked in the highest sphere and Adam Kadmon from which the Universe(Totality) is based from. Now the highest world called Atziluth which is the world purely composed of the direct shape of Adam Kadmon with God manifesting his divine energy into these local sphere with the highest being a representation of the Unknowable, the Kether which is the ineffable crown and the will of the Creator being the unconclead union of nothingness/perfection of God. It also sustains the other two highest spheres alongside it: Binah and Chokmah being representative of the “Supernal Triad” of the unconcealed veils of the Unknowable: Ain(Kether/Crown), Ain Soph(Chokmah/Wisdom), and Ain Soph Aur(Binah/Intellect). These three spheres are not bound by space or time and are the direct expression of God’s limitless light with God being the ground of all logical necessity. So these structures are at the very least 1-A(being beyond space, time, and dimensions) or High 1-A+(This may be reserved for the Kether only being the ineffable crown and the absolute will of the Unknowbale).

Q: Should God be Outerversal or Boundless, if the latter then what information should we use in the replacement of the old?

A: Certainly Boundless since God was described as having all the qualities of 0:

• God is pure ontology in conjunction with existence as a whole.
• God was described as the ground of being.
• God is logically necessary.
• God was described as divinely simple.
• God was described as the perfect nothing without duality, division, and differentiation.
• God was described as perfect that can only be reflected through contraction since Creation cannot take even the smallest of his power or name.
• God in his purest was apophatic.
• Exists at and outside all hierarchies since no logic bounds him in comparison to others.
• It is said to be pure actuality.
• Purely ineffable.

So, is it really a question?

Changing God “Ein Sof | Atzmus”​

The profile is horrible for distinguishing between these two keys. First off, Ein Sof is one of many names of God and only is used through a handful of kabbalistic metaphors. Ein Sof being both God prior and after contraction: Unknowable(before) and Ain Soph(After). Its just naturally “God” as both perfection prior to and after the creation of the Universe.

This brings us to “Atzmus” It has been directly mentioned once and a few times through indirect statements being the “essence” of pure divinity. The whole notion of it is absence of thoughts and name should disqualify it even having a key with a name for it. However, Atzmus is not “above” God, it is God just when he was “pure nothing.” The same interlude that mentions God, Nothingness, and Atzmus directly clarifies why God was perfect but in a way limited without being that perfect essence he was when all was pure nothing. The example was metaphorical about the notion of binary digits and duality which several story mentioned God being beyond all dualities and hierarchy while being “wholly one” in itself. This was used as the basis of the example of why God should be a binary digit: 1 but that's precisely only because God was “perfectly imperfect” after contraction. Atzmus was the state of no consciousness and the state of divinity as pure nothing which is why it wasn't described as binary opposites.

Several examples of character throughout fiction follow this logic. For example, the Divine Creator from Marvel Comics is beyond existence and non-existence by virtue of encompassing both everything and nothing while being described as pure nothing beyond those two opposites.

God from Seekers into the Mystery was described as a primordial oneness and his essence was a pure primal ocean of nothing yet stands above the duality of everything(Maya) and nothing(Primal Ocean) at once.

The two new keys will be renamed. However, I would like it to be a vote between three proposals:

Proposal 1: Bound | Unbound
Proposal 2: Partial Divinity | Full Divinity
Proposal 3: Contraction | Essence

Have fun reading!

 

[Eseseso]

I'm not an expert on the verse or on this type of stuff but this seems ok.

 

[Antvasima]

@Ultima_Reality @DontTalkDT @Executor_N0 @Agnaa @Elizhaa @Qawsedf234 @Planck69 @Ovy7 @Rakih_Elyan @IdiosyncraticLawyer @RatherClueless @GrathOfLux

Your help would be very appreciated here.

 

[Hirotoswnn1x]

Look seem fine. I think God 0 and High 1-A+ for Explicit Name ?

 

[VeryGoofyToddler2]

Look seem fine. I think God 0 and High 1-A+ for Explicit Name ?

Explicit Name just falls under the lesser section.

 

[Hirotoswnn1x]

Explicit Name just falls under the lesser section.

Metatron still maintaining the High1-A ?

