Politics and Spirituality | Circle and Line

Taking a step back to reframe the current psychodynamic moment.

At the end of a dizzying month — God help us if 2026 continues at this pace — I invite you to take a step back with me for a moment. Not to let go of this historical moment (I wrote about the Alex Pretti murder here), but to situate it into an ethical, psychological, perhaps even spiritual context.

As readers know, this newsletter is largely about the intersections of politics and spirituality: the ways in which our political crises reflect psychological, religious, and spiritual qualities of the human mind; the ways in which those crises impact us as human beings; and ways in which various contemplative technologies enable us to survive them. Of course, Both/And is also about my personal experience pendulating from political engagement/journalism/law/activism to religion/Judaism/spirituality/ scholarship/psychedelics.

There are different metaphors for this dynamic: intersection, balance, overlap, influence. Different images seem more apt at different times, but for the last year, it has felt mostly like oscillation. I am enmeshed in the news, then I am resting in awareness; I am agitated about the times in which we live, then I am settling back into the timeless. Or, more prosaically, I feel a sense of urgency to write about the slide into tyranny, but then I work on my next book or psychedelics for awhile, and it feels somehow more authentic, more durable, even more real. Back and forth.

So it has gone, for me, for the last thirty years.

Since I know some of you (especially paying subscibers — thank you!) also live in this both/and, I thought that it might be helpful to validate it in a particular way by having recourse to some theological and philosophical explorations of this dynamic. These are not the primary focus of this newsletter (I discussed them in more detail in an older book of mine entitled Everything is God) but they do point to a recurring pattern in human experience: the tension, balance, dynamic, oscillation, overlap, imbrication (still one of my favorite words), interdependence, interpenetration.

The metaphors are many, though perhaps secondary to the existential reality to which they point. Greek philosophy had two conceptions of time: linear chronos and non-linear kairos. Ancient Indian philosophy contrasted kala and ritu. But naturally I’ll focus on the tradition with which I am most familiar, and on the Jewish mystical/ esoteric dyad of circle (igul) and line (yosher), which appears throughout Kabbalistic texts and imagery, including the well-known ‘tree of life’ diagram of the divine. Theologically, the circle and the line express two different forms of divine emanation: the circle represents the all-encompassing infinitude of the ein sof, the endless, while the line represents the linear, staged process of creation through the sefirot, which are themselves depicted as circles.

Since theosophical Kabbalah, especially Lurianic Kabbalah, loves to complicate matters, there are even two perspectives on these two perspectives. The concentric-circles representation of the sefirot represents their cyclical nature, contrasted with the line of linear, temporal emanation. But that is the circular view of circle and line; there is also the linear view, which is the familiar ‘Tree of Life’ diagram, arraying the Sefirot in a botanomorphic and anthropomorphic array. In other words, circle and line can be seen from the perspectives of both circle and line.

Such mystical concepts may seem abstruse, but they are expressed in a number of polarities which are more familiar experientially. The circle is endless, the line is finite; the circle is timeless, the line is temporal. And, in the gendered language of Kabbalah, the circle is ‘feminine’ and the line is ‘masculine’ — long before contemporary understandings of gender, these traditions taught that masculine and feminine are not biological categories but are qualities of reality and human experience that are in constant, dynamic play.

The metaphors of circle and line are also found in pre-Socratic philosophy, in particular the debate between Parmenides, who held that the world was fundamentally an unchanging ‘circular’ unity and Heraclitus, who held that the world changes through the line of history, never returning to an earlier point.

In Vital’s formulation, both conceptions are true; the opposites complement one another. Our lives are linear: we move from birth to childhood to adulthood to death, and no amount of medical intervention can (yet) change that. But the occasions which give shape to our lives are often circular: the holidays of the calendar; the things we do at fixed times of the year, returning to them again and again; the cycle of our family lives, from our ancestors to our parents raising us as children, to perhaps becoming parents ourselves, to our children growing into adulthood, and on and on.

I relate to these philosophical conceptions as helpful iterations of psychological realities. Not only in times of collective stress, such as this month, but every day. For example, as I write these words, it is late morning. Already today, I have taken care of some linear tasks — answering email, reading the news, dealing with a broken thermostat, writing my book — and in each one, I have knowingly or unknowingly immersed myself in linear time. Things get fixed or they don’t, words get written or they don’t.

Yet with a simple contemplation, it’s easy to drop out of that, into immediate presence and the endless cyclicality of the human condition. In this moment, temporality is secondary to awareness; the contingent formations that we take for granted as the substance of our lives are a kind of shadow play, as Plato and Shakespeare might put it. Things grow, things fall apart, endlessly, impermanently, without separate independent reality. There is only ‘now’ — only ‘is’, the one true divine name: was-is-will-be. There are nested circles, as in one of Hayyim Vital’s diagrams: the cyclicality of linearity, and the immediacy of the timeless. In this moment of attention, all simply is; in the next, the shadow play becomes reality, the empire of linearity is reestablished, and life goes on.

