Unsong - Cosmology

==Introduction==
If you're interested in reading the series, I'll link the official website here.
If you want to read the series consider not reading this page as it's spoiler heavy. 
The verse draws it's cosmology and most aspects from Kabbalah, more specifically Christian Kabbalah, so some concepts might be used from it for clarification.
==Malkhut==
The Malkhut (מַלְכוּת) is the physical universe in which humans exist, the name Malkhut comes from the Sefirot, you can read about it here.
the physical universe is small, very small. What humans perceived as being outer space was in fact a gigantic crystal sphere surrounding the Earth, 250,000 miles in diameter, whose inside surface was holographically adjusted to give the illusion of depth:
It is the only point in creation where the concepts of space and time actually apply with a form, and outside of it there is just the vastness of the Ein Sof:
Furthermore, one of the main themes of the story is that the underlying structure of the universe is akin to a fractal: Each smaller part of it reflects and connects to larger ones and to one another, forming an endless self-similar pattern.
This is due to the fact that, simply put, the entire universe is modelled after, and derived from a celestial blueprint known as "Adam Kadmon", which in Kabbalah is known as the Archetypal Man, and defined as a realm embodying the primal thought of God, the most primal embodiment of His infinite light, where the whole of creation is idealized and every aspect of it superimposed into a single point.
==God and the Divine==
Standing at the top of the cosmology, beyond all else, is the Ein Sof, the formless and ineffable God which encompasses and surrounds creation, in a state of "Eternity" beyond time and space.
 
The precise scale of God? Well, early in the story, specifically in Interlude ג, the concept of larger sizes of infinity discovered by Georg Cantor is briefly commented upon, with the narrator restating Cantor's own beliefs: That even if the hierarchy of infinite numbers is itself unending, there must be a quantity so large that it contains and describes the total amount of them. This is what he deemed to be the Absolute Infinite, an inconsistent multiplicity that surpasses all conceivable numbers, and which he identified as an expression of God.
Seemingly in support of Cantor's beliefs, Chapter 17 discusses a traditional jewish children song, and then extracts the following symbolism off the lyrics:
He is also described as being the animating spirit of the world, and its ontological ground, which albeit inert, possesses many mystical Names that, when spoken aloud, can manipulate the world to various different degrees and produce many magical effects:
His true name, however, is said to be the holiest and most dangerous of all, as it would allow any individual that uttered it to govern the entirety of creation in a near-omnipotent state, giving them the power to shape whole Worlds. It is referred to as the Shem HaMephorash, the "explicit name", and is known only to Metatron.
This is believed to be due to the fact that knowing the true, mystical name of a supernatural entity (such as an Angel or a Demon) gives one the power to control them, and thus, following this logic, knowing the True Name of God, would grant dominion over the creator Himself, or at least the manifest aspect of Him.
And then we are told the explicit reason behind the power of the HaMephorash:
The Ein Sof is also described as unbound by the basic dichotomies and principles which exist in the created world:
Namely, some of the basic principles used to drag people out of it are:
However, as God is an infinite and unknowable force, His full extent cannot be realized within the physical universe, and thus the divine light which He emanates must be filtered through ten mystical channels known as the Sephirot, descending from the absolute divinity of God and shaping it into the basis of the material world, in accordance to the blueprint of the Adam Kadmon, mentioned above, which is just pure light devoid of any vessels or filters.
The ten sephirot, together with the twenty-two paths which connect them together, form a structure known as the Tree of Life, a "machine" of sorts whose full extent lies beyond time and space, and which was eventually hacked by the Archangel Uriel, who found a way to manipulate the sephirah and rewrite the fundamental nature of reality, "retconning" it into a self-sustaining world whose primary substrates were the laws of physics and mathematics, as opposed to the Divine Light of God.
The Tree of Life is itself divided into Four Worlds, each representing a stage of conceptual expansion/contraction where the light of God is transitioned from the divine and into the finite. Those being, from lowest to highest:
*Assiah (World of Actions), the lowest of the four worlds and the one which corresponds to the physical sphere of existence, where all laws of nature operate seamlessly and the concepts of space, time and causality are set firmly in place by the operations of the rest of the Tree of Life, with the divine light provenient from the upper worlds having finally made its transition from the divine and into the finite.
*Yetzirah (World of Formation), the world of dreams and possibilities, where consciousness emerges and the unformed light provenient from higher worlds is shaped into more defined archetypes and conceptual objects. It is above Assiah and more fundamental than it, as everything in the physical universe is just a metaphor for incomprehensible things residing in Yetzirah.
*Briah (World of Creation), the world where the divine light of God is filtered and interpreted into the fundamental components of all existence, although they are not archetypes like the objects residing in Yetzirah, just sparks of creative energy which will eventually become archetypes. It is above Yetzirah in the same way that it is above Assiah; that is, even Yetzirah is a metaphor for it.
*Atziluth (World of Emanations), the highest and most primal of all worlds, where the light of Ein Sof still exists in unity with His infinity, completely unformed and lacking any separate existence from God, or the awareness of it.
In Kabbalah proper, the four worlds are often explained in a "top-to-bottom" manner through the allegory of a teacher imparting a lesson to his student: Atziluth, the World of Causes, is represented by the teacher having a single spark of inspiration, unformed but brimming with potential, Briah is symbolized by the teacher elaborating and solidifying this concept inside his head, compressing it into a concrete idea, and Yetzirah is represented by the penultimate stage, when the teacher finally transmits this idea to the student, who comes to fully comprehend it and then apply it to whatever their surroundings may be, instantiating it into the world (This being itself the final stage, Assiah)
The aforementioned hierarchy where lower worlds are just metaphors for more fundamental things existing in higher worlds also corroborate with the above statements that God is necessarily the pinnacle of all things, and above all kinds of hierarchies, as everything is a metaphor for God, an expression of His infinity which repeats itself across all scales, with the only thing apart from this being God Himself.
There are however, other aspects to the divine that are even more abstracted and concealed than the Ein Sof. This is briefly alluded to in this interlude, where, to summarize it, the main characters discuss the concept of divine simplicity, where God is idealized as an entity of pure wholeness that is not comprised of any smaller or more fundamental parts, and partakes in all attributes and characteristics.
Being the concept of "existence" in its purest form, God would then be the simplest and most fundamental possible thing, apart from his logical diametric opposite: Nothingness. In binary terms, those two would then be the digits 1 and 0, respectively, carrying only one bit of information.
One of them, though, suggests that if God and nothingness still denote a small amount of information in these symbols, then neither of them can be the simplest possible thing, which would then be neither 1 nor 0, neither God nor nothingness, just the absence of information entirely.
The interlude then associates this with the concept of the "Atzmus", which in Kabballah is the name of the most primal essence of the divine, which is essentially a complete absence of thought or description that cannot be talked about or referred to in any form, devoid of anything whatsoever. The Atzmus being the simplest possible thing is thus dismissed, because it cannot be talked about, and can't even be considered a "thing" in the first place. To shamelessly quote wikipedia:
While speaking to Job as the Voice of God, Metatron also describes a primordial realm that exists as the Garden of God, a paradise beyond existence, where millions and millions of different universes exist side-by-side, each corresponding to a Possible World ranging from the simplest and most perfect to the most flawed. Adam Kadmon itself is merely one seed that gave birth to one universe among many.
In particular, he describes a perfect universe where there is no concept of time and space, and its inhabitants exist as incorporeal entities, whose nature is absolutely flawless, and who stand in golden thrones contemplating their own perfection.
Category:Cosmology