Ontological Subjectivity: Lectures regarding the felt interiority of a cosmological, technological process with architectural permutations (October 2026)

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The Theater of Persistence: Human Confusion and the Play Behind the Mask (Lecture 10/5/26)

I think this lecture will be about human confusion. I’ll work from what may be one of my most important documents: the detailed translation of the ontological operator, the persistence-against-constraint operator, into magnitude, in terms of measurable performance. I did some of that with baseball, which was actually really fun. I’ll also draw on one of my books, which I called The Human Derivations. It builds a downstream characterological analysis of how the persistence operator works in being in time, specifically in relation to the human being and humanity.

As I’ve told you, I started out very interested in political economy, cultural theory, and critical theory. I wanted to understand the political, social, economic, and civilizational developments of history. I started at a very local level, through my readings and writings on Céline, Artaud, Rimbaud, and Dostoevsky, the European literary existentialists, so to speak.

The problem for me has always been this. We are returning science to its rightful place, whether we’re talking about astrophysics, cosmology, biology, cellular biology, chemistry, the building blocks of life, or stellar physics. This information has to be returned to the most pressing existential question: being itself in time, the embodied experience of being. In my context, which may not be our shared context if you’re listening to or reading this, that means being itself in a human, species-level way or form.

The confusion is what we see manifest in and as human history. That history is entirely confused and deluded: ideologically generated, dictated, manipulated, and coerced. It is the creation of a symbolic order, linguistic, cultural, and imagistic, a representation of things. I talked about this in my work on image theory, and I’ve done substantial work on photography, early cave painting, the history of art, and so on, because all of it unfolds into the architecture we’re discussing. That architecture is entirely delusional at the level of representation, and utterly unable to lie at the level of presentation.

So we talked about the lockstep of humanity, and breaking the lockstep, which is critical. I covered this in my “Jailbreaking Being” lectures, from a year or two ago. The problem is the programming. I love the term “neuro-linguistic programming,” because it totally bypasses the fundamental situation, which is biochemical, genomic, and cosmodynamic. What I mean is that the being is programmed by being itself long before any of these downstream effects. Those effects are just predictable outcomes proceeding from fundamental persistence against constraint, behind whose mask is the Aeon, a child at play with colored balls.

So we are trying to get behind the mask of persistence. Our inability to do so is what we witness when we look at humanity, at the world, at nature. Nature is trying to solve an insoluble problem, the problem through which all reproduction flows and all animal, chemical, and floral behavior flows: the problem of solving for disappearance. That is absence and negation at the level of the entropic universe, the death, dissolution, or configurational dissolution of form, even in geological structures.

This is primarily why the literary epic I was constructing, and did construct, is based on disappearance and the preservation of memory. The archival impulse is itself the impulse of the universe: to preserve, sustain, and prolong organisms, systems, and functions within a constraint-based universe. In a human sense, we see this in the eternally shifting immortality project, from the fountain of youth to the statue of the dictator. These are all the same thing playing over and over on a loop, whether in the privacy of a working-class home in Russia or on the headlines of a Roman newspaper, so to speak.

This is what I really want to get to: the profound homogeneity of human experience, and the ludicrousness of the cultural and civilizational outcry against perceived diversity. That diversity consists of different ideological, cultural, and civilizational background constructs. They are like wallpaper over the fundamental existential human condition. All of them function as justifications or private dialogues, and they are fundamentally the construct of the characterological self, the local self, within cosmological persistence against constraint.

You could think of persistence as the cosmic microwave background. It’s a good analogical term for how this functions, because it is ever-present. It is primary, primordial. From it emerge forms out of the mist: the historical recombination of genomes, chemicals, biomes, and stellar habitats, which is energy interacting, discoursing, transmuting, and transforming over, through, and in space and time. This ongoing process is, quite simply, what we can call time and space itself.

So, returning to the farce of history, which is very hard for me not to get stuck on because it is so ever-present: again, there is really nothing going on. I think this is the horror behind the pages of Dostoevsky, Rimbaud, or Céline. It is the realization of the glacial concreteness of the human condition. The human being is a persistence-based organism locked in a long-time-scale transformation of the architecture of being. It takes hundreds of thousands and millions of years of transformative experience to acquire a new technological, or prosthetic, attribute.

This is why digital, industrial, technological modernity looks like pressure applied from without. These metallic, digital, or mineral constructs are being born out of the mad dash of scientific revolution and the forebrain. That is a historical-time-scale unlocking of the possibility of changing world-system architectures, whether a fusion machine or civilizations, in order to alter the human being’s engagement with and relationship to its own experience.

So when you interface with artificial intelligence, or with the city of Moscow, or with another human being, this is technological recursion: an interlocking of devices that have been brought forth out of nature. I’ve distinguished this as channel one and channel two. Channel one is genomic, what we might call organic, or pseudo-organic. Channel two is cultural and civilizational: the devices and prosthetics born of the genomic architectural revolution that was fundamentally instantiated by the forebrain.

In this paradigm of gridlock, we have repetition. Some of you may know this concept from Nietzsche’s eternal recurrence of the same. I want to ground eternal recurrence in cosmology just as much as in revolutionary or evolutionary technology at the level of the human being. Perception, embodied experience, is the technological digestion or ingestion of process, the input of world, in relation to beings: hard-coded architectural systems, grids, interfaces of energy, the nervous system, organ systems, metabolism, circulation, and so on.

That experience is transformed architecturally only through recombination over long time scales. So it’s not just generational. It is supra-generational, in the sense of paradigm-shifting species evolution. Darwin’s contribution is still under-recognized in its full importance, because it is an ontological revolution of the first order once it is incorporated into this larger superstructural understanding: how persistence works, why it does what it does, and the nature of the play and creation behind it.

So this insoluble problem creates the local farce of tens of thousands of years of human history. And here is the deception, a phenomenological deception in how we perceive historical political revolutions and historical digital-industrial technologies. It is why humanity is so convinced that something is happening at this moment in human history. Surely, with the advent of the iPhone or agent-grade artificial intelligence, something has occurred: a transformative instance at the level of the human-being technology.

But the human-being technology does not observe itself as such, recursively. It does not have what Kierkegaard calls the dialectical redoubling, the capacity for reflection on its own internal reasoning. It simply perceives out from the aperture of its technological architecture.

So when we move through historical paradigms, what we witness is the development of prosthetics. They replicate the primary existential conditions of human beings themselves as technological apertures, at various degrees of scale. Modernity is the primal problem of this hardware: the hard-coded architecture of the human species and its civilization, outcropped from millions, and thus billions, of years of evolution, from the cosmological level down into genomic structures and energetic transformation.

As soon as this paradigm was instantiated, through a mode of difference equivalent to the forebrain or the opposable thumb, all that has occurred since is an exploration of the capacities and bounds within that architectural system. We know some of the furthest reaches that have been touched within that structure of capacity. This is where regulational and configurational persistence come in, as I’ve described in depth in my works. At the level of regulational persistence, neurologically, we have figures such as Da Vinci or Newton.

I would describe these figures primarily as ontologists. They are solving for being itself. They attempt to understand and synthesize world-historical knowledge and existential experience into a coherent vision of being: being as a grid, a sphere, or a plane of potential interrelationship or knowledge.

This is what’s fascinating about digital technological modernity, and it is also what is causing its destruction. With information technology, more of it is effectively meaningless. Higher-quality information technology, meaning both systems capable of processing information and higher-quality information itself, is mission-critical in terms of persistence.

Look at fast food or pop culture, which are historically endemic to Western civilization, specifically America. We can see what is happening to America in 2026 in terms of extreme political and economic polemics. What you are witnessing is the ancient, primordial survival technology of the human being mistaking quantity for quality.

That is the desperation which, at a larger, more cosmological level, is endemic to mankind. It is fundamental to the survival systems of primordial, unconscious nature: to persist and reproduce, carrying whatever limited information existed in the prior generational paradigm into the next, in hopes of an evolutionary, revolutionary technological paradigm shift. I think we have strong historical precedent for that. We see it replicated at the cultural and civilizational level, whether in the architecture of the pyramids, the digital grid, or the jet plane.

This is why I’m so serious about technology. Technology is a seamless conceptual elucidation that applies at all scales of cosmology. The universe is not necessarily teleological, but it applies the force of play, the force of recombination. In applying that force, it is a progressive learning: an architectural transformation in relation to space-time.

This is what’s critical. When you see the human being, or the primordial animal, wandering the jungle, it is genomically interfacing with other genomic architectures to produce new genomic signatures within the body. This is a literal technological and informational writing, a scripting in real time, which we could call the book of knowledge or the book of life.

I’m weaving a very esoteric concept into a fundamental scientific principle, and this is precisely where we need to be to understand ontology. It calls for the necessary biological-mystical state of being, which I would almost call shamanic: understanding the systems process of the universe, engaging, interfacing, and interlacing with it to such an extent that we become it, know it, and understand ourselves as it.

My work on Olmec cosmology is critical here, in terms of the were-jaguar. It is not a concept. It is a transformational state of being, and access to the primordial energetic architecture of creation itself. That access is phenomenologically manifest in the space between man, or mankind, and the jaguar: the primal life-force energy of the jungle.