 

[VeryGoofyToddler2]

Metatron still maintaining the High1-A ?

Nah, everything that was High 1-A gets downgraded to 1-A.

 

[TokiNoOuja]

So basicly Unsong Cosmology is just single Universe but layered into 12 spatial dimensions or something?

 

[VeryGoofyToddler2]

So basicly Unsong Cosmology is just single Universe but layered into 12 spatial dimensions or something?

Perhaps, it is just a Universe but I was more in line with calling the “Universe” the totality of material creation. However, the 12 dimension thing was just when they name-drop dimensions, not that is the limit of the verse.

 

[the_doctor]

Bump

 

[Antvasima]

@DarkDragonMedeus @Mr. Bambu @Just_a_Random_Butler @Agnaa @Celestial_Pegasus @Wokistan @Ultima_Reality @Elizhaa @Qawsedf234 @ByAsura @Sir_Ovens @Damage3245 @Starter_Pack @Abstractions @Colonel_Krukov @SamanPatou @GyroNutz @Firestorm808 @Maverick_Zero_X @Crabwhale @GrathOfLux @Dereck03 @Planck69 @LephyrTheRevanchist

Are any of you willing and able to help out with this high-tier revision please?

 

[Ultima_Reality]

Hi, this thread will be going over Unsong because the tiers need to be updated based on the current situation.

God:​

God is pretty reflective of the Kabbalah depiction of God and in essence monotheism in general. As such he created the Heaven and the Earth(Unsong: Prologue) as well as creating man and everything is his very own image as his divine energy structuring all of reality(Unsong: Chapter 1 - Dark Satanic Mills) To God nothing is a coincidence(Unsong: Chapter 1 - Dark Satanic Mills) and his name is transcendent with it being very long.(Unsong: Chapter 2 - Arise to Spiritual Strife)

Spoiler: Ontology

God is not some person on the literal sense but a force in a higher level than those on the grounded level.

As such God, the Devil, Angels, Demons, and all sort are on a metaphysical level. Forces rather than actual beings.

God being One and also name is One:

The explicit name of God also his true name(Shem haMephorash) gives wielder the power over all of Creation. (Important in the Creation portion about the importance of words and names):

God being Cantor conception of the absolute infinite: Divinity. One that supersedes all natural and ordinal numbers as well as any finite, transfinite, and infinite levels of infinity as it is the single complete unity of all numbers and levels.


God is both immaterial and ineffable.

God is without parts in Creation but Creation relies on him or else things would not exist nor make sense. The Divinity being the ontological ground which its attribute brings about life.

God is too powerful to be conceptualized since even his shortest name is too big to fit and any amount of his divine energy could destroy the Universe. The only way he can interact is through the divine energy of the Sefirot:


God being purely ontological when compared to the world:


God is perfect can exist as just himself as ultimate divinity. To create the world, he decided to bring about duality, division, and all forms of dichotomy since the Universe requires Evil as it is imperfect, unlike God. God at in its primal state(Perfection) is just pure Nothing without division or differentiation.

Alll hierarchies end in God whom also exists above all things:

Divinity had existed before Time had existed when Angels would gloss over the incomprehensible nature of God who was everywhere when everything hadn't yet existed.

God’s divine energy used by Uriel could “peel” apart Space.

God is divinely simple:

God is everywhere due to omnipresence therefore he can not be summoned.

God is also logically necessary:

Like all things God itself has many names alongside an inner essence like that of humans and their divine spark(neshamah) as opposed to a normal soul(ruach). This is indirectly referencing that God also has a sort of “deeper” form that also cannot be named this is indirectly referencing the “essence” of divinity which to God is the Atzmus:

When Ana was using an example of digital binary, she used God after contracting himself from his perfection while staying perfect to describe the world as being the essence of his perfection. That the contrast to God’s binary digit as “God is One(1)” would be the binary digit of 0: Nothingness(What God was before contraction). If you remove the need of duality, references, and binary digits with the absence of thought you get only perfect essence of Divinity or the complete absence of anything other than itself: Atzmus.