Yet in this tradition, the ‘shadow kingdom’ (a phrase of Bob Dylan’s) is not quite illusion. Linearity is where suffering and joy take place. It is where, in Jewish conceptions, the mitzvot (commandments) are performed, where children are raised, where Torah is studies. And thus, in this tradition, the goal of mystical praxis is not to slough off materiality once and for all, but to run back and forth (rotzo v’shov) between finitude and infinitude. We run from the one to the many and return to the one. It is the condition of householder monasticism: oscillation as spiritual practice.

I am interested in how the embodiment of these perspectives gives balance, even comfort, in a world that, itself, seems to be falling apart.

In a sense, moments spent in circular consciousness, in Eckhart Tolle’s “now,” are an escape from the terror of our times. But I would insist that they are not escapism. It is escapist if I am merely getting through life, waiting for the next mystical moment; or if I am devaluing the experiences of other people (whether in my relationships or in a world defined by oppression) because they aren’t really real; or if I run to my sources of comfort any time something disturbs my narcissistic equanimity. But it is not escapist if I am seeking a balance between the times and the timeless that is at once truthful and generative of love. If I return, down from the mountain, to work toward more justice and love in community.

Equally important, there are no claims made in pure presence about things working out for the best or happening for a reason. We cannot infer temporality from the atemporal. Things often do not work out for the best, and reasons are projected onto happenstance and coincidence. Meaning and consequences are determined by us.

There need not even be claims about what is experienced. The return to the “one” may simply be a momentary state of being which has, as a purely perceptual quality, a sense of the timeless within it. It feels more real, not less, though whether it is or not seems almost unknowable. Its noetic and ineffable quality points toward the mystical, but those gestures may be incorrect; one can be certain and still be wrong — along with centuries of contemplatives of mystics anyway. Theological conclusions are not the point, as I wrote in this long-ago essay.

I suppose there remains the dream that, at some point, decades of spiritual practice come to fruition and oscillation ends. Now every moment is a Blakean one

     To see a world in a grain of sand
     And a heaven in a wild flower,
     Hold infinity in the palm of your hand
     And eternity in an hour.

But innocence, without its complement, experience, is amoral and incomplete. Blakean mystical consciousness is beautiful, nourishing, and potentially transformative, but it can only exist sometimes, and in the right conditions — ironically, eternity (or at least the experience of it) is constricted by temporality. In the Jewish tradition, those times are quite frequent: during prayer, during Shabbat, during times of meditation or ecstasy. But they are interspersed with much longer periods of worldly preoccupations: tedium to delight to charity to love to justice to rage. Immediacy is like rebirth, but human beings ought also to live as adults, not merely as children. And so, yes, there is oscillation, and both poles are of value. This is what it is to be incarnate in this form, for now anyway.

Might it be possible for oscillation to become superimposition, such that every moment is experienced as both circle and line? Perhaps; I’ve read books that claim that it is. But I have not attained that stage of realization, and I have met few people who have. Most of us, I think, must be content with oscillation.

But that can be a form of contentment. For thousands of years, humans have lived in this interplay. In linear mind, “If you're not outraged, you're not paying attention” — and we should be paying attention. It is not wrong to be outraged or anxious or overwhelmed; it is right. And also, in circular mind, there is no longer outrage; there is only the present, and a kind of un-knowing, a radical epistemic humility. This is rest.

Put another way, in the equanimous, clear-seeing mind, all formations are temporary and intrinsically unreliable, and all this is emptiness rolling on anyway. As the Vedanta teacher (and cigarette salesman) Nisargadatta put it:

Love says "I am everything." 
Wisdom says "I am nothing." 
Between the two, my life flows.

And then we get back to work.

---

Hope you’re doing alright out there. Here are some things I’ve enjoyed reading this week:

• If you’d like a break from ICE news, Wired Magazine’s Andy Greenberg just did an astonishingly good long-form narrative/investigation about a whistleblower at a notorious ‘scam compound’ in Southeast Asia who risked his life to expose the (actual, literal) slavery and exploitation going on there. This piece is also so gripping and well-written, it’s as good as any thriller.

• I’m delighted to say that my nephew, Henry Michaelson, has followed me into the lucrative and fame-making field of religion writing. He has an excellent essay up on Arc magazine called “God Against the Algorithm.”

• There are many silver linings to the cloud of ICE news. Some I’ve liked: Nate Silver (no pun intended, I guess) has the polling data , Jay Kuo has a strong analysis of the failure of the ‘Roy Cohn Strategy.’ On the other hand, Kuo also did a great piece on the DOJ’s request for Minnesota’s voter rolls, which is extremely concerning.

• Finally, if you’d like some more disturbing news to lighten your day, the Global Project Against Hate and Extremism has released this sobering investigation into Pete Hegseth’s proselytizing Christian Nationalism throughout the military.

Also, here’s a new course I’m co-teaching sharing queer perspectives on the traditional Buddhist precepts. It’s at the New York Insight Meditation Center starting in two weeks — you can attend online or in person.

See you next week.