Tiphereth

...

The illusion of Tiphereth is Identification. When a person
is asked "what are you", they will usually begin with statements
like "I am a human being", "I am a lorry driver", "I am Fred
Bloggs", "I am five foot eleven". If pressed further a person
might begin to enumerate personal qualities and behaviours: "I am
trustworthy", "I lose my temper a lot", "I am afraid of
heights", "I love chessecake", "I hate dogs". It is extremely
common for people to identify what they are with the totality of
their beliefs and behaviours, and they will defend the sanctity
of these beliefs and behaviours, often to the death - a person
might have behaviours which make their life a misery and still
cling to them with a grip like a python. This inability to stand
back and see behaviour or beliefs in an impersonal way produces a
peculiar ego-centricity: the sense of personal identity is
founded on a set of beliefs and behaviours which are largely
unconscious (that is, a person may be unaware of being
grotesquely selfish, or pompous, or attention-getting) and at the
same time seem to be uniquely special and sacred. When behaviour
and beliefs are unconscious and incorporated into a sense of
identity it becomes impossible to make sense of other people. If
I am unaware that I regularly slip little put-downs into
my conversation, and Joe takes umbrage at my sense of humour,
then rather than change my behaviour (which is unconscious) I
interpret the result as "Joe doesn't have a sense of humour; he
needs to learn to laugh a little". There are many behaviours
which may seem innocuous to the person concerned but which are
irritating or offensive to others, and when the injured party
reacts appropriately it is impossible for me to make sense of
this reaction if my behaviour is unconscious and tightly bound to
my sense of identity. Our sense of identity thus becomes a kind
of "Absolute" against which everything is compared, and
judgements about the world become absolute and almost impossible
to change, even when we realise intellectually the subjectivity
of our position. Referring to this projection of the unconscious
onto the world Jung [5] comments:

"The effect of projection is to isolate the subject from his
environment, since instead of a real relation to it there is
now only an illusory one. Projections change the world into
one's unknown face."

In summary, the illusion of Tiphereth is a false identification
with a set of beliefs or behaviours. It can also be an
identification with a social mask or Persona, something
discussed in the section on Netzach. So to return to the orginal
question: "what are you?". Is there an answer? If the answer is
to be something which is not an arbitrary collection of emphemera
then you are not your behaviours - behaviour can be changed; you
are not your beliefs - beliefs can be changed; you are not your
role in society - your role in society can change; you are not
your body - your body is continually changing. Out of this comes
a sense of emptiness, of hollowness. The intellect attempts to
solve the koan of koans but has no anchor to hold on to. Is there
no centre to my being, nothing which is *me*, no axis in the
universe, no morality, no good, no evil? Do I live in a
meaningless, arbitrary universe where any belief is as good as
any other, where any behaviour is acceptable so long as I can get
away with it? This sense of emptiness or hollowness is the
Qlippoth or shell of Tiphereth, Tiphereth as the Empty Room with
Nothing In It. Jung [6] provides a memorable and moving
description of how his father, a country parson, was
progressively consumed by this feeling of hollowness. There can
be few fates worse than to devote a life to the outward forms of
religion without ever feeling one touch of that which gives it
meaning.