(This post is a summary of https://rdiamond.substack.com/p/from-infinite-potential-to-purposeful)

The Kabbalistic tradition names the originating condition Ein Sof, meaning “without end.” The name is deliberate in its austerity. It does not describe the originating condition positively — it cannot, because every positive description we possess was built inside the universe that originated from it, and is therefore inadequate to describe what preceded the universe. It points instead by negation: not finite, not bounded, not ended, not anything our concepts were designed to handle.

For our purposes, we can give this austerity a single precise philosophical content: Ein Sof is infinite potential. Not potential for this thing or that thing. Not an unusually large reservoir of capacity for some specific kind of outcome. The complete space of all possible actualization — everything that could coherently exist, prior to any of it existing in fact.

This characterization has one immediate and important........

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