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Aleph

One is the Loneliest Number. Or, How I Learned to Love Set Theory and Create the Universe



A question that has plagued theologians, philosophers of all stripes, mystics, warlocks, witches, and the unbodied sprits of the Dead for millenia has been - why is there something, rather than nothing? And, since it really does appear that there is something, how did that come about? Why is there one instead of none? (While still perplexing, the notion of why there seems to be many rather than just one, seems at face value less of an ontological leap).

It is hard to get more basic than One. It sort of just hangs out there, by itself. Being one and not anything else. Unique, total, sole, only, singular, first, alone. But where did it come from? From whence did it arise? One, by its nature seems pretty contiguous - unbroken. It is.

The point of contention seems to revolve around whether things (be they One or Legion), or that from which they are derived, have always just been... eternally out there (here?) - Ex nihilo nihil fit (nothing comes from nothing), or if things just sort of spontaneously (or intentionally) arose. Creatio ex Nihilo (creation from nothing).

In Hebrew the phrasing of the latter is: ISh MAIN יש מאינ (411), Something from Nothing. Or, to be rather more specific, Something from Ain.

AIN (61), to the Kabbalists is the ultimate and truly unknowable unknowableness that underlies reality. Not the Creator God who makes Mankind in its image, not the jealous IHVH of of the 12 tribes, not even the infinite and all-powerful God of Medieval monotheism - AIN is simply without. It is not anything, It is not nothing, It is not the negation of anything or nothing. To even call it AIN, nothing, without, is to imbue it with a distinction, no matter how abstract or amorphous, that cannot really be applied to it - AIN, in a nutshell - ain't.

One would be tempted to treat this AIN as cognate with a prima materia from which all is formed, ever extant even if not actually material in the sense we are used to, or even Idealized like Plato's eternal forms. But the AIN beingnotbeing AIN just is not that. So in an attempt to move beyond that , the Kabbalists came up with AIN SVP (207), "Without Limit". Infinity. Ain Soph, being in all things perfect without lack, has all properties, including that of existing. This is God, capital OG. Omnipotent, Omnipotent and Omnipresent. And also - contiguous and commensuarate with AIN.

"But wait," says the Kabbalist, running his fingers through his greying beard. "God cannot be the Prime Material!" (Here is where I can't help but think to myself... you just said omnipotent...). "The matter of this world, while not evil in and of itself, is finite. It lacks. Things die and pass away. It has beginning and end. God is perfect and uncorrupted, singuar."

This is actually a pretty good point if you are conceiving of God this way. So there developed in several schools of Kabbalah the theory of Emanations, of the Tzimtzum, and the Ain Soph Aur, the Partzufim. The Four Worlds (sometimes five) and the Sephiroth, the 32 Paths of Wisdom, the Shekinah. As that which is God, brings forth that which is Created. Kabbalistic cosmogony can be said to be a form of Pantheism: all that is is God, or at a minimum Panentheism, which posits that God is distinct from the Universe, but pervades and sustains it.

There is a Kabbalistic notion that it is only from the point of view of our world that creation is ISh MAIN, Something from Nothing. From the point of view of the divine, the process is AIN MISh, Nothing from Something - that it is only through the outflow (ShPAa 450) of the effluence of the Divine that creation is sustained at all...

Here at Baphometrics.com, we like to think of it as sort of a combination of the two, not really believing in an all powerful God separate from ourselves, yet still comprising the totality of the Universe. That somewhere between AIN and here, there is a point. A dimensionless spot that lies at the center of it all. It is indeed our contention that this point that lies between, is in fact, the only thing there is. HThHVVTh (822), The Becoming of the Universe. The one Emanation, the All, without Time and without Place. The One. The Aleph.

In Set Theory there is a series of axioms - presuppositions that always are the case - that there exists a Set that has no elements, an Empty Set "{ }", that that Set is unique and singular, and that all sets contain the Empty Set. Which is basically the definition given above of AIN SVP: it exists, contains Nothing, and is Omnipresent.

To look at it in a slightly different way. Picture if you will, nothing:         

Perhaps it would be easier to conceptualize using the Arabic zero: 0, or more commonly shown in mathspeak: Ø.

Think of this asasnot AIN. Blank. Empty. Everywhere. Nowhere. No Thing. Without.

Now to describe this absence, one must resort to isolating it, making it a concept - putting it brackets so you can point at it and say authoritatively, "There. There is Nothing." As { } or {Ø}. This is the Empty Set. Think of this as a representation of AIN SVP, for another translation of the term would be "The Limit of AIN" (SVP, 146, has the meaning of end, or limit, or ultimateness - a reasonable stand in for our brackets). This is No Thing contained, so you can talk about it. Even if only to point out its infinitude.

But then a funny thing happened on the way to infinite regress... Remember, ALL Sets contain the Empty Set. Always. Even the Empty Set itself. Et Voila! Poof! Abracadabra! You have {{Ø}}!

... And here is where something happens.

There is a concept, basic to all Maths (and really of perception itself), of Cardinality. Cardinality is the notion of quantity. The "how-many-ness" of that which is being counted. In Set Theory it refers to the number of elements, the contents if you will, in a given Set. Now an Empty Set {Ø} has a Cardinality of zero. There are no elements in the Empty Set (being empty and all that). But, by virtue of being a Set, by definition, it has to contain the Empty Set. This, {{Ø}}, is called "The Set of Empty Sets". And it has a Cardinality of One. The Set of Empty Sets contains something, irregardless that that something is empty. Houston, we have Cardinality. ISh MAIN. Something from Nothing.

Aleph.

In the Zohar it is said that when the Most Concealed of All that is Concealed desired to begin creation of the Universe it made first, a single point. A spark of impenetrable darkness from which All is comprised. One.

Spelled in full Aleph ALP is 111. Which is the Baphometric value of the Sephirah Malkuth. Thus on the Baphometric Tree, appropriately, Aleph runs from Malkuth to Yesod. The Fool stepping forth. The First path. The One.