The Centre Cannot Hold

“Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;

Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world”

W.B. Yeats - The Second Coming

I came across Yeats’ poem recently and was deeply struck by some of the images and symbolism that he evokes. It is, to my mind, truly prophetic of our times. I’ll tell you why.

Spending the month of February in Beirut, where there was essentially zero single traveller meetup stuff going on, served to re-awaken in me my interest in meditation. Desperate for a bit of social connection one evening, I went along to a Sufi meditation event to see who I could meet. Having lived in a spiritual community for years, I’m used to the scene and this was nothing special. But having to sit for 45 minutes in the evening actually did me a lot of good and I found myself repeating it daily for the next couple of months. Somewhere down the line, this also rekindled my interest in mysticism and Qaballah.

And when I came across Yeats’ poem and recalled that he had also been into that scene, I found an intriguing image beginning to assemble in my mind.

In Qaballah, a Judeo-Christian mystical tradition, they have this thing called the Tree of Life. It’s basically a glyph with 10 blobs, known as sephirot, fixed upon it. It usually takes the form of three columns. The Tree represents all of creation and Qaballists believe that it tells a deeper truth about existence than science is capable of telling.

Science is good for building new things and transforming our world. But, because it proceeds from axioms which are only valid within a certain context, it can’t give us meaningful answers to deep questions like “What is consciousness?” or “What is physicality?” Qaballah tries a different, more participatory approach to reveal a deeper layer of knowledge of these things.

As mentioned, this Tree of Life is usually arrayed as three columns. However, during times when our world is undergoing upheaval, the sephirot (blobs) on the middle column shift to the sides to join those on the side columns.

This can be represented graphically like so:

The Tree on the right has just two columns.

The effect of this transition is to cause each and every human mind to lose its sense of stability - its centre - and to become progressively more polarised. Remind you of anything going on in our world?

It’s important to grasp that it is this transition of the Tree which causes the polarisation of our minds to take place. There is a causal relationship here.

These interpretations of the movement of the Tree I found in Aryeh Kaplan’s commentary on the Sefer Yetzirah which, along with the Zohar and the Torah, is a cornerstone Qaballistic text.

This is what Kaplan writes, commenting on verse 3.1

When the Sefirot are in their normal state, arrayed in three columns, they are in a state of equilibrium. But when the Sefirot of the central column are moved to the right and left, so as to divide the Sefirot into two arrays, a powerful tension is produced. When they are in such a mode, powerful spiritual forces can be directed and channelled.

The effect of this polarizing state on our mind is to break down the artificial sense of stability that we have each developed, to help us navigate through life and get needs met. As we feel the world around us being rendered into two camps, and the centre ground fleeing, so all sorts of repressed feelings and anxieties are also driven to the surface.

In Qaballah, this is perceived as a fundamentally healthy, if somewhat brutal, process. It is often referred to as an “Unveiling” or, as early Christians put it, an “Apocalypsis” or “Revelation.”

In the face of a world that appears to be slowly separating into two opposite camps, what we need is to find the centre ground within ourselves. This is essentially the sense of our body. The more we can feel our own body, the less we will be dependent on there being stability in our world to be okay. The sense of the body is our own central column and by bringing it back into our awareness, we find the capacity to be functional and empowered in a changing world.