In ordinary speech those two words do the same job. To exist is to be, and to be is to exist. Nobody has ever needed the distinction to order a coffee.
This material pulls them apart and puts a Hebrew letter on each half. One of them is what you are, and it never changes, has no memory and no purpose. The other is everything that happens to you, and it is the only half that can die. So the question is worth asking as a piece of grammar. What is the difference between existing and being?
Alef is the letter for the Eternal No-thing, from which Light or Energy flows into manifestation as Life and Death. It is the unified Life/Death Principle of everything — and being exceedingly creative, it becomes diversified in existence as Birth, continuum, Death.1
The letter for the continuum is Yod, which is described as the projection of Alef into temporal existence.1 One letter for what does not move, one for what runs. Neither is a symbol of anything; they are the two halves the system is built out of.
Then the image that makes it physical, and it is a breath. Alef is the Stillness, the Formless, in which the inhalation and exhalation of the Eternal Living Spirit is poised in that hovering pause, the rest of total surrender, the free fall between each cycle of breath.1 The two breaths themselves are the Life and the Death of the Yod continuum. So Alef is not a thing beyond the breathing — it is the gap in it, which is available to anybody who stops for a second at the top of an out-breath.
The contrast is then stated in the plainest form offered anywhere in this section. Ein Sof is Life and Death in total union. Time is existence as Life, Death, Life, Death — not a unity any more, but separated into a cycle of alternating opposites.2
Which is why time gets described as a pulse rather than as a container. Time is a rhythm, a pulsation, an exhalation and an inhalation, or simply existence.2 Nothing is said about a river or an arrow. Time here is something that beats.
And the rhythm is explicitly relative rather than uniform. It is not the same for all events — it differs between the fast-moving cycles of manifested Life and the slow-moving cycles of mega-molecules. In the subconscious too, at very deep levels, what seems a brief moment could have taken long periods of earth time, and the reverse.2 Anybody who has surfaced from a dream that lasted years has the evidence already.
Time gets set at right angles to the No-Thing, and the geometry is stated as a picture. Time as Eternal Existence is perceived as horizontal, and the Infinite No-Thing as vertical.2
Then the two are put in a contest. It is as if Life/Death and Eternal Existence are playing a continuous game, in which Time/Existence is always the loser, since Alef — the non-moving centre — overtakes running Time while standing still.2
That sentence is the whole section in eleven words, and it is a race with a fixed result. The runner is always beaten by the thing that never set off, because arriving is not what the still one is doing. It was already wherever the race ends.
Now the distinction the page opened with, stated in the tradition's own terms. Alef is the silent, immanent principle, and Yod is the active, continuous sounding of Alef in existence.3
The definitions that follow read like a riddle and are not one. Alef is non-existent, the Timeless, yet always IS. Yod is the existence of Alef in Time, yet in truth IS NOT — because is is permanent and is not is temporal, and the temporal is only there to allow the is to know Self.3
Alef has no past, no future, no memory, no purpose, but is what It is within Itself.3 Every one of those is something you would call a loss in a person, and here they are the definition of the only real thing.
Then the difficulty that follows for anybody trying to reach it, and it is stated as a dilemma rather than as an encouragement. The act of knowing by necessity functions within Existence alone, while the state of knowing is beyond deeds within Being itself — so the only way to know the Self is beyond thought, since Alef is beyond all mind.3
The temporal half is then described doing something violent, and it is the ordinary business of living. Yod gives birth, yet in the end consumes its own offspring. By emanating continuity in Time, it annihilates that very continuity in order to create more continuity.4
The same goes for Life. As Light from Alef creates Life, so Life sacrifices itself in order to maintain Life — which is not a metaphor if you have ever eaten anything.4
And a reason is given for all of it, which is the strangest claim in the section. The main purpose of this sacrificial maintenance is only to allow Alef to become aware of Itself. Thus the Word is made flesh so that it may utter Itself to Itself.4
But the project cannot finish, and the reason given is geometric. It can never know Itself completely since It has no centre, and therefore Yod can never be Alef.4 The whole of time is a process of self-knowledge that is structurally incapable of completing.