Spoiler: Emanation/Sefirot/Klipot

The world runs in the structure of Adam Kadmon(Epilouge) and the divine energy that emanated down from God. As such each Sephirah represent a divine attribute of God using Adam Kadmon as the presence point for the the Four Worlds:








The first three highest Sephirot are connected to each other in the same vein that others “trinity” are connected. This sort of Supernal Triad originates the transcendent and ineffable essence of God:

As such Tiferet is the center sefirot of the tree reflecting whatever it sees since its connected to all the sefirot in the Tree of Life:


As such the higher worlds cannot be reached by humans, if it were to then they would pass by like shadows:


The Kilpot are shells that covered the divine light from the Tree of Life.

The right Sefirots in the Tree of Life are representative of God’s mercy as opposed to the left side representing his need of justice with the middle being balance/union between the two.




The higher worlds are not bound within space-time. The world once being emanated with divine energy was changed into forms of mathematics:

The higher worlds are not made of matter but various forms of subtle structures from what empowers the material world:

Creation:​

Creation is created(Unsong: Chapter 5 - Never Seek To Tell Thy Love, Part III) by God which its history began with the Big Bang when the Universe cooled down from symmetry(God is perfectly symmetrical before any contraction) broke into the laws of physics.(Unsong: Interlude ב - The Code of the World) The world itself shaped through a perspective that every part is of the whole which was said to be Adam Kadmon, primordial father:

Spoiler: Structure of Reality

Adam Kadmon is the blueprint for both man and the Universe itself which each things representing a facet of Adam and each part contains the whole.


As such words define everything as that's the way of knowledge to connect to the highest of their intellect to the secrets of the Universe:


Not to mention that Reality is filled with patterns as such maps and territory are a representation of Adam Kadmon and that of the divine order that brings all this belongs only to God:

The structure of the world was based on the divine emanation that follows in the sphere. It also was changed from that divine light into substrates of mathematical structure in the ontological layer of the base Universe.

• Twelve Dimensions (Chapter 20: When The Stars Threw Down Their Spears)
• There's an example of the Universe being spatially bound. (Chapter 70: Nor For Itself Hath Any Care II)

TL; DR(Summary):​

This verse is quite confusing in its cosmological structure so I'll just do a Q&A on what has been accepted now.

Q&A:​

Changing God “Ein Sof | Atzmus”​

The profile is horrible for distinguishing between these two keys. First off, Ein Sof is one of many names of God and only is used through a handful of kabbalistic metaphors. Ein Sof being both God prior and after contraction: Unknowable(before) and Ain Soph(After). Its just naturally “God” as both perfection prior to and after the creation of the Universe.

This brings us to “Atzmus” It has been directly mentioned once and a few times through indirect statements being the “essence” of pure divinity. The whole notion of it is absence of thoughts and name should disqualify it even having a key with a name for it. However, Atzmus is not “above” God, it is God just when he was “pure nothing.” The same interlude that mentions God, Nothingness, and Atzmus directly clarifies why God was perfect but in a way limited without being that perfect essence he was when all was pure nothing. The example was metaphorical about the notion of binary digits and duality which several story mentioned God being beyond all dualities and hierarchy while being “wholly one” in itself. This was used as the basis of the example of why God should be a binary digit: 1 but that's precisely only because God was “perfectly imperfect” after contraction. Atzmus was the state of no consciousness and the state of divinity as pure nothing which is why it wasn't described as binary opposites.

Several examples of character throughout fiction follow this logic. For example, the Divine Creator from Marvel Comics is beyond existence and non-existence by virtue of encompassing both everything and nothing while being described as pure nothing beyond those two opposites.

God from Seekers into the Mystery was described as a primordial oneness and his essence was a pure primal ocean of nothing yet stands above the duality of everything(Maya) and nothing(Primal Ocean) at once.

The two new keys will be renamed. However, I would like it to be a vote between three proposals:

Proposal 1: Bound | Unbound
Proposal 2: Partial Divinity | Full Divinity
Proposal 3: Contraction | Essence

Have fun reading!

Reading the rewritten version that got published recently (Yeah, the webnovel is ostensibly outdated now). Will give my two cents here when I finish that.

 

[Antvasima]

Thank you greatly for helping out.