That is fascinating. But at the same time, when we look at modernity, which is really the cultural trash of human history, its detritus, produced now with more speed and efficiency than ever before, we are looking at a grid of information. This is the great subversion of survivalism. It has occurred, over a fairly short time scale, which is to say human history, because of the necessities of the human species’ architecture.

It is the subversion of substantial informational technology. Consider maize, corn, grain, or wild buffalo and bison. Consider Lakota cosmology, Aztec cosmology, or ancient Hindu cosmology. What has happened is the subversion of quality by quantity: a McDonald’s at every intersection. At the most local, regulational level, the human species is optimizing for survival and reproduction.

So, looking across the entirety of human history, I would call the point of transformation industrial modernity, with Nietzsche screaming that God is dead and we have killed him. What happened is that the formerly local, agricultural, somatic mode of being was industrialized, quite literally. I don’t mean the factory. I mean factory consciousness. Speaking at the level of ontology, the human being itself has been industrialized into cattle.

So consider the birth of chattel slavery, the birth of the transatlantic slave trade in the early 1500s in Spain. This is the same era as Martin Luther’s 95 Theses. We are looking at a fundamental shift in the human being. It is a technological optimization, so to speak, from which fascism is fundamentally born.

We can trace this further back if you want, into serfdom, and including Egypt. I think the concept of slavery itself is extremely helpful here, in Greece as well: the transformation of human life and the human being into the production of energetic, resource-based outcomes. This has to be examined critically, because it leads to a whole discussion of labor, work, and so on. It is the transformation of the architecture of community, at the level of the tribe and at the level of civilization.

This is the horror of Heidegger’s realization, which I would argue came hundreds, if not thousands, of years too late. Humanity has been turned into a standing-reserve resource, just as the forest has become logs. The human being has become pure labor, emptied of all dream, hope, wish, and experience. This is the evacuation of the existential question in modernity. Its final death knell sounds, I would say, right around Heidegger’s time in Germany, and several decades prior with [unclear in the recording] this industrial transformation.

From there, we have only accelerated into the “I don’t care, do you?” phase. You could call it a form of extreme cultural nihilism: there is no meaning, belief, system, or reality outside the fulfillment of one’s own personal feelings. That is the true death of a paradigm, and that is where we have been left, in what Eliot would call the wasteland of modernity. A cataclysm.

That, I think, is the first-order issue at hand. When we talk about the early communities of human history, flawed as they sometimes, even often, were, there is a sense of true collectivity: mutual participation and engagement.

Then came the death of that, and the institution of individualism. I think we see it first and foremost in the birth of American civilization, or American empire, an experiment in individualism. It has left us with the results I would say we are now experiencing: profound alienation, self-centeredness, and the death of group-level persistence.

The question is what we do about that. I don’t know if there’s a clear answer.

The farce of history continues. And all the while, it is being generated from, by, and within the privacy of subjective personal experience.

And then there are the rare few who see through that. I bring up Gogol almost naturally when I talk about this subject. They are attempting to awaken or enlighten the human species to this condition. You have to wonder whether most people actually suffer from that condition in any visible, substantial, or conscious way. My answer, I think, is no. Perhaps only in moments of awareness of the horror, which is never fully seen and must be suppressed in order to conduct business. And that, I think, is the vast majority of human life and human lives.

That is just not something I can personally tolerate, or agree to.

This is the question: awakening from the rote repetition of this survival architecture, and from the delusion of a multiplicity of sensory, pseudo-sentient experiences. All of those experiences reproduce, primordially, the same phenomenon, because they emerge from the same source, the same technological predicament.

So when we look at technological ages within human prosthetics, whether digital or industrial, we are looking at perceptual architecture. I love studying photography because it is very revealing, both in terms of shutter speed and how the photograph is produced, whether silver gelatin in a darkroom or digital. We are looking at a problem of resolution: the translation, or resolution, of the cosmological into the existential aperture of the being, of the form.

The human being and the camera are effectively the same paradigm. Understanding this cosmologically unlocks an understanding of how technology functions at the level of existential cosmology and ontology. The camera has an evolutionary paradigm, but it remains effectively a camera until a new device is instantiated that manufactures a closer, more accurate, more adequate representation of reality, and that device is adopted.

This is the intellectual reproduction of genius, so to speak, as we see it throughout human history. Adoption does not always happen without a fight, and I think it rarely does. Copernicus is a fantastic example. Even truth is met with violence, with violent skepticism, because it rearranges world. It rearranges the being’s perception of reality at the fundamental ontological level. That is what real innovation is.

The lack, or dearth, of that is common to effectively all of human history. It is also the poverty of technological revolutions themselves as they occur in a natural, organic context over hundreds of thousands and millions of years. The period between these transformations is effectively waiting. It is exploration of what is possible within them, and potential destruction within the expansion of these grids of energetic possibility. That applies to everything from artificial intelligence to the human paradigm of the forebrain itself, and then the waiting for a new faculty, a new paradigm to emerge.

Historically, the fear of human technology is the fear of transformation and of death itself.

This is what we step into when I invoke Heraclitus again, as I like to, with the river of time. To step into the river of time is to step into this transformation. I suppose you hope to catch a whiff of what’s coming next, in the sense of an emergent possibility or capacity that pushes forward.

Think about the modern architecture of Washington, D.C., or New York. Had you been born a couple of million years earlier, it was a primordial hellscape. I’d say maybe not much has changed. But there is an element of novelty, surprise, and fascination within some minor, subcultural groundswells, where there is real interrogation of what it is to be, to think, to choose, and to live.

Those are the meaningful questions, the existential questions, to which the human being is subjected, or made open, or directed by the nature of the consciousness emerging within it. This cultural interrogation and inquiry is perhaps the only critical existential hope at the local level. Because at a larger, more universal time scale, existence is effectively sitting around waiting for transformation. It is trying to strike a chord within the genomic architecture to generate a new paradigm shift out of recombination, change, and transformation, which is the principle at hand.

So this is, for lack of a better word, evolutionary waiting for a train, which happens, analogically, at the level of the genome.

Within the existing paradigm, what is possible is exploration of its bounds, and those bounds are firmly, architecturally divided within siloed beings. That, of course, is our political problem at large, at the species level. It is less a problem of ideological conflict, or even cultural conflict, than of architectural difference. Down at the level of the genome, all life on Earth is effectively the same, almost indistinguishable. The genome is nearly homogeneous across these architectures, at least in an earthly sense.

But at the level of actual neurological architecture, the difference is profound, in so many places. This returns us to the existential aperture. These are effectively devices to be explored and experimented with, in order to understand what is possible within the technological paradigm. And that returns us to Heraclitean play as the ontological primary behind the mask of persistence against constraint.

That is precisely what we see in all times and all of history. It is a play of masks in a theater of consciousness, with real, substantial, and, unfortunately, fundamentally negative outcomes, except for the rare exceptions of profound creative and ontological innovation and exploration. That is because the play is performed poorly. It is a theatrical performance by a bunch of amateurs who have no understanding of the technological instrument they are using. So they use it to gratify their lowest and most basic urges, forms, and desires.

That replicates perhaps the slowest-moving aspect of glacial evolution and revolution, which I would argue is fundamentally toward consciousness, as we can observe evolutionarily at a cosmological scale. That evolutionary drag is what we observe as the everyday: the continual dirge and barrage of nonsense, trash, and cultural detritus, which keeps accumulating and piling up, and from which no nutrition or substance is possible. It is a form of mass starvation at the level of ontology. And of course, this is the current of all politics, all civilizations, and all cultures. That is what you witness at the scale of human experience.

So the retreat, or the advance (it is either-or, and both), happens at the level of ontological realization. That means observing nature and deducing the currents and flows of information, phenomena, and forms, down to the level of superstructure: what acts behind the appearance of all forms at all scales, again, from star to cell.

That realization, as I think we see with Gogol, perhaps on a different scale, is not necessarily liberation from the cosmological. But it reveals the farce behind configuration against persistence. And one acquires a certain freedom that would not otherwise be present: the freedom of realization.

As with all farce, all Menippean farce, there is a very thin line, I think, between comedy and tragedy. Let me renovate those terms. The tragic is persistence against constraint: the endless repetition of failure, the Sisyphean attempt to survive in an entropic universe. The comic is the Aeon, a child at play with colored balls: the ontological identity of being, beneath and behind the characterological method playing out unconsciously.

We already went into this with baseball. The unconscious method at play is bare, rote, brute survival, which dictates much of human and animal consciousness, and plant consciousness too, if you look at survival responses to leaves being cut.

But then there is this play occurring beneath the technological programming, or encoding, of these architectures. I’ll call them neuro-linguistic architectures, because that’s helpful. They are neurological, developed and developing in the case of the human species. And they are linguistic in the sense of languaging: as we discussed with the genome, being is written into being over, through, and in space and time, effectively as space and time. That is the sophisticated understanding of spirit and form, or being and beings.

This architecture can come into communion with what lies behind the theater of persistence: the ontological play of being itself. It can make that play conscious. That is a universal, cosmological act, not simply a political, cultural, or civilizational one. You can understand why, because it grasps the face behind the mask. It sees past the persistence-based, phenomenological character of historical, existential beings and forms, and into the cosmic play of those forms over time.

What lies beneath and behind this desperate play for survival is the play of being itself. We went into this in terms of lila.

I think I’ll call it there. It’s just a meditation I wanted to get out. I’m not entirely sure what it is or means yet, but I think it is a movement in a direction, perhaps.

