A brief thought on the concept of “Eber” before I go into work. It’s a topic that keeps resurging into my mind. It’s the root word for Hebrew and the root concept of Nietzsche’s übermensch. It is perhaps the clearest movement toward pure abstraction the human species has ever made.

In Douglas Rushkoff’s Nothing Sacred, he writes of Judaism:

“What if we were to apply the iconoclastic, uncompromising, and relentlessly inquisitive spirit of the stiff-necked people on ourselves and our beliefs? We would be doing Judaism to Judaism. It might not be easy. Judaism is a process in which no stone is left unturned—at least not for a lack of willingness to question.”

The prevailing question for me is, why?

Eber is, roughly speaking, a Hebrew word that can be a noun or a verb, referring to the large gliding wing of a soaring bird or the act of soaring thereof. It can also be used to refer to the idea of going over something. Think of a buzzard swirling overhead. In fact, “eber” is a cognate with the words “over” and “ever.”

An old gal friend of mine would explain to me that Friederich Nietzsche, the angsty 19th Century German philosopher of nihilistic optimism, was a great fan of Judaism although he despised Christianity. This is contra the rumor that Nietzsche was a proto-Nazi. It was a fuzzy concept to me. Why would Nietzsche’s philosophy be so fond of Judaism? What is it about the state of mind he speaks of that likes Jews and disdains Christians? I felt it had something to do with the iconoclasm of the Hebrews vs. Christians consolidating God into a body.

Then a few years later another friend, this time a lover, shedded more light on the matter. She explained to me how Judaism is a state of mind that is assertive of one’s own reality but also continually scratching its own head and bickering. There is no assurance of resolution, even if there are promises, they stay in an indeterminate. And, ah, it came together. Jewish thought scintillated with an iridescence in the darkness, Jacob’s ladder descended the central nervous system through the rungs of the spine all the way down into the layers of tissue and ladder-like DNA, the mind and the body each a heaven and an earth to the other. The concept of eber, of over, is the primordial act of abstraction, of transcendence, a concept which is an example of itself, a reflexive concept, a fractal, a Jacob’s ladder waiting to unfold, a bereshit waiting to unfurl a genesis, a mechanism of evolution, a true spirit.

No wonder Western consciousness has had such a crisis. This process of cultural abstraction is a projection of mind over matter, consciousness outpacing the natural world around it. And the parallels in other cultures exist because there is a common process underlying them both. And perhaps this would answer my long-held confusion about why there has been such vehement anti-semitism by nationalists of various kinds—Judaism is a threat to the compulsive, narrow-mind that clings to the body, to circumstance, that does not allow itself to wander. The Hebrews, a loose amalgum of cultures, a mathematically defined set of people, have thousands of years of experience being drifters that rise wherever they go. Abstract consciousness can be used for selfish gain, and a deeply rooted natural instinct rebels against that, looking for traditional norms to define society, rather than having to adapt to a cosmopolitan elite class of successful Jews, so the narrative goes. Jews have been committed to eber for a long time, and have gotten pretty good at it. But the pattern they established has gotten out of hand, even if accidentally and mindlessly copied by people outside the eber faith. The Christians bastardized the fluidity of God and boxed it into Jesus, thus crucifying him. It was not the Jews that crucified Jesus, it was the Christians. Christianity is the state of mind that looks to Jesus for atonement. The line is blurry. One can be a Christian and a Jew, so to speak. What it means to be a Jew is an inherently fuzzy thing, by definition. But I digress.

I’m going to go straight to the point for lack of time. There is a bridge that spans across—that goes over—cultural-linguistic barriers. The Buddhist Heart Sutra concludes with their equivalent of John 3:16—a depiction of the one who has stopped coming and going from vice to vice, they are “gone, gone, gone beyond, altogether gone beyond, awake, sobeit!” Gate, gate, paragate, parasamgate, bodhi svaha! Gate is essentially the same as “over.” The one who has transcended all boundaries, from the enslavement to unconsciousness, from the overreaction of consciousness to control the body, from enslavement to all the paradigmatic schemes that can exist by means of speciation and differentiation as a single category, from the duality between mind and body: enlightened. Eber is a great concept for transcendence, it’s got mathematical purity to it, and that rings of the scientific. Even qualifying what it is about eber that is doing something interesting impresses an act of eber. I made an opinion about it, that it is “great.” Saying it is effective, good, powerful, etc would have all involved some kind of justification that is itself anti-eberific. To say something “true” about eber, I went beyond the idea of justifiable truth. One must go over to go over. One does not have to go over to go over. And this is why Nietzsche praises the one who sets up the path for the ubermensch, the one who follows all the rules to the T. Because he is trying to go over the system by fulfilling it. I would admonish Nietzsche for disregarding Jesus as a figure and focusing on Christianity. Jesus was very eberific. To go over in one’s relationship to patterns is the fundamental act of mythic transcendence, of metanoia, of metaphor, of metamorphosis.

A pattern that spans cultures and languages is a true myth. A pattern that goes over culturo-linguistic boundaries is a true myth. I wonder what connections can be drawn between the concept of eber and the storm vs. sea myth? Both the concept of eber and the storm vs. sea story translate across the Semitic/Indo-European language barrier. That’s clear evidence for something having tangible roots in the psyche. It’s evidence for a reality beyond the story depicted. There is a meta-pattern in the patterns that emerges primordially, like mineral structures or the math of flowers. The regularity is not imposed by a rational rule, because the cosmos does not have a mind like ours. We inhabit the world with a mind evolved to pattern-recognition. But why is that pattern there in the first place? Must it be some kind of anthropic intelligence or a simplistically atheistified version of that in the form of natural laws? What if the truth is more bizarre than that? What if patterns exist for the same reason that there is life? What theistic wisdom can be drawn upon to discover the natural processes that transcend the mind-body division?


June 7th, 2023
Gorda, CA