Yod means a hand in Hebrew, and the pun is made into the mechanism. Yod is the Hand of Time, continuously giving and taking in Existence — while Alef perfectly balances the principles of give and take, neither giving nor receiving, and knows Itself more and more through the actions of that hand.5
The exchange runs one way only, and it is set out as a sequence. Alef becomes Yod. The Centre becomes the Circumference. Life/Death becomes Existence in order to know Itself — so the No-Thing becomes its own opposite, which satisfies itself by giving Life and betrays itself by taking Life.5
What cannot happen is the return trip. Alef becomes Yod, and Yod can never become Alef. Alef always remains the same and can never evolve, whereas Yod, as a continuous cycle of change and exchange, is evolving and revolving eternally in the Now.5
Which produces the line the section ends on, and it is the best sentence in it. Alef is the Question Mark, Yod the Questing for an Answer.5 One of them is a shape, and the other is a search. Neither will ever produce the other.
You want something to do with a distinction between two Hebrew letters. Four moves, and the first is a breath.
Start at the top of an out-breath, because that is where Alef is located rather than described. The pause between the cycles is named as the free fall and the rest of total surrender, so stop there for a moment and notice that the stopping is not empty — it is the only part of the breath that is not going anywhere.
Then sort what happens to you into the two halves, and be honest about which is which. Anything with a date on it is Yod: the job, the illness, the argument, the birthday. What is left when every dated thing is removed is what this system means by you, and it has no memory and no purpose and does not change.
Then stop trying to reach it by thinking, since that route is closed by definition. The act of knowing works only inside existence, and the state of knowing is elsewhere. Every method in this tradition that puts you in a chair doing nothing is built on that sentence, and the ones that involve effort are working on Yod.
And take the incompleteness as the design rather than as failure. It can never know Itself completely, so nothing you do finishes the job — which means a practice that has not arrived is not behind schedule. Yod is described as evolving and revolving eternally in the Now, and eternally is the operative word.
This is doctrine rather than argument, and it comes with a moment of self-awareness. Still too difficult to understand? Well let us look at it again sits in the middle of it. Most books of this kind never concede that the reader might be lost.
The letters are doing real work rather than decorating. Yod genuinely means hand, and it genuinely is the smallest letter in the alphabet. Identifying that small letter with the point projecting into time is consistent with the earlier reading of the Four-Letter Name. The etymology carries the argument here, which makes it checkable.
Tension left open. Alef is said to know Itself more and more through Yod's actions, and also to be unable to know Itself completely because It has no centre. Increasing knowledge with no possible completion is coherent, but nothing here says whether the increase is going anywhere or is simply perpetual.
🚩 PRACTITIONER SOURCE. 🚩 The horizontal-and-vertical geometry is offered as so to speak and should not be pressed. 🚩 The relative-time claim runs together physical timescales and subjective dream duration as if they were one phenomenon.
Two accounts of why anything happened at all sit in this body of work, and this one is not the earlier one. The tzimtzum account has the No-Thing contracting and expanding under something like pressure, with vessels failing under load — a process with no purpose in it, described almost mechanically.
Here the whole of existence has a purpose, and it is stated outright: to allow Alef to become aware of Itself. That is a motive. The earlier account was built specifically to avoid needing one, because a complete thing cannot want.
The two can be held together if the awareness is a result rather than an aim, and some of the wording supports that. But the main purpose is not the language of a by-product, and neither is the Word is made flesh so that it may utter Itself to Itself. What is never addressed is how a principle with no purpose — stated in this same section — can have existence as its purpose.
Enemies as the Only Honest Mirror — behavioral-mechanics.
King Hiero is arguing with an enemy, and the enemy — reaching for something that will land — tells him his breath stinks. Hiero goes home rattled, and not about the enemy. He asks his wife: How does it happen that you never told me of this problem?
That is the same structure as the whole of this page, arrived at from the opposite end. Something cannot get at itself directly, so it has to go outside itself to find out what it is. Alef cannot know Itself, so it projects into Yod. Hiero cannot smell his own breath, so it takes a man who wants to hurt him. In both cases the knowledge comes back from somewhere else or not at all.
And both accounts agree that the exterior has to be genuinely other, which is where the cost sits. For Hiero the mirror has to be hostile, because everyone close to him has a reason not to say it. For Alef the mirror has to be temporal — it has to change, and give, and take, and die, because a thing that never moved could not show anything back.
Which yields a test worth keeping. A mirror that never tells you anything you did not already know is not outside you yet. The wife was not a mirror; she was part of the same arrangement. And the incompleteness carries over exactly. An enemy tells you about your breath and nothing whatever about your virtues, so what comes back from any exterior is partial by construction. That is the practical form of It can never know Itself completely since It has no centre.
Sharpest implication. The purpose given for all suffering, eating, birth and death is that a principle with no centre should come to know itself. The same passage says that project cannot be completed. So the whole of time is a self-knowledge exercise with no possible finish, which makes going anywhere the wrong question to ask about it.
Generative questions.