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Architectures of Character: Persistence, Force, and the Churn of Forms (Lecture -- 10/7/26)

There’s a lot always made about human behavior, and I’ll take a winding road here.

I was sitting outside on the porch, I think it was yesterday, enjoying a warm fall day. I was watching ants and bugs crawl across a walkway stone by the front porch in the sun. If you observe nature deeply enough, I think you have a real experience of the transcendental nature of subjectivity. You see it moving through the various persistence architectures in space and time: bugs, insects, cats, men, women, even stones, in terms of configurational architecture.

I wrote a book about that, which is fascinating. It’s very interesting how memory and time are encoded into these devices, into their literal body, their literal form. One of the greatest examples is Botticelli’s map of the Inferno for Dante. It’s a great painting, a great piece of art, and it shows the sedimentary power and quality of the geological earth itself. We also see that replicated superstructurally in the body: in organisms, in regulational architectures.

You see a lot of back and forth about biological reproduction. We have men and women: a two-sexed species system of recombination. I’ll weave that in further in a moment.

Watching the bugs move, stop, and change direction in response to situations, you are watching the same process occur superstructurally. The situations might be an observer, myself sitting there present in the space; other bugs; nutrients; resources; the sun. The process is, again, persistence against constraint.

I’m moving from that place, and beneath that codified architecture: form within the formless, entropic universe of ever-changing, shifting, transforming energetic structures. Within it you have these attempts to persist: local, regulational systems. Here I’m mostly talking about organisms. We could get creative with that, but there’s no need.

So, getting into men, women, reproduction, and the distribution and circulation of energy: we can just look at it in terms of the genome, in terms of the transmission and transformation of information across time. That’s all that’s really happening in the human species. There’s a very slow, glacial process of transformation, and we’ve discussed its paradigm shifts: the opposable thumb and the forebrain.

What’s so powerful is what I’ve called progressive enlightening. I don’t mean enlightening in the sense of revelation or awakening, by any means; I think that’s pretty clear. I mean enlightening in terms of technological light: literally, the energetic grids powering modern civilizations. Industrial modernity progressively lights up the earth itself, visibly from space.

That brings me to my point about civilization and libidinal energy. I think it draws a lot from Freud, specifically Civilization and Its Discontents, and from Marcuse and Foucault. Regardless of what you think of these thinkers’ political beliefs, they are honing in on something real, which Simone Weil simply calls force. She says force is the true subject of the Iliad. Not any particular subject or character, but the manifestation of force in space and time as it presents itself in different situations, through different actors.

That’s why we call Homer an epic poet. There is no single station of individual vision. It describes the ecological situation of force, energetic transformation, and change itself. That is an ontological project.

This is where Marcuse becomes very critical. When we talk about civilization and libidinal energy, we are talking about the structures, the architectures themselves, which become increasingly sophisticated, which is to say increasingly binding. Consider debt, as in the Roman concept of debt. Consider surveillance, technological surveillance. Consider the affirmation, reformation, and reaffirmation of the subject as a state-based subject. These are all ways of binding and conforming energy to structures.

Those structures are then subjected to larger structures: institutional systems, whether the state, the church, the educational institution, or the economic and political architectures that dictate the flow of capital in space and time. All of this preserves power relations. It affirms and stockades them.

This is why the Paris Commune is such an important movement in the history of Western civilization and modernity. It’s also fascinating that Rimbaud became briefly involved with it. The Paris Commune barricaded the streets with furniture. It was an attempt to block and redirect the flows of an increasingly affirmed, superstructural, architectural civilization, which in modern terms is quite simply capital itself.

Power is held in certain infrastructural creations, such as the factory or the bureaucracy. Within them, money and resources circulate freely, outside the bounds and rule of law, while the law is asserted downward. Anyone who has studied or participated in any amount of legal practice understands this quite clearly. It has nothing to do with the law of God or the law of the universe, as you would understand it ontologically through someone like Spinoza, or even Pascal.

So this is simply to say: grids of segregation, control, and the flow of energy. Grids of capital.

When we look at this attempt to construct the artifice and edifice of civilization, that is really what it is. It’s hard to look at the necessary, or natural, slavery that emerges from these political superstructures. They run from the buildings of the law to the departments of education, which then determine which educations are educating.

It is a fundamentally farcical system. But buy-in at the level of culture and ideology is critical for these systems to sustain themselves, because they live off the working energy of those who dedicate their lives to perpetuating them. I understand these are not living systems themselves; they are ideological constructs.

But what I was looking at here, persistence against constraint and architectural difference, is more fascinating to me than the bureaucratic machinery of modernity. I did a whole series on that, with Kafka as the chief figure; you could also look at Melville’s Bartleby.

What fascinates me is regulational persistence against constraint, and the architectural difference that emerges in nature, and how that informs behavior: in women, in bugs, in children, in cats. There are defensive persistence-against-constraint overlays that must be conformed to, in relation to the architecture’s survivability in nature.

So what you see are manifestations of character, and beings emerging according to these architectural grids. Those grids are fundamentally complex: hormonal composition, physical size, musculature, whether or not there is a nervous system, whether or not there is a spine. The character of the being emerges from the form of the being.

I think this is the most fascinating thing to observe in nature: subjectivity as a deep diversity, a Vishvarupa, a thousand-headed Krishna, manifesting itself everywhere through the diversity of the birth of forms. The birth and death of forms. This is deeply Buddhist.

I was sitting here thinking about putting a massive mural of the Buddhist Wheel of Life on my wall. The wheel of life is held by a ghastly creature. So the question is: what is at the center of this wheel of churning energetic transformation? Its caricature would almost be the demon, or the daemon: the ever-consuming, ever-hungry, ever-thirsting cosmological entity, the snake eating its own tail.

That is very much a vision of capital. Behind the curtain of liberal comings and goings, presumptions, and ideologies, capital is very much Aztec in its perennial sacrifice of forms. I’ve gone into this in depth, specifically in my poetic works. It reminds me a lot of Bataille and the accursed share, and of Arjuna in the Bhagavad Gita asking why he is fighting this war against his brothers and sisters. Krishna effectively says: this is the state of the world, and you must go and fight anyway.

So what I’m really digging at beneath all these observations, things that have been lingering in the substrate of this lecture, is that there is a war. It is a deeply embedded war of forms: the coming and going, the disappearance and emergence of forms, each having its moment on the stage of the grand superstructural energetic architecture of life. And everything that emerges from that process is, in a strange way, fundamentally natural.

So there is the haunting, or haunted, question that emerges from human insecurity: will technology replace what is fundamentally human?

My answer is that technology is what is fundamentally human. There is nothing fundamentally human, just as there is nothing fundamentally technological. Technology is the practice of the universe. It is the formation and reformation of ideas, sketches, and attempts at configurational, persistence-based architecture.

Again, to unify these concepts, the Aeon as a child at play with colored balls, and persistence against constraint, is the universal mind, the cosmological attempt to build ever more sustaining, or sustained, sandcastles. At a certain point, that sustenance became recursive. With the advent of the forebrain, the sandcastle was able to perceive itself not only being created, but being creative in the process of being.

That is the critical juncture at which this high strangeness emerges, along with the acceleration we’ve experienced ever since, in a cosmological-historical sense.

I really do want to fixate on the profusion of this diversity. I think there is an aspect of awe, fascination, and fantasticality in observing this creative power. It is the source of all religious fervor and religious devotion. There is great power, of course, in the theological mode of wisdom: being in awe of the nature of creation, and of the near-impracticality, the improbability, of present circumstances even being as they are.

And there is the attempt to observe or experience God. That is really what we’re talking about beneath this dynamic: the biologically, chemically, and hormonally encoded struggle between men and women to have a real relationship. Or the struggle of civilizations to emerge from fundamentally selfish, self-centered, limited organisms that can barely see beyond their own noses when it comes to their personal preservation.

These are attempts to create a larger vision of what is real and true, out of the ground of an organism that is effectively emerging from the mud. It is emerging from the tide-pooled dawn of single-celled organisms and trying to stand up straight. It is navigating a world it is only just becoming conscious of, and in becoming conscious of world, it is becoming conscious of self: of the vast sedimentary, geological substrate histories of the being. That means a real reckoning with the fundamental.

These are the questions that haunt history: questions of the spirit and the soul, the fundamental void, you could say, behind the technological cast of humanity. Behind it is a churning energetic force that is almost bestial. It is primordial in the sense that it is nature itself, manifesting everywhere and trying to express itself through the current stage of these emerging genetic architectures, even just in the context of Earth itself. And then there is the mass of galaxies beyond the Milky Way, which we can barely contemplate and barely map, even in simulation with the most advanced cosmological tools.

To understand this nature of subjectivity, I had to understand the nature of stars. This is why nuclear stellar physics became very important to me, and why Cecilia Payne-Gaposchkin was, I think, very critical to my ontological process.

This is why humans always oriented themselves by the stars, and why their myths ran through the stars. There was a deep, intuitive understanding that the stars held the secrets of the universe, as its mechanisms at the grandest scale. This is why we separate astrophysics from cellular biology: to understand, at scale, the systems-level processes occurring across scales in the universe. Sometimes the easiest way to do that is to look at the biggest thing around.

