From the Anatomy Manual of God
01. Superfluous God
In the visions of Ezekiel, we meet horrible creatures from the Bible. On the one hand, it describes a cherubim that has 4 faces, that is, looking at the four sides of the world, and these faces are that of a man, a lion, a buffalo, and an eagle. Out of his 4 wings, the cherubim covers his body with two, so that God does not see him, and flies with two. If the cherubim is a so-called ‘biological’ chimera, the Ophanim is someone/something on a completely different level. Ohanim is a set of interlocking wheels covered with tens of thousands of eyes, which also have wheels inside, also covered with eyes, and which fly.
They say that this wheel is the embodiment of the Lord’s omnipresence. If you look deeper, this omnipresence is like the terror of a police state — it’s everywhere, you’re never alone.
Imagine how difficult everyday life can be when you know that God’s million eyes are watching you. Imagine that you cannot avoid God even for a second. There is nothing but Him.
Such total ‘pressure’ is the reality of God, in which part of humanity has always lived, perhaps now it has been replaced by the ubiquity of cameras.
One of my favorite books in the Old Testament is the Book of Job. (By the way, Borges called it the main book of humanity, and Jung dedicated the entire text to it under the name “Answer to Job” )
In this book, Job, who will face many sufferings unfairly just because God wants to test him, this God finally appears and tells him things that not all people can bear.
I will ask you and you will answer — says God — where were you when I founded the earth? Explain to me if you understand. Have you seen the gates of death and the gates of darkness opened before you? Have you experienced the length and breadth of the earth? Tell me if you know all this? If you know the laws of heaven or if you will establish its rule on earth? If you call the lightning to come and tell you: I am here!
Of course, Job does not know such things. He has only great faith and a small, mortal body. Here it is clearly seen how a force or a concept or an event beyond our understanding can sweep us away, leaving no room for the individual.
I have often experienced something similar in psychedelic trip. I had such a trip where the gods ate my body. Such rapprochement is difficult to convey in words.
02. Less God
In Isaac Luria’s medieval Kabbalah, the countdown begins from this state. But not towards additional expansion, but backwards.
Imagine a circle that is all that exists, and that circle is filled with God. In order for something that is not God to appear, it is necessary for God to “squat” a little. Thus begins the process called Tzimtzum, when God begins to pour into himself in and slowly move away from the edges of the circle. God poured himself into himself and freed the spaces where life arose. But the problem is that if in the first chapter we discussed the divine terrible eyes and Yahweh’s here-presence, in Kabbalah it turns out that we have appeared where there is no God.
These are the places from which God has gone.
As a child, during the war and my refugee period in Poti, I often looked at the port, cranes, ships, the monument of Nikoladze wet from the rain, the streets where people do not meet you, and I had a feeling of absolute abandonment. Many years later, when I got acquainted with Luria’s Kabbalah — I had native feelings, because I know what it means to live where God has already left.
The mystical Kabbalistic cosmogony is based on a primordial tragedy, an error that occurred. There is a chapter in Chewing Dawns called TzimTzum, and the error of divine error in this novel is largely dictated by the treatises of Luria, Nathan of Ghaza, and Abulafia, which no critic or reviewer has yet noticed.
It’s strange, but the alarm and sadness caused by the loss of God and his absence here in one and the same gives the vision of existentialism. Sartre also said that in a situation where we do not have a guide, a father and a supervisor, where the world causes anguish and anxiety, because it has not so much under our control as we have thought for millennia, we are left only to “act without hope”.
This action-without-hope is the new art I am trying to master in my daily life and in my writing.
03. God, but false
And finally, the highest level of alarm — the doctrines combining the above two approaches are known as Gnosticism.
Judge for yourself: if in the first case we have “too much” God, similar to the despots of the ancient Eastern kingdoms, and in the second case we have “less” God or we don’t have it at all, in the case of Gnosticism, our world was created by a false god, Yaldabaof, the same demiurge. For Gnosticism, this world is a prison where we have been converted by a false god. The real god is somewhere out there, aeons beyond, and our goal is to escape the prison or destroy that prison. It is very similar to the world of “Matrix”.
It is even more interesting that in the first centuries of Christianity, Gnosticism was quite popular, and in the battle between thousands of currents and sects, if Gnosticism, not the Christianity we know, won, the world would be completely different, but how? no one knows.
All these and many other concepts dealing with the geometry of God are answers to eternal questions that have grown out of our unconscious. Our species seems to have “implanted” the concept of God. We have believed in these eternal and infinite powers far longer in history than we have not. Therefore, for the writer, this marginal experience, this approach to the spiritual is very important.
Along with writing in the syntax of programming languages and cut-up techniques, I delve deep into ancient treatises and texts to find forgotten metaphors and what Pseudo-Dionysius called the sacred, radiant darkness.
- Please note that English is not my native language, in matter of fact, it’s my 5th language.
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