Polytheism and Nonduality: Integral Kabbalah and the Repersonalization of God
$10 at the door (no advance sales)
at Integral New York, at the One Spirit Learning Alliance
330 West 38th Street
New York NY
It is a strange fact that religious traditions which most embrace nonduality at the same time embrace polytheism — in Hinduism, for example — or in the case of Judaism, what might be called theological polymorphism. Thought one might expect a radically iconoclastic emphasis on nothingness, in fact one finds in these traditions and integral return to theological forms, from Ramakrishna to the Zohar. Anticipating the notion of holarchy by six hundred years, classical theosophical Kabbalah posits a kosmos in which the higher contains the lower, the lower contains the higher, and “lower” forms of religious expression are seen as masks of the nondual. In this discussion, we will explore how the Kabbalah understands these ideas and how they offer a non-triumphalist account of the evolution of consciousness within a Jewish framework.