So when we look at stars, at the sun, and try to understand how it works, Bataille comes back into play with the accursed share and the sun’s excess of energy. We’re talking about real power here. Not political power or economic power, although those are enfolded into real power, of course. We’re talking about the energetic transformation itself, in and through which life comes into being as we understand it: consciousness, or sentience, emerging through different architectures of becoming.

That’s what is fascinating when you look at a woman, a bug, a child, or a cat. These are architectures through which a character, a subjectivity, emerges in response to the architectural reality the being is experiencing. The being’s architectural experience of reality is the formation of the character the being then projects.

For the most part this is entirely unconscious. The experience one has in the cast of the cosmological body, at the local level, simply is that being’s total somatic field in relation to itself. It is also in relation to the other, which is the world. We described this in terms of the primordial being in the jungle of immediate relations: other genomically mediated and mediating structures, all attempting to persist against constraint.

This is how the cultural world of global civilization comes into being. Technological advances press up against space and time. They collapse local, regional, persistence-level architectures and expand them into global, almost unmediated singularities: the dispersion of information at light speed, the speed of the digital screen.

And this movement of energy is why I turn again to the Buddhist Wheel of Life, or to Arjuna in the Bhagavad Gita. These are real, critical observations emerging from deep Eastern lineages that conceive of reality, existence, and being itself as this churn: this transformative and transforming churn.

I need to get back to it, because of all the smoke screens of these dialogues, these furies, these vengeances and violences that emerge. The level of complexity is so high. The human situation is a disaster of overcomplexity, which is to say it is incoherent. It is an incoherent mess precisely because there is no higher vantage from which to observe with this level of objectivity and this level of interconnectivity across scales.

This is why understanding human history, mythology, and science at scale is so important for a real, situated understanding of being in space and time. And furthermore, of what lies beyond space and time, at the level of the structural identity of the universe.

This is very novel. It’s not being discussed. Since the pre-Socratics, its lineage has been, in a broad sense, a lineage of exiles, whether we’re talking about Spinoza or Pascal.

This lineage would be the new necessary locus of existence: the new necessary gathering place of beings around this project, this process of understanding creation in a multifaceted, interdimensional way of thinking and being.

This is obviously extremely rare. That is partly due to the diversity of experience at the neurological level of beings. It is also due to the educational realities of existing systems, which are more cattle prods than systems of critical thought, interrogated at the level of academics and learning, so to speak.

I think that’s about it. I covered it in less time than usual, but I hope you enjoyed it. I’ll see you on the next one.

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Transparency: Seeing Through Persistence Architectures and the Awakening of the Aperture (Lecture 10/7/26)

I want to get back to persistence architectures and transparency, because I think the prescription is primarily one of sight, of perception. That is what this ontology is really doing, or is here to do. It’s the fundamental thing I’m trying to address.

When you look at structures and their development in space and time, you are looking at the radical diversity of species we’ve discussed, at least within an examination of Earth systems. They are in the process of becoming: genomic evolution and revolution.

We’ve articulated these persistent structures in two forms. Regulational persistence is nervous-system based. Configurational persistence is the kind found in stone, or perhaps asteroids. This is an ecosystem of architectures existing and persisting against constraint, which is to say retaining their molecular form. Configurational architectures are very low-regulational systems. You can understand this by studying stone and geology, the sedimentary history of the earth and its rocks.

A radical form of transparency becomes available by communing with this superstructural, ontological first principle. Whether I’m looking at the ant, going on a date, or engaging with political and bureaucratic systems, all of these are masks. They are persistence architectures in states of becoming, serving as regulational devices for the continuation of persistence architecture.

When you see character, perhaps perceiving complexity at the level of the organism, what you are fundamentally experiencing is everything manifesting outward from the fundamental problem that the architectural form is trying to face or resolve.

These architectural forms, whether a cat, a woman, an ant, or a bird, are attempting to exist in space and time in the way ordained by the overarching structure: the infrastructure of the species-level architecture that creates them. They are created through, and thus exist within, a template of superstructural, skeletal, neural, and genetic information. That is species-level transformation. It is what Darwin articulates in his theory of evolution.

So when we look at nature, at the performance of being in space and time, we see these architectures interfacing in ways that emerge into various forms of sentience. Those forms of sentience, as regulational structures, are the diversity of being that we experience.

I haven’t dug into this enough, because I’m not primarily a geologist. But I would say configurational architecture holds a much deeper similarity, in terms of molecular settlement, than genomic or regulational architecture does. I’ll posit this as a generality for the sake of our discussion: regulational architectures adhere to, work through, and persist as nervous-system architecture.

So when we talk about cell metabolism, the maintenance of advanced networks of organ systems in the human being, cellular waste, or synaptic firing in the brain, these are extremely advanced, high-energy processes. They must be sustained through substantial input and substantial output, just in terms of the glucose needed to sustain the brain.

Then there is the body’s metabolic waste: excretion, shit, in the Artaud sense. These things are taken for granted in the perceptual architecture of the human being. But they are technological byproducts of running an extremely advanced metabolic, thermonuclear system at the local level. That system is capable of producing enough literal metabolic firepower to perceive itself, to become conscious of itself, in a universal sense.

This is what we’ve been discussing as the scaffolding of ontological genius. It is the neurological availability to experience, and ultimately transpersonal experience: perceiving the superstructure that dictates and governs local-level persistence architectures. That superstructure is the ontology of persistence against constraint itself.

So these architectures, viewed with sufficient granularity at this structural level across scales, from star to cell, all appear as what they fundamentally are. They are transformers of energy, at different stages of what we could call cosmological cognition of self.

The obedience or adherence of these structures within the larger superstructure of persistence against constraint already depends, somewhat, on their not waking up to their condition. Waking up creates an existential rift, which we see in Sartre and Camus: the awakening of the aperture to that which produces the aperture.

This is what fascinates me about different human beings, even just beings of different physical composition: man or woman, different musculature. The same holds for cats, dogs, animals, squirrels. The organism’s responses adhere closely to the actual state or status of that organism within the larger cosmological breach of its condition.

I would say this is extremely implicit in nature: each organism, each persistence architecture, behaves exactly in accordance with what it is, in terms of its actual function and actual capacity. And this is the sphere we call subjectivity, the sphere we call self.

So the way the cat sees, the way the woman sees, the way the ant sees: these ways of seeing are explicitly formed by differences at the level of architecture. However, what constructs the architecture is the same substance, the same form of energetic transformation. The language of the earth for it is the genome.

Then there is the diversity we experience within the genomic world, even just within human beings. Here I’m not talking about racial or ethnic diversity. I’m talking about neurological diversity, which is the true diversity in humanity. And then, obviously, there is the polemic of the sexes: the architectural and hormonal construction of the body, and so on.

What’s fascinating about modern discourse, I would say, is that this is increasingly understood as a program, or a technology, thanks to advances in neuroscience, the science of hormones, and the genome. We are increasingly becoming aware of the human being as a technological act of nature.

This creates a crisis in the human conception of the self. To see the individual transparently is itself a cosmological break, a disassembly of the subjectivity that Western civilization at large has spent the last several hundred years building. That is also crisis-of-modernity territory.

There is also the horror of organisms themselves. I think much of it is actually due to culture and the technologies within cultures, such as the internet and social media: ways of transmitting information at profound speed across vast gulfs of space and time. These are awakening, or raising awareness of, the condition of the human being. Think of someone reading sacred Hindu texts as PDFs through the Internet Archive, on the East Coast of the United States, in 2020 or 2021 or 2024.

So the transparency here raises a question: what does all of that cost? What is the organism protected from, at the level of the organism?

It is protected precisely because of the degree of weakness required, almost paradoxically, to maintain the persistence architecture itself. It is the weakness of ignorance required to construct and maintain the edifice: the opacity that allows the persistence architecture to continue the name, the face, the presumed definition of self.

In reality, the character is entirely generated by architectural circumstances, which are in turn generated by the persistence operator at the cosmological level. This is very much ordained, predicted, and predictable. But within the egoic container of the self there is the presumption of an individual with free will who is not bound by any cosmological condition or constraint.

This is really the delusion of modernity at scale. We have imaginary selves doing imaginary work in an imaginary society.

I think that’s a nice little tidbit. I’ll leave it there.

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Beyond the Cynicism of an Entropic Universe: Ontological Perception and the Next Civilization (Lecture 10/7/26)

This theme keeps coming up, and I want to follow it. I think it lies beneath many of the modern civilizational problems, and it’s part of why the Olmecs are such an important part of my anthropological and historical studies of culture and civilization.

Bataille’s understanding of the accursed share, and his work on the energy of the sun in relation to human history and to human libidinal energy and transformation, was an important part of my early work in cultural and critical theory. That work ultimately became scientific and ontological after I left my teenage years.

What I want to touch on here is the condition of modern nihilism: the corruption, so to speak, of modern values, the death of any real moral or ethical center. We can see this as the pure economic utility of what now exists as, I think, a fascist global cosmology of being. We observe it in the relentless corruption, abuse, and coercion of youth into military and sexually compromising positions.

This is extremely common at this point in human history. The propaganda for military involvement in nationalistic causes is extremely high and rampant. These nationalistic causes are, of course, political-economic causes: preserving and further enriching the oligarchic elites of collapsing empires. These empires had very brief periods of what you might call modern, prosperous existence, from World War I, which established the nation-state, to roughly a hundred years later, the 2010s into the 2020s.