 

[Agnaa]

@DarkDragonMedeus @Mr. Bambu @Just_a_Random_Butler @Agnaa @Celestial_Pegasus @Wokistan @Ultima_Reality @Elizhaa @Qawsedf234 @ByAsura @Sir_Ovens @Damage3245 @Starter_Pack @Abstractions @Colonel_Krukov @SamanPatou @GyroNutz @Firestorm808 @Maverick_Zero_X @Crabwhale @GrathOfLux @Dereck03 @Planck69 @LephyrTheRevanchist

Are any of you willing and able to help out with this high-tier revision please?

I've removed myself from the knowledgeable members & supporters.

I haven't kept up with the rewrite, and generally aren't interested in interacting with the verse, ever since I learned that the author is a eugenicist actively trying to propagate those ideas to his audience.

Multiple people have contacted me about the thread; I'm saying this publicly in hopes that I won't be contacted about it again.

 

[VeryGoofyToddler2]

I've removed myself from the knowledgeable members & supporters.

I haven't kept up with the rewrite, and generally aren't interested in interacting with the verse, ever since I learned that the author is a eugenicist actively trying to propagate those ideas to his audience.

Multiple people have contacted me about the thread; I'm saying this publicly in hopes that I won't be contacted about it again.

Yeah, you can ignore this thread then. Would of been great to hear from you, but we won't push that.

 

[DarkDragonMedeus]

I think God being Tier 0 looks good; not sure and not exactly an expert on 1-A to High 1-A borders and might appeal to what Ultima may say later. But otherwise, I am leaning towards the downgrades from High 1-A to 1-A for the others make sense.

 

[VeryGoofyToddler2]

I think God being Tier 0 looks good; not sure and not exactly an expert on 1-A to High 1-A borders and might appeal to what Ultima may say later. But otherwise, I am leaning towards the downgrades from High 1-A to 1-A for the others make sense.

Which rename proposal do you prefer? I need Ultima to ascertain whether or not God in his lesser state gets 1-A or High 1-A.

 

[Antvasima]

I've removed myself from the knowledgeable members & supporters.

I haven't kept up with the rewrite, and generally aren't interested in interacting with the verse, ever since I learned that the author is a eugenicist actively trying to propagate those ideas to his audience.

Multiple people have contacted me about the thread; I'm saying this publicly in hopes that I won't be contacted about it again.

The problem is that I have a list of people who are knowledgeable about higher tiers and not a very good memory combined with tend of thousands of tasks every year. I will try to remember, but will most likely fail. My apologies.

 

[VeryGoofyToddler2]

Bump.

 

[Antvasima]

@Ultima_Reality @DontTalkDT @Executor_N0 @Elizhaa @Qawsedf234 @Planck69 @Ovy7 @Rakih_Elyan @IdiosyncraticLawyer @RatherClueless @GrathOfLux

We still greatly need some help here.

 

[VeryGoofyToddler2]

@Ultima_Reality @DontTalkDT @Executor_N0 @Agnaa @Elizhaa @Qawsedf234 @Planck69 @Ovy7 @Rakih_Elyan @IdiosyncraticLawyer @RatherClueless @GrathOfLux

We still greatly need some help here.

You tagged Agnaa who made it clear that he doesn't want anything to do with the verse.

 

[Antvasima]

Oops. I will modify my post accordingly.

 

[Ultima_Reality]

Alright, starting off with this...

Honestly, no, God isn't divided into a "contracted self" and an "unbounded self" that's identical to the Atzmus. The Tree of Life doesn't actually diminish God in any way, it's just a system of emanations of his light, which is the thing that gets "filtered" by means of the Sefirot until it reaches (And becomes) Malkuth. The "God" that's referred to as the binary digit 1 is the undiminished God, because there's no such thing as a diminished version of God at all; if anything the Sefirot themselves are various stages of his diminution. (Which is only to say that God is Existence itself and they are contracted forms of existence. But God doesn't literally squish himself)

In fact you see this pretty clearly in the text itself:

“Leibniz was studying the I Ching, and he noticed that its yin and yang sticks, when arranged in hexagrams, corresponded to a new form of arithmetic, because he was Leibniz and of course he noticed that. So he invented binary numbers and wrote a letter to the Duke of Brunswick saying that he had explained how God could create the universe out of nothing. It goes like this. You’ve got God, who is 1. You’ve got nothingness, which is 0. And that’s all you need to create everything. 1s and 0s arranged in a long enough string.”

