My use of molar here is borrowed from Chemistry.

I use it purely metaphorically and self-indulgently. In Chemistry, moles are used to measure something that is unmeasurable — or, more
correctly, something that is so small that it is molecular and hence beyond our ordinary sense of weight. So whenever I say “molar” (as I am sometimes wont to do), I mean a measure of the immeasurable/unmeasurable/molecular.

An example from popular culture. In what ways does Ashton Kutcher manifest the Joker archetype that is interesting to tarot card readers and Jungians alike?

We all deserve to be punkd every now and again by some cosmic Ashton Kutcher.

They used to call it candid camera, but now the lens of the camera is turned in on images of itself, self-referentially. Pop eats itself. Take it like a celebrity or movie star, babe.

But that’s just Sufism cliche. What if the movie show becomes molecular, rather than a molar affair. What if the images are fed into your DNA? Demi Moore within and Aston Kutcher without, replicated in union.

And so that micro Demi-Aston enlightens the Demiurge, fills its body from the cellular level outwards, to blood veins, to the nervous system, to muscular issue and skin and hair, lips, curves, forms, sight, speech, action, forethought, insight, Wisdom, and …

This is what we in the business call the Joker Archetype: not a sign, a tradition or cliche, a Zen master parable, but a functional, functioning, function over signs, a predicate or vortex that we can enter. A totem, mask and transformative download.

Well, I think it’s funny at least.

There is a molar Demi-Ashton, a molar marriage of the prankster and the older woman, and then there is a molecular understanding of this. (The characterisation of the marriage itself, being, of course, a kind of punkd prank.)

By which I mean there are practical jokes, Ashton Kutcher’s show, Zen parables, modes of interaction that have distinct value for us, in the
same sense that molecules can be weighted according to a molar scale. When someone says: “such-and-such a teacher pulled such-and-such a prank on me, and I was enlightened in some way (say, gained some understanding of the nafs etc)”, then we are talking about a molar value. I am not dismissing this process at all: this weight is the weight of Gold, sometimes, and Gold is what our Prophet distributed to the men after battle and, perhaps more significantly to Sufis, Gold is what Imam Ali distributed to the followers after the battle with Aisha’s forces was waged.

But it is, nevertheless, a molar weight that is given that characterises the Gold’s value. A molar valuation of something molecular, something that is within our DNA, so to speak.

I’d say micro and macro instead of molar and molecular, but then the sense of the former “weighing” the latter would be lost, and so I say molar and molecular. And molecular is still pretty small, hardly micro!

There are lots of things going on at the molecular level: the molecular Demi-Ashton is just a silly example.

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