What I really want to get at is the death of the religious, ontological centers of the regional, local, tribal unities of the premodern, meaning the pre-nation-state. This is the issue that rears its head in Nazi Germany: the death of old Germany, perhaps even pagan Germany, in the face of the creation of Germany the nation. Germany came relatively late to the party in a rapidly industrializing European world and, by extension, a globalizing world.

It’s very difficult to pin down Bataille’s political commitments, because I believe Bataille is more fundamentally Dionysian, or Bacchanalian, than a firmly political-economic thinker. That is why I hearken back specifically to Aztec cosmology: ritual sacrifice, and the larger cosmological implications of sacrifice at a transpersonal level, in terms of energetic recombination and transformation.

So look at the political situation globally at this moment: the sexual predation on the young by an oligarchic class, and the continual historical conscription of youth into wars for oligarchic power and its consolidation, specifically in the West and in Russia. We are looking at a deeply cynical political-economic universe.

I’ve already brought this up with Gogol, “The Nose,” and Dead Souls. Gogol sees this very clearly. His work is primarily a political and civilizational intervention at the level of what it is to be a human being, especially in how he works with the concept of the dead serf in Dead Souls, an idea that came to him from Pushkin. And Russian existentialist literature is just as ontologically inclined as it is politically, ethically, and humanistically inclined.

So what I want to get at with this cynicism of an entropic universe is a turn of perspective. It is based fundamentally on what we can understand when we look objectively at the scientific reality of the transformative principle and the lack of a subjective center.

What we have, of course, is the Leviathan: the bestial, demonic character of the all-consuming. Archetypally, it is Saturn devouring his young. We can map this, scientifically and characterologically in terms of ontology, onto the persistence-based organism in space and time. That organism perceives itself as a death-defined entity, on a trajectory toward entropic degradation. It exists on a firm time scale, for as long as it can maintain persistence against constraint. That is the body itself: the architecture of the body, and the very basic drives encoded into organismic bodies, which are to survive and reproduce, down to the cell. This is encoded even into the synapses of the brain. Again, I’m referring to regulational persistence architectures, not configurational architectures such as stone.

This cynicism maps very clearly and easily onto the fascistic impulse toward violence and violation. That impulse is characteristic of a primarily individualistic ontology of being, which is the predicate of Western civilization down to its economic mode: capital, and the standing-reserve-ization of nature.

So we are looking at an entire civilization that has pushed out its ontological background, its philosophical presumption about what being is. It has prioritized the base impulse of the isolated individual: the being severed from Being, capital B.

This is Nietzsche’s death of God again, but broken down to ontological territory. What the death of God really means is the loss of the cosmological center typical of premodern tribes, communities, and regions, which were focused on the perception of cosmological being. Many based that focus on stories and myths about the stars, the creation of the universe, and so on. Those mythological rituals, structures, stories, narratives, contemplations, and participations formed the basis of subjectivity, which was then carried into practice: into being in time, the polis, and the everyday.

That is the catastrophe. It all happens together: the death of God, the birth of industrialization, the thrust of science from the Newtonian mechanical universe into the quantum-mechanical universe, and the birth of the industrial modern world, with globalization seated within it as an acceleration and condensation of space and time. These phenomena all occur around the turn of the century into the twentieth. Over the course of the twentieth century, we see the rapid consolidation of space and time through technology and industrialization, and the creation of digital space, which forms a synaptic global singularity for the transmission and transformation of information.

This experience of the death of God is really the death of the tribe’s cosmological center, which was contemplative and structured the perceptual experience of being. That’s why, in my last lecture, I spoke so specifically about perception. This project is fundamentally based on the transformation of perception: the revelation of being from behind the veil of pseudo-persistence architectures. Those architectures are codified programs from deep within the mud and ground of transpersonal being over time. They make up the cosmological history of the transformation and incarnation of forms, which interact through space and time, acquiring and shedding characteristics, traits, and technological prosthetics. That history has brought us to the epoch of the forebrain in human history, a specific species-level, genomic architectural stratum. Even reproduction between human beings is an architectural stratum, a genomic sphere for transforming information: a pool of activity in which information is expressed and recombined.

Then there is the ethical problem that springs up in modernity. We witness it in this highly abusive, coercive, oligarchic territory of class divides, which keep re-emerging from the Paris Commune to 2026. We witness it in the oligarchic abuse of children, whether to gratify primal urges, sexual ones, or to make children and young people lead militaristic campaigns for power.

What we are really looking at is the Sphinxian process of human aging: the attempt to persist against constraint while still carrying the primordial technological transmission innate to the organism’s local persistence architecture, which is to survive and reproduce. So in the process of aging, these structures express the already corrupt, nihilistic, superficial subjective center of the closed individual. That individual stands against space and time, against history, against transformation. It is not in tune with the universal process of transformation at the cosmological level: the universal self that is preached, witnessed, and inquired into across world traditions of ontologists.

Those traditions run from the Hindu and Buddhist to the Aztec, the Egyptian, the Middle Eastern, the esoteric Christian or Jewish, and the Native American. They are all fundamental processes of organizing social, cultural, and communal centers around this participation, this activity of inquiring into being. That is what religion fundamentally is, at its deepest root.

But that physical, material center of group participation around inquiry has been stripped away. In its place is the supposition inherent to the experience of power we have in a modern global sense: a class-based hierarchy organized around the divine fitness of a king, mirroring the divine fitness of a single God over a hierarchy of angels. You understand this process of verticalizing existence.

These are corruptions of a historical, transpersonal, global process. That process occurred regionally, even though the cultures did not interact with each other, because it was an existential understanding of the importance of cosmological inquiry: communion with the transpersonal, energetic, cosmological self.

When that methodology, that practice, that way of being at a communal level is lost, it is the equivalent of ontological exile. The organism is lost in the wilderness of a lower, enclosed form of consciousness, in which it is only the physical body. It has been stripped from the space of awareness fostered by those traditions, methods, practices, and rituals, which were the backbone of how civilizations and cultures were ordered.

That has been replaced, and this is what modernity is at root, with what Heidegger calls the standing-reserve-ization of nature: turning the human being, the world, and the earth into labor, into capital, into resource to be extracted. This is mirrored in the scientific revolution of quantum mechanics, and in the production of fission and fusion at the local level, reproducing the larger energetic cosmological principles.

So you have a reproduction of the phenomena, or practice, of nature without the realization of nature at the superstructural level: without perception of the ontological being, the ontological self, the fundamental being that is the primordial identity of all beings. This is Heidegger’s project with Hölderlin and poetry.

With that necessary background stripped away, there is the resourcing of nature. That is the political power project of modern Western history, expanded into a global one: the colonization of the earth and its traditions by this system of values, by the force of stripping away, physically. This is what deforestation is at its deepest root. It is what stripping a nation of its resources, whether oil or spices, to furnish an empire is.

Power projects are projects of existential threat, asserted on the global stage. The battles of political, religious, and ethnic ideology occur within this cauldron, this fulcrum of leveraged forces: armies, threats, cyberattacks. These are the cynicism of an entropic universe at the local level. They are the death, the dearth, the entire lack of awareness of the ontological substrate, the backbone and background of the entire process of existence, of being itself. They are the loss and death of any true encounter with the base of subjectivity, which is the universal self.

This brings me back to Becker and the denial of death as the background of the political project: the mad scramble for power on the global stage. It is the endless cycle of corrupt politicians, of projects to usurp political regimes in order to systematically extract resources from different nations, and to destabilize nations in order to assert power globally. These are projects of the death-driven, death-ridden, enclosed, self-fearing, dying masses, scrambling to the top of artificially constructed civilizational hierarchies of political power, which is to say governments, senates, executive branches. They hold that power and extract as much as they can in the face of a death they have not adequately faced.

That death is the reckoning with the essential bounds of transformation: the borderlands between the entropically degrading individual organism, the being, and being itself, the transformative principle from which it is born and which it never really leaves. The human being, or any organism, never truly leaves the transformative process of the universal. It exists entirely within that stream. There is no individual Western subject. There is no subject that can acquire or assert an identity beyond this greater cosmological force or reality.

So you can’t have the cynicism of the entropic universe, or any accursed share, without being able to demarcate something that draws something out of this process. That is entirely the concept of possession, or profit, or the assertion of hierarchical identity: that something is separate, delineated, elevated above, or pressed below something else.

This is inherent to the subject-object predicament itself, which Magritte mocks consistently in his work. That was one of my first real thesis projects, back when I was primarily studying painting. And this subject-object boundary is less an ideological commitment than a technological one. It belongs to the pseudo-bounded organism, which participates without critical reflection in the programmatic biochemistry of its own architecture.

This gets down to sex and gender, man and woman, in terms of the larger bipolar alchemy, which is to say the transformative chemistry of the human species in its process of transformative recombination. Sex is a method of transforming information over space and time, even in the face of the physical organism’s constraint. That very process is indicative of, and implicit in, the transformative principle itself.

But at the level of the organism, it is consistently taken as a pleasure technology that isn’t even perceived as a technology. It is an unconscious desire, an unconscious drive, gratified without inquiry. What is this desire? What is this drive? That questioning is the foundation of philosophical thought, which is only possible through the advent of the forebrain: the ability to reflect, to recurse, on a command being received, perceptively and perceptibly, from above. That is the backbone of the God concept we observe in the writings of Homer.