“How, exactly?”

“The kabbalistic conception is that God withdrew from Himself to create the world. I, for example, am beautiful and intelligent, but not so physically strong. God is perfectly beautiful and intelligent and strong, so by withdrawing a little bit of His beauty and intelligence, and a lot of His strength, and some other things, we end up with an Ana.”

God is analogized to the binary digit "1" precisely to explain the state he is in above all of the Sefirot. The contraction is represented by the arrangements of 1s and 0s, but those arrangements are precisely not God in any way. No version of God shown or alluded to in the story corresponds to anything in the contractions. Unless you argue God limited himself in some way that's not related to the Sefirot, which is never stated at any point in the book.

So, yeah, I disagree with the thread altogether.

 

[VeryGoofyToddler2]

Alright, starting off with this...

Don't start with that.

Honestly, no, God isn't divided into a "contracted self" and an "unbounded self" that's identical to the Atzmus. The Tree of Life doesn't actually diminish God in any way, it's just a system of emanations of his light, which is the thing that gets "filtered" by means of the Sefirot until it reaches (And becomes) Malkuth. The "God" that's referred to as the binary digit 1 is the undiminished God, because there's no such thing as a diminished version of God at all; if anything the Sefirot themselves are various stages of his diminution. (Which is only to say that God is Existence itself and they are contracted forms of existence. But God doesn't literally squish himself)

No, the Atzmus is part of that unbounded version hence Kabbalah's inspiration of the Unknowable who existed in his perfection before anything else and that perfection was all things alone. Which alone is the description of the Atzmus conception of being the divine essence. As most Kabbalists put it everything and nothing is God and we see that in the ontology section.

This is said when many of the story arc revolves around “how is God perfect but he couldn't get rid of evil.” In which the response was God was perfect and the nothingness that stood alone before anything, but because space is needed for Creation and his divine energy of perfection could not be contained at any level it would have to be held within things that aren't so “perfect” like duality, creation, and all things that aren't God. So he couldn't manifest as self-perfection again since all things aren't perfect as he was. It was explained in the “Ontology” section. Atzmus is the literal “essence” of the Divine when duality hadn't yet existed to define any binary opposite.

So here are the claims for Ultima in this specific section that make absolutely no sense:

He claims:

Honestly, no, God isn't divided into a "contracted self" and an "unbounded self" that's identical to the Atzmus.

Yet is is explained that God had to divide his divinity in order for Creation to come about because his perfection alone existed but nothing else can exist in that state of perfection:

The most famous question in theology is “Why did God create a universe filled with so much that is evil?” The classical answers tend to be kind of weaselly, and center around something like free will or necessary principles or mysterious ways. Something along the lines of “Even though God’s omnipotent, creating a universe without evil just isn’t possible.”

But here we have God buying evil with two silver coins. Buying to me represents an intentional action. Let’s go further – buying represents a sacrifice. Buying is when you sacrifice something dear to you to get something you want even more. Evil isn’t something God couldn’t figure out how to avoid, it’s something He covets.

What did God sacrifice for the sake of evil? Two silver coins. We immediately notice the number “two”. Two is not typically associated with God. God is One. Two is right out. The kabbalists identify the worst demon, the nadir of all demons, as Thamiel, whose name means “duality in God”. Two is dissonance, divorce, division, dilemmas, distance, discrimination, diabolism.

This, then, was God’s sacrifice. In order to create evil, He took up duality.

“Why would God want to create evil? God is pure Good!”

Exactly. The creation of anything at all other than God requires evil. God is perfect. Everything else is imperfect. Imperfection contains evil by definition. Two scoops of evil is the first ingredient in the recipe for creating universes. Finitude is evil. Form is evil. Without evil all you have is God, who, as the kabbalists tell us, is pure Nothing. If you want something, evil is part of the deal.

Now count the number of creatures in the song. God, angel, butcher, ox, water, fire, stick, dog, cat, goat. Ten steps from God to goat. This is the same description of the ten sephirot we’ve found elsewhere, the ten levels by which God’s ineffability connects to the sinful material world without destroying it. This is not a coincidence because nothing is ever a coincidence. Had Gadya isn’t just a silly children’s song about the stages of advancement of the human soul, the appropriate rituals for celebrating Passover in the Temple, the ancient Sumerian pantheon, and the historical conquests of King Tiglath-Pileser III. It’s also a blueprint for the creation of the universe. Just like everything else.

Literally, God is perfect in which nothing but that perfection exists. However, the persistent of wanting something other than itself was imperfect which becomes evil that is contained within that imperfection yet God wholly stands above the duality and distinction but only taking up that notion alongside Thamieul because nothing couldn't have existed otherwise.

In fact you see this pretty clearly in the text itself:

Yeah in another text it also says he is pure sublime nothing yet the analogy of binary just pivots a way of understanding duality not because God is limited to it as seen in several examples where there isn't dual in any form
(at least prior to the creation of everything).

God is analogized to the binary digit "1" precisely to explain the state he is in above all of the Sefirot. The contraction is represented by the arrangements of 1s and 0s, but those arrangements are precisely not God in any way. No version of God shown or alluded to in the story corresponds to anything in the contractions. Unless you argue God limited himself in some way that's not related to the Sefirot, which is never stated at any point in the book.

No, it said “he took up duality as a sacrifice” which the whole binary story also tells us that God is analogous to the idea of being “one” which was the only easy way to explain him as he is now, not before when he was just nothing but perfection

This notion:

“Well, it’s easy to represent nothingness. That’s just the bit ‘0’. God is the opposite of that. Complete fullness. Perfection in every respect. This kind of stuff is beyond space – our modern theories of space take a bunch of bits to specify – but if it helps, imagine God as being space filled with the maximum amount of power and intelligence and goodness and everything else that it can hold, stretching on to infinity.”

Is anwswered within the context of this:

“The kabbalistic conception is that God withdrew from Himself to create the world. I, for example, am beautiful and intelligent, but not so physically strong. God is perfectly beautiful and intelligent and strong, so by withdrawing a little bit of His beauty and intelligence, and a lot of His strength, and some other things, we end up with an Ana.”

The world or pure existence as binary digit 1 is exemplified only after God represent his innate nature after contracting/withdrawing from his own “essence” for that to happen.

The most simplistic notion in Kabbalah is that God withdrew from himself, in name he's not known as “God” up until that contraction so they just use Unknowable or Nothing as a stand-in up until conceptualization which obviously is even answered:

What did God sacrifice for the sake of evil? Two silver coins. We immediately notice the number “two”. Two is not typically associated with God. God is One. Two is right out. The kabbalists identify the worst demon, the nadir of all demons, as Thamiel, whose name means “duality in God”. Two is dissonance, divorce, division, dilemmas, distance, discrimination, diabolism

So, obviously, he took up a duality in a way to put himself in an understanding that “God is One” within the framework of existence only because existence needed to be defined as such, this doesn't deter what “it” originally was.

So, yeah, I disagree with the thread altogether.

Ok.

 

[Ultima_Reality]

Yet is is explained that God had to divide his divinity in order for Creation to come about because his perfection alone existed but nothing else can exist in that state of perfection:

This "division" is not anything other than the process of emanations constitutive of the Sefirot. None of what you've showed suggests otherwise.

Is anwswered within the context of this:

The Tzimtzum in Unsong is not anything prior to the Sefirot themselves. When Anna speaks of God "subtracing" his own attributes to produce this or that being, she is speaking of the entire descent of the divine light in those ten stages as one continuous thing. None of this is actually referring to any self-limitation on God's part that took place prior to the Sefirot forming and so a fortiori "God" as used in the story exclusively refers to the divine essence lying above the tree of life. In fact, one of the very scans you posted suggests as much: "Ten steps from God to goat." They're treating the Sefirot as being the only contraction that takes place in order for things beside God to exist, so the idea that God has a restricted self that is still transcendent over the Sefirot is nonsensical.

