Open Secret: Postmessianic Messianism and the Mystical Revision of Menaḥem Mendel Schneerson

The essence, accordingly, is neither light nor dark because it is both light and dark, albeit not identically or differently, indeed beyond the identity of identity and difference.

From this assumption there follows the further one that both genders are circumscribed in a closed circle of nondifferentiation—to be contrasted with an open circle of indifference—much like the serpent eating its tail, according to the archaic mythological image. A critical and influential formulation of this ideal is the zoharic description of th

Marshall, Paul. Mystical Encounters with the Natural World: Experiences and Explanations. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005.

logically it may have) an indifference that transcends difference indifferently, but rather a coincidence whereby one of the opposing terms is entwined in the other.206 When kabbalists speak of a reality where there is no left, they mean that everything is right, and not that there is neither left nor right.207

to contemplate what is beyond duality, we must ponder the suspension of all opposition, even the opposition of opposites that have been rendered (non) identical in their opposition.

The one who acquires this gnosis perceives that the world is suffused with divine reality, that there is, paraphrasing the zoharic locution favored by many Ḥasidic masters, no place devoid of the divine.

Only when one sees from the vantage point of this double extinction—the nothing becoming something that is nothing—does one comprehend the far-reaching monopsychic (as opposed to the conventional monotheistic) meaning of the verse from Deuteronomy proclaiming that apart from God there is no other, that is, appearances notwithstanding, there appears

we can say that Ḥabad cosmology espouses an apophatic panentheism: the One is affirmed in everything to the extent that everything is negated in relation to the One, but the One is negated in relation to everything to the extent that everything is affirmed in the One.

the most secretive of secrets is the open secret, the secret that is so fully disclosed that it appears not to be a secret.