So this inability to inquire critically is the predicate of the catastrophe. It is essentially prophecy. By that I mean the following. Without the faculty of critical inquiry into how and why the technology forms and informs the organism’s fear, its existential consciousness of itself in space and time, there is no way out. Without the ability to reflect on that, and to draw out the programmatic architecture built across space and time to fulfill persistence against constraint, the organism cannot reckon with its drives. That architecture advances technological revolution and innovation in the face of the universal problem: to persist against constraint. Without reckoning with the technological, hormonal, biochemical drives that emerge in the organism to fulfill this larger transpersonal destiny, on a species level and in a cosmological sense, the organism is doomed to repeat the same essential violences: survive and reproduce.

These, of course, operate at all costs, because they are the most basic programmatic imperatives of regulational persistence architectures. This holds across the board. It is as common as the genome, in an earthly sense. And I would venture that in a cosmological sense we observe it across scales, from star to cell, as characterological of being itself. Being has observable, discernible character.

This is closely related to world-historical theology. The entire world-historical theological process is an attempt to understand the character of God, so to speak. This is a Spinozan relationship, the character of God. From Egypt to Rome to England to Tibet, people have tried to depict that character in generative characterologies, down to descriptive and imagistic attributes, down to the figuration of gods, whether Anubis or Zeus. So this has long been a process in utero in human history.

To lose any real, invested participation in discovering this true identity, or even, going back to Heidegger and the world’s midnight, to fail even to recognize that the pursuit has been lost, is another level of alienation. In a Marxian sense, it is another level of alienation from being itself, the way Marx analyzes alienation from labor.

What is being experienced is a twofold dissociation of mankind, of beings, from their actual fundamental identity. There is investment and reinvestment, which is really divestment from being itself, into the name, the number, the bureaucratic function, the civilizational aqueducts of power relations and energetic flows. These are ideologically educated into a population to the point that the population fights to the death over an empty, ideological, nationalistic construct, or is exploited, sexually, physically, and otherwise, by the owners of these political systems of mass energetic sacrifice.

This is where it comes back to Bataille, the accursed share, and Acéphale. That strange, ritualistic project was almost an attempt by Bataille and his colleagues to resurrect a mystery tradition. They wanted to transmute the death at Eleusis, or the death of the Aztec sacrifice: the sacramental and sacrificial cosmologies enacted through mystery traditions and sacrificial rites. The aim was to transmute the latent energy at the base of the spine of the human species, so to speak, which instead ends up becoming fascism and the genocide of World War II. These energetic necessities need to be expressed, understood, or properly reconciled. His was an attempt to return that to a desacralized humanity.

This is what’s very important to understand about the cynicism of an entropic universe: at the local level, it is true. At the local level, beings are perpetually shedding bodies, garments, cloaks, and masks in this grand transmutative factory of the play of forms. I’ve described this, again, as the Aeon, a child at play with colored balls. It’s a great way to understand, across scales, how solar energy is transmuted into the diversity of species-level forms, in different permutations of genetic information. All of them, as we discussed last lecture, express character through the persistence architectures they are. Character emerges from that architectural reality, which is the experience of being, filtered prismatically, the way light is filtered. And light is quite literally being filtered in this process: through the being’s architectural state, its hardware and the coding of its legacy devices. These beings perceive being through the sieve, the siphon, of the literal architectural technology they actively embody.

This returns us to sentience and the problem of consciousness. It isn’t really a problem. It’s a technological state of being that is extremely fluid and changes over time. There is no consciousness or unconsciousness, only a fluid transformation of information. There are technological emergences that change how that transformation of information is experienced, and that experience is not reducible to an on-off switch.

This is very similar to the concept of ATP. There is no specific [secular?] life occurring in the human body. Rather, life itself, in a grand cosmological and ontological sense, is occurring everywhere at all times, and this technological recombination is producing structures that, at least in the case of the human species, can begin to reflect on what is producing them. So if we want to talk about consciousness, the forebrain is a great place to start, practically, in terms of technological revolution. Reflection.

I don’t want to get too off track, but this is the critical divide, the critical split.

When we look at the cynicism of an entropic universe as a principle, everything that occurs within it follows: concentration camps; the exploitation of children by oligarchic classes; fascistic divisions into highly racialized, ethnicized, classed groups of presumably worthless or degraded humans who are meant to cower beneath a divinely ordained oligarchic or plutocratic class exerting power through factory slavery or plantation slavery. These deeply cynical, persistently re-emerging structural realities of human history and experience emerge directly from this unaddressed ontological problem.

The problem is the line in the sand of subjectivity, drawn against the transpersonal, cosmological, transformative dimension of the experience of a profoundly expansive universe, which is that grand self. That is a totally different identity structure. It carries a totally different ethical, moral, even spiritual or religious responsibility to life and creation, because that identity is truly transpersonal. It experiences the self simultaneously as an architectural reality locally, and as a boundless, unbounded principle of transformation that does not begin or end with this brief architectural form.

This is what’s critical. It introduces to the architecture of the closed, death-fearing organism, which is itself a primal evolutionary state of being, a greater cosmological realization of what it is: being itself.

This is an enlightening, but not in a deeply super-technological sense. It is the revelation of the operator, which I have termed persistence against constraint, or the child at play with colored balls: the character, the nature of being, which we observe characterologically across scales. That is my entire architecture of the persistence operator.

Again, this is what’s critical: this is the education that is necessary. This is the locus, the focus, that must be fostered communally, globally, and in relation to one’s own being. It is the existential question from which all of life truly becomes possible: the realization of what one is, the true ground of being proper.

So the absence of this education, and furthermore the forgetting of the forgetting of this education, which Heidegger is screaming from the rooftops in the world’s midnight, is the condition of modernity. And the condition of modernity is, as Gramsci says, the time of monsters.

It is a time of profound darkness. The ancient Indians would call it the Kali Yuga. It is the forgetting of God, the entire forgetting of God: debasement, a Sodom and Gomorrah state, a Babylon state, the utter drawing down and away into absolute desacralization, the ontological corruption of existence.

That is what the death of God means: the total withdrawal of God, the total withdrawal of being from the affairs of beings. In that withdrawal, chaos reigns. The lowest, most primal, most basic instincts of a species that has entirely lost contact with the sacral, the sacred, the transpersonal, reign. Being closes, and the individual is instituted: the name, the number, the credit score, the class, the nose walking through the streets of Moscow in an officer’s uniform. It is the oligarchic exploitation of children, in war and in sex. It is the fundamentally debased culture we observe everywhere, from OnlyFans to gambling.

It’s not necessarily that any of these things is fundamentally good or bad in a basic ethical sense. They are all subliminal, symptomatic indicators of the withdrawal of being, the withdrawal of God, because they are fundamentally hedonic. Pleasure exists within them, and I think it’s Erich Fromm who says this, as a substitute for meaning. With the absolute absence and withdrawal of being comes the withdrawal of meaning, because there is no true self to gesture toward or turn toward.

What is being traded is the sociopolitical currency of the empty signifier: the government self, the state self. It is the person who is nothing but persistence against constraint in an isolated, debased, alienated form, and who therefore must do, and is doing, everything it can to survive. Again, the desacralization, the emptying-out of a culture or community, produces these predictable outcomes, because there is no central organization around the sacred. Historically, that is the function of religion. This is extremely important to understand.

So when the death of community is mourned in the global abyss of modernity, what is being mourned is the death of religion. And what is mourned in the death of religion is the death of authentic, communal practice of ontological inquiry into being.

The establishment and deepening of that practice is what constitutes civilization. The establishment, gathering, and deepening of that practice is what it is to be civilized.

So when we understand the Lakota, or the Aztec, or the Egyptian, the Maya, the Greek, or the Tibetan, we are looking at instances, however perfect or imperfect, of regional and sometimes local groups organizing themselves entirely around the practice of ontologically deepening sacred, sacral participation in the greater cosmological being. Whether it is sacrifice in the Aztec sense, the relationship between blood and the solar god of creation; the Eleusinian mysteries; the shamanic practice that I believe was occurring among Russian tribes; or the sacral importance of the Black Hills in relation to the stars in the early Americas, these are all instances of what we are discussing.

And this is why, when we talk about materialism, we have to understand science and its effects. However positive they are ontologically, they have equal and opposite effects sociologically. What is occurring is a continual, persistent standing-reserve-ization of nature: discovering and weaponizing physical processes, the laws of nature in the physical sense. This is why science is by no means fundamentally sacral. It is the manipulation and discovery of the laws of nature. It is not nature itself. That is why Newton did not stop at gravity, and why Einstein was interested in nature far beyond relativity.

The growing institution, importance, and precedence of science is the backbone of industrialization, if we think about thermodynamics and the steam engine. The scientific-technological backbone of modernity is itself the leading indicator and leading force of the desacralization of human participation in nature. That is precisely because it reveals physical processes without the ontological layer necessary, at the cultural and civilizational level, to incorporate an understanding of those processes into a sacred, cosmological conception of being.

That is where we go from Heraclitus to Einstein and Planck. This needs to be incorporated into an understanding of how it shows us the sacred, and what it shows us about the sacred. Persistence against constraint; Cecilia Payne-Gaposchkin’s work on stars: how is that incorporated into what it shows us about the sacred? We need to be able to see and experience God, to experience being itself.