The only thing that would seem to support your interpretation is the fact that the twist at the end of the novel is that the characters are all mistaken about the scope of God's creation, and that there are actually a bunch of other universes outside their Tree of Life (Some of which are perfectly good worlds), all embedded in a "garden" God created. So if God needs to contract himself for anything else to exist, yet there are places before, besides and additional to the Tree of Life, then on that vein it'd result in contractions taking place prior to the Sefirot, yeah. But "God" as used all throughout the novel ultimately still refers to the God who created and presides over the garden of universes, so even then, there is no "restricted" form of God there, either, in which case my point still stands, the can is just kicked up a layer.

 

[VeryGoofyToddler2]

This "division" is not anything other than the process of emanations contained in the Sefirot itself.

Nice headcanon. However, the emanation processed only happened because the world couldn't contain any power of God, so his light “had” to be filtered. It was that he created the world before the Sefirot because he failed leading to the need to filter his light.

This is evident since the story predicates that God couldn't have used any of himself in the contraction itself, he needed divisions, duality, and any sort of dusk to bear his component or else they shatter apart. This is only because of the existence of the Sefirot to help with that issue. You're missing this key context.

The Tzimtzum in Unsong is not anything before the Sefirot themselves. When Anna speaks of God "subtracing" his attributes to produce this or that being, she is speaking of the entire descent of the divine light in those ten stages as one continuous thing. None of this is actually referring to any self-limitation on God's part that took place prior to the Sefirot forming and so a fortiori "God" as used in the story exclusively refers to the divine essence lying above the tree of life. In fact, one of the very scans you posted suggests as much: "Ten steps from God to goat." They're treating the Sefirot as being the only contraction that takes place in order for things beside God to exist, so the idea that God has a restricted self that is still transcendent over the Sefirot is nonsensical.

The Sefirots are connected to God in per dividing up his energy. In purely his position without the need of it was explained as transcendent and ontological. Your example literally doesn't deter anything you're basing off that sefirtos are required in order to exist next to God, yet nothing ever said that. Even so much as to tell God the ground isn't explained any better by anything as in all “parts” are in God in that all parts and hierarchies also end in God in his ineffability thus no amount of energy could extrapolate God in his indivisble self only to barely come up with conception using names to define him with existence, in the end, none of that affects him. The later stories highlight this though I wouldn't want to let it go that far.

The only thing that would seem to support your interpretation is the fact that the twist at the end of the novel is that the characters are all mistaken about the scope of God's creation, and that there are actually a bunch of other universes outside their Tree of Life (Some of which are perfectly good worlds), all embedded in a "garden" God created. So if God needs to contract himself for anything else to exist, yet there are places before, besides and additional to the Tree of Life, then on that vein it'd result in contractions taking place prior to the Sefirot, yeah. But "God" as used all throughout the novel ultimately still refers to the God who created and presides over the garden of universes, so even then, there is no "restricted" form of God there, either, in which case my point still stands, the can is just kicked up a layer.

You can't just pick and choose what you want because “the entire novel hinges on it” yet one example that destroys that conviction of yours is ultimately unusable even when the context makes sense so your wodering over that is purely spectualtory on your behalf.

Not to mention your take Anna's words as literal about the theories of binary digits which wasn't a kabbalistic view but metaphor to answer can God and nothing be a simple bit, whom everyone agreed but her and she started her rants about it. Her theory was proven false in the end as well.

So I will ignore this ridiculous point of yours. This is just you cherry-picking out the information though the second response should answer your stipulation about God in where exactly his transcendence fall. The next argument you bring up, I’ll just highlight where and when the sefirot were required and that God is the ontological ground beyond those. Although, it was made clear throughout the story, you filtering out the information that goes against you is really just low.

 

[Antvasima]

So which new tiering are you suggesting here, Goofy?

 

[DarkDragonMedeus]

Nah, everything that was High 1-A gets downgraded to 1-A.

It also looks like Ultima mainly focused on the Tier 0 proposals. But what about the others being downgraded to just 1-A?

 

[VeryGoofyToddler2]

So which new tiering are you suggesting here, Goofy?

Yeah, Ultima is focused on the 0 portion primarily. Though, usually I make him either concede in Discord and/or he never appears again. So we're still in the debate phase though I'm not at all bothered by his points.