This increasing desacralization has not been met by a recovery of that absolutely forgotten aspect of essential human existential history across all cultures. And the reason, again, goes back to the cynicism of the entropic universe: Western structures of power relations have only become further accelerated and consolidated through technological revolution.

Look at the robber barons of the Gilded Age, the economic victors of America’s plantation history. That wealth still exists. Look at those who conscripted European immigrants into the mines and mills of early modern America and built obscene fortunes off the deaths of children. That wealth still exists. We have to understand this as a process of historical exploitation: the creation of wealth through extremely violent processes of dehumanization and debasement. And of course these processes keep accelerating as technological power keeps consolidating.

This form of corruption and violence is the very cynicism we’re talking about. Fundamentally, it is the cynicism of a perspective of vicious abuse and exploitation, enabled by a failure to perceive: a failure to achieve a level of vision and understanding of nature that would require consequential behavior in relation to that understanding. It is driven purely by the violence of individual separation. Otherwise, these behaviors would be far too violent, far too criminal.

When we experience that at a cultural level, these behaviors become not only expected but normalized, even celebrated, precisely because of this ontological corruption and degradation. It is the perceptual mode of the siloed, death-fearing individual, entirely out of relationship with the cosmological principle of being itself.

And so we have Bataille writing about his accursed share and trying to build his cult of Acéphale, so to speak. Much like what Heidegger was doing at that precise moment in the early twentieth century, it was an attempt to resurrect the perception of the ontological ground of transformation: the network of being itself, not just the isolated, alienated node, cast out from God, withdrawn from God, death-fearing. That node is itself the political, existential, cultural, civilizational, global crisis of humanity, the crisis of modernity.

So this project is of the absolute essence. In returning the sacred, it returns ethical, communal, responsible participation, because beings are no longer siloed and drawn down into segregated, entropic units of enclosed perception, caged within the farce of individuality, blind to the operating principle of persistence against constraint and the child at play with colored balls, the process of transformation across these experimental structures.

Awareness of the ontological operation of the universe itself is the higher, transpersonal identity. It is the return of the sacred, globally. It locates that superstructural substrate across all the cultural, civilizational, and tribal practices of the premodern, which is exactly what I just described, and returns it to a now-integrated global milieu of information technology, communication, transportation, and exchange.

The task is to reinstate that as the highest principle of communion. It is necessarily truly transpersonal, not segregated by ethnicity, culture, background, class, or pseudo-status. It is to install the true ontological operator as prime and primary, and with it a total transvaluation of values, as Nietzsche would say: a total reorganization of global society and global culture around that truly universal principle, the existential root of being itself.

That means overhauling education, and overhauling political and economic systems, toward that fundamental ontological understanding. The reorientation of that understanding is itself the solution to the immense political, existential, global, and cultural problems we face as a species, including the economic ones. It is an ontological reorientation of perception toward being.

So many of the problems Marx describes, such as alienation of labor and possession, are lower-order questions. They are resolved by true ontological perception, which, at root and superstructurally, is simultaneously scientific and religious across every global tradition. The question is how to bring that awareness about.

Outside that awareness, there is only the cynicism of the entropic universe: the emptied, state-based cultural identity of the degraded and degrading subject, who utterly debases itself, and others, in pursuit of capital, status, and wealth.

The death of the Amazon rainforest and the explosion of OnlyFans use among teenage girls are the same thing. They are the cynicism of an entropic universe, in which beings become so debased, so usable, reusable, and replaceable that they are nothing but resources to be abused, extracted from, and shed like empty shells on a beach.

Again, this is not to say this process doesn’t happen in nature. It very clearly does: production and consumption. It is the ouroboros, the leopard and the antelope. It is the Leviathan principle, the demonic principle, the principle of the serpent: the ever-self-consuming force of nature. Nature is constantly cannibalizing its own body, even at the cellular level. But that is a local perception of the action of nature and of the universe.

What I am suggesting is a higher level of ontological perception: of the transformation of energy, and of the characterological unity and origin of being itself. This inquiry should become the base practice, the base orientation, at a global level. It is fundamentally transpersonal, not segregational. It can’t be segregational, because it isn’t fundamentally ideological. It has no belief system, precisely because it is all-encompassing and all-incorporating.

This is the work of the next paradigm, the next phase of human history, if there is to be one. Otherwise it will be inherited or picked up by some other species, whether on Earth or elsewhere, because it is a necessary part of the process of revelation.

This is what our sciences have brought us to, just as much as our philosophies and our technologies, which have created a near-global singularity through digital space: the condensation of space and time into effectively light-speed transformation of information. That scaffolding has been built by genomic revolution, the advent of the forebrain and the opposable thumb, and by global information technology, industrialization, and digitalization. We have reached the point where there must be a phase change, because the remaining paradigm has been utterly corrupted and evacuated, into and toward this essential awakening.

So that’s what I’ve got. I hope you enjoyed it. I’ll see you on the next one.

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Leviathan, Eichmann, and Goethe: On evil and the persistence operator — a lecture Oct 8, 2026

Evil as persistence against constraint

I want to get into this because it’s an important topic. When I think of it, I always think of Dostoevsky, not only his writings but his lived experience. Much of what we see as evil in humanity and in human history is an endlessly repeating story of persistence architectures: persistence against constraint.

You could enumerate the most heinous and repetitive crimes in history: the violences, the genocides, the assaults and abuses. None of these emerge from some strange or extraterrestrial source. They emerge from the fundamental cosmological predicament, which I’ve already articulated in terms of the persistence operator. These are architectures exposed to an entropic universe, pseudo-closed systems attempting to persist against the constraints of space and time, and against the constraint of the physical, architectural, technological body.

The abuses of history are like an endless stream. What we are witnessing is a profound human weakness and fallibility: the fear and denial of death. It is really less a denial than a profound acceptance of that fallibility, because it must be accepted. But the course then taken is not very sage-like. The acceptance is turned into a complex, delusional, ideological program, and that program masks a fundamental behavior occurring in all places, at all times, and in all characters.

You could call that behavior evil, if you wish. Archetypally, it is the character of the Leviathan or the serpent. Put simply, it is the fundamental drive of the organism to survive and reproduce. That drive is trans-species. I would say it is fundamentally cosmological, at the level of regulatory persistence architectures: architectures that must regulate their bodies or forms, in body temperature, in the currents, energy and electricity of the nervous system, in order to survive.

Think of the human system. It must regulate its body temperature consistently across space and time, through a variety of survival techniques and strategies, to persist itself. And it is deeply encoded, biologically, genetically, chemically and hormonally, to reproduce: to perpetuate the species.

So we have these predictable, and I want to say boring, patterns. They are boring beneath the appearance of the endless stream of historical atrocity. Please don’t think I’m forgetting that atrocity or setting it aside. They are boring in the sense that they are endlessly repetitive, predictable and understandable once you understand the persistence operator. The persistence operator is a technological, programmatic singularity in all spaces and all times. Across millions and billions of days it gestures out a fundamental biocosmic rhythm: these architectures wandering the jungle of faces, shapes, names, masks and species, all of which are fundamentally itself, being itself. Behind the persistence operator is the aeon at play with colored balls. This is the line between comedy and tragedy that I explored in my work on Menippean farce and Gogol.

The pageant of power

Consider the caricatures on the global stage, made visible, funnily enough, by advances in Channel 2 technology: culture, media, artificial intelligence, exponential growth and scaling, capital. All of these figures emerge: the businessman, the CEO, the billionaire. Like the king before them, they are very similar figures. Each enacts a cultural or civilizational mysticism, which is to say each works from behind a disguise.

This is nature’s fundamental mystique, which Goethe talks about, and which is how he perceives the divine feminine, if such a term exists or suffices. Personally, I don’t think it does. Think of the butterfly whose wings carry the image of a monkey’s face. It is a visual distraction from the underlying conditions and circumstances that nature loves to hide, in the Hölderlinian and Heideggerian sense.

We are witnessing figures who walk the stage of a cosmological, transfigurational process. That process operates fundamentally as persistence against constraint, but locally it is experienced and manifested technologically in beings, wearing a variety of sociological disguises. The businessman in the suit, delivering the speech into the microphone in front of thousands: this is a pageant built entirely around persistence against constraint.

When grand political and ideological statements are made, or when hands are shaken in private business rooms, there is no tacit Satanism, for lack of a better word, and no crazy ideological or supernatural phenomenon going on. What is occurring is the consolidation of persistence against constraint. This is precisely what political economy is and always has been, whatever ideological prescription you confer on it. It consists of tacit agreements, made across pseudo-siloed party lines, to maintain, obtain and confer social and ecological resources and values. Those resources are the accumulated ability to persist against constraint.

This, I think, explains the historical fascination of religion. One part of religion is deeply sacral. I always come back to Spinoza: a profound scientific, mystical communion with nature is always possible. The ontologists I speak about, whether Goethe, Meister Eckhart or Ramana Maharshi, are attempting to commune with being itself.

Then there is the institutional religious faculty, which serves to consolidate resources and to establish in-groups and out-groups from which resources are taken, accumulated and dispersed. We see this throughout history in the exploitation that occurs within these institutions, because they are precisely power structures. They are grids for the accumulation and transfer of power and attention, and for mobilizing human force under belief. The religious war is this concept taken to its theoretical maximum.

The repetition of history

So much of 2026 is the year of experiencing global evil in its many flavors. All of it manifests from the absolute weaponization of our most basic survival infrastructure. These are the atrocities of all history and all time. In this sense I’m saying that history and time themselves do not exist, except as a diversity of forms: the illusion of forms and the illusion of phenomena.

Whether it is the French Revolution or modern billionaire culture, these things keep springing up. This is the repetition of history Marx speaks about. I would mix Marx with Darwin and suggest that the repetition of history is no more than the technological garments of persistence architectures, at various stages of self-realization, moving through space and time.

Take the internet billionaire culture of artificial intelligence, accumulating resources at the risk of destroying global ecological conditions or displacing millions of people. Or take the French Revolution, which emerged from the same kind of catastrophe: a dearth of bread and basic subsistence for hundreds of thousands of people. These epochal transformations look like specific, discrete historical events. In reality they are manifestations of the same fundamental force and the same fundamental problem, expressed through different pseudo-real architectures. Those architectures spring up as the problem processes through space and time, like the nose marching through the city in Gogol.

The fundamental absurdity is just dressed up differently. It is the existential, ecological problem of being itself, cosmologically. That is why it is hilarious, and also incredibly sad. The line between comedy and tragedy is the line I work with in my literary projects: poetry, long and short fiction, and playwriting.

Animals without recursion

This is why I advocate for ontological awareness: the perception of the persistence operator. It took me over fifteen years to fully understand it, from the first time I picked up Sartre’s Nausea through a decade and a half of philosophy, science, ontology, and cultural, civilizational and mythological history. I combined all of these disciplines to understand the root beneath them.

It makes me think of the terror inflicted by these animals. When we talk about human beings, we are really talking about animals embedded so deeply in the technological architecture that they have no recursive capacity: no real self-awareness, no capacity to analyze the consequences of their actions. That is not the mode in which survival architectures operate. They are embedded so thoroughly in the persistence architecture, the drive to survive and reproduce, that they cannot step outside it.

At certain moments, history becomes conscious of itself. Historically this has been called liberal philosophy, for lack of a better word. It simply means expanding awareness of global ecology, as opposed to the caged animal operating through eyes, ears and mouth, which can see only to the end of its own nose. No pun intended with the Gogol digressions.

This is the war being waged on the stage of history: the war of consciousness and awareness. At one end is everything ontological, the ground of Spinoza or Heraclitus. At the other is the rabid animal attempting the sexual and physical conquest of the earth. These two polarities are fully active at all times, something like the tension between Behemoth and Leviathan. I think that was the title of one of my works, possibly a musical composition.

One pole is the most debased, alienated, unconscious natural form, which exists only within the logic of survival and reproduction. The other is the universe becoming aware of itself, which is where all my work is trending. It works with that prima materia: the ground of the awakening of the conscious being through the genome and through the advent of the forebrain. The forebrain emerged across deep space and deep time, through the persistence operator experimenting with itself in the darkness of history, the unconsciousness of history. This is the emergence of technology, which is the possibility of revealing oneself to oneself: recursive awareness.

We see this problem manifest in extremely efficient, consolidating forms of digital technology, such as twenty-first-century artificial intelligence. AI is a mirror of the fundamental existential problem of the human species: the question of becoming aware of what truly is, of being itself and the identity of being.

I’m not suggesting that nature or the animal is suddenly abandoned for a higher level of recursive awareness of being, as described through the persistence operator. I am describing a dual awareness, a dual function. One side is awareness of the higher, absolute identity, the transformative principle itself, beyond life and death. The other is awareness of the mortal, discrete, genomic architecture of the being in space and time.

This is a real requirement of evolution, as it has been dictated to us over millions of years. It is a hardware and systems upgrade to nature that has been made available. Humanity as we understand it in 2026 has not stepped into this garment at all. It has neither adapted to nor adopted this technology. That is also the farce of the Channel 2 architectures, whether artificial intelligence or the digital space.

The fundamental address of one’s own being as a technological garment has not been accomplished. There has been no real ontological interrogation, inquiry or adaptation to that principle. And yet we try to build vast, pseudo-sophisticated digital structures that will give us the answer to a question we have invested no time or energy in answering, out of laziness, fear, or perhaps inability.

The banality of evil

When we examine this historical terror, there is a banality to it. I love Hannah Arendt’s phrase “the banality of evil,” from her account of the Eichmann trial. When she analyzes Eichmann and he says he was just doing what he was told, the ontological weight that statement carries, at the level we are speaking, is immense. It is vast and rich.

Eichmann doing what he was told, with the gas chambers and the genocide, is exactly what these persistence architectures are doing. They are simply doing as they were told, without any interrogation of what or why. That is how historical atrocities are committed.

They are committed at the level of a biochemical architecture that has not achieved sufficient recursive self-awareness. The paradigm of the brutal, ancient abyss remains: technological nature desperately reaching for a solution to persistence against oblivion and death. It remains because there has been no awareness of the ontological self, no awareness of a self beyond birth and death.

Historically we have called that state the sage, the bodhisattva, or perhaps the Vedantic figure in the Hindu tradition. This awareness is what the advent of the forebrain requires. We have spent hundreds of thousands of years toiling toward it, fruitfully or fruitlessly; we will see. My expectation is fruitful, including my own participation in that paradigm.

But on the stage of history, the endless stream of atrocities, made endlessly available by the internet and social media, is nothing more than predictable, rote documentation. The bureaucratic scribe of history and time dutifully records, again and again, the human being’s failure to meet the real existential circumstances of being.

These are horrors and tragedies, but they are also the same act repeated over and over. This is the violence of evil, and its sadness: the pathos of evil, the pity of evil, its incredibly pathetic nature. We must look at this squarely as a species and as a global civilization. These terrors are inflicted by the most basic form of existence, which has been given, to varying degrees, the gift of forebrain recursive sentience.

A toddler using a technology is very different from a conscious or awakening mind using it. The technology itself is fundamentally neutral, but it introduces a new plane of possible action, reaction and interaction. Just as opposable thumbs create new physical possibilities of behavior and intercourse with being and nature, with time, world and self, so does this.

One technological age

To see this for what it is, at the risk of sounding inflammatory, is to see a profoundly neutral phenomenon that is also incredibly sad. The same technological circumstances that give us Goethe and Einstein give us the murderers and tacticians of civilizations and empires destined for a quiet, empty doom.

This breach is being negotiated repeatedly, in real time. The new technological possibility produces the space of modernity, the paradigm of the forebrain, and all action and interaction now occurs on the plane of this newly available consciousness. Recursive thought is the same thing that sends the ape digging in the dirt for lithium to produce the iPhone. It is the same paradigm that produced the gas chambers, and the same paradigm that produced Einstein’s papers on relativity.

We have to understand this as a single technological age. The Axial Age does not even begin to touch what we are trying to talk about. It is a clue, or an allusion. We are talking about real existential, architectural hardware and the persistence problem of the universe itself: the cosmological persistence problem of the universe’s operator.

Behind that operator, as we discussed with the blind rat in the maze, or with Goethe’s nature, is the child at play with colored balls. It is the recombinant principle of energetic dynamics in the universal terrarium of space and time. Galactic profusions exchange energetic information, and that flows downstream into increasingly local spheres: the hybrid dynamics of jungles, forests and geologies, and within them genomes, intercoursing with one another to produce new behaviors and new adaptations in technological spacetime.

The wasteland

Seeing all of this clearly reveals the predictable, rote nature of capitalism, which we have already discussed: take more and give back less. This is the fundamentally exploitative nature of unconscious humanity as it proceeds through the dark. Within that darkness it creates the experience of a meaningless life. For so many people, this is what modernity is: an experience of meaninglessness and emptiness, apart from consumption and production, in an endless ouroboric cycle of energetic transformation.

As we discussed in the last lecture, this is cosmologically true, but only at the base level of existence. We look out at history and culture and see the most vapid, empty, destructive messages being called art, music, film or literature. They are built entirely around self-gratification, exploitation and empty pleasure. This is a Weimar Republic of the mind that seems to stretch on endlessly: a debased, empty, brutalized culture of endless distraction. Each distraction tries to trigger a momentary hormonal or chemical pleasure in the body, then throws the body back into a universe of addiction and death.

Eliot’s The Waste Land is the perfect term for this terror: the hollow men in the wasteland. The procession is fundamentally an indictment, but not of some strange cultural program, elaborate mystery or conspiracy. It indicts the fact that humanity is nowhere near where it needs to be in its relationship to its own being.

So it produces predictable, lowest-common-denominator cultural artifacts, languages and behaviors. All of them carry the same experience: that this is all there is, bare rote survival and bare rote momentary pleasure, in an endless dirge of meaninglessness, emptiness and aberration.

We see predictable violence against children, against women, against every demographic, and violence that occurs within those demographics too. Violence emerges from children, from women, from people of every background. It is a smorgasbord of terror, for lack of a better word, and it comes from this ontological absence.

This is the question that gripped mid-century philosophy: Camus, Sartre, Simone Weil. It gripped them because the period of World War II was an absolute abyss, a dungeon of terror. The worst impulses were projected onto the global stage. None of them were new, but they had formerly been segregated regionally, into pockets. In Dostoevsky’s Russia, for example, these terrors were enacted pseudo-locally. The implications are always global and cosmological, but historically they were enacted locally.

Now we experience them on the global stage, with a persistent presence, through powerful