The rest is 1-A. So God would have a 1-A key for his lesser state and 0 for his higher state. The three highest sefirot are 1-A as well and the entire Tree of Life is 1-A as well.

 

[VeryGoofyToddler2]

It also looks like Ultima mainly focused on the Tier 0 proposals. But what about the others being downgraded to just 1-A?

The previous tiering system used cardinality in that each level of existence is an infinity of levels above the previous. Though, as of now, we only use that as a quantitive jump. “Hierarchy” is way too vague here thus there's nothing to suggest 1-A+ with nothing outside the higher spheres having BDE statements. So God in his lesser state is 1-A alongside the Tree of Life and the three highest sefirot.

 

[Udlmaster]

Yeah, Ultima is focused on the 0 portion primarily.

Perhaps then, it would be wise to make a thread discussing those parts first and then move onto the higher tiers? That way the revision isn't stonewalled by Ultima being busy.

 

[VeryGoofyToddler2]

Perhaps then, it would be wise to make a thread discussing those parts first and then move onto the higher tiers? That way the revision isn't stonewalled by Ultima being busy.

It’s on him to appear. He said because he doesn't agree with the 0 as of now and due to that he disagrees with the thread in general though, I'm getting the implication he didn't read all of it.

Regardless, I could make a post detailing out all the incoherency he said due to missing context as I said before but I enjoy dismantling his points one by one this way. I can wait, I'm patient (usually). He also concedes to me on Discord or just doesn't appear and says the thread can go if I make it sharp and neat.

 

[Qawsedf234]

We still greatly need some help here.

I don't mind commenting, but I need to know what the OP is trying to change about the tiering. Currently, the God of Unsong is already rated very high at: "High 1-A | 0". I don't know if they're trying to make it just "0" or "1-A | 0" or "High 1-C | 0". Could you clarify in the OP or in a comment what your suggestion is @VeryGoofyToddler2 ?

 

[VeryGoofyToddler2]

I don't mind commenting, but I need to know what the OP is trying to change about the tiering. Currently, the God of Unsong is already rated very high at: "High 1-A | 0". I don't know if they're trying to make it just "0" or "1-A | 0" or "High 1-C | 0". Could you clarify in the OP or in a comment what your suggestion is @VeryGoofyToddler2 ?

1-A | 0

 

[Qawsedf234]

I main, based purely on what I see, we already accepted Tier 0 so that's the hard part out of the way. 1-A seems to be justified, so that's fine.

 

[Averroes1]

The very first pages of the story refer to the real name of God as capturing the true essence of God, so your demarcation between "God-as-named" and his essence as something else from that here isn't something the story admits. As for Atzmus he's really not anything more than God himself, denoted by absolute simplicity–an attribute described as being represented by the digit '1', which likewise is the "contracted" God here as well, so Atzmus isn't really some hidden part of God, he is God himself, fully.

So yeah, I agree with Ultima

 

[VeryGoofyToddler2]

The very first pages of the story refer to the real name of God as capturing the true essence of God, so your demarcation between "God-as-named" and his essence as something else from that there isn't something the story admits. As for Atzmus he's really not anything more than God himself, denoted by absolute simplicity–an attribute described as being represented by the digit '1', which likewise is the "contracted" God here as well, so Atzmus isn't really some hidden part of God, he is God himself, fully.

Ultima distincly places Atzmus as not “God.” The page itself is self-contradictory as capturing “God’s full essence” by name doesn't make them God nor does it make them fully omnipotent. This is just using God’s explicit name to control Creation which is distinct from God, himself. Name of “God” throughout every story arc is something that people sprout about all the time and could randomly say the name despite God true name not being expressable by language, so you can't really just distinguish saying God’s explicit name as describing the very nature of God, its all poetic device.

 

[VeryGoofyToddler2]

Bump.

 

[Antvasima]

Which staff members have accepted what here?

 

[VeryGoofyToddler2]

Which staff members have accepted what here?

Qaws seems to be fine with 1-A | 0. I have no idea about DarkDragon but assuming what he meant then he's more in agreement side. Ultima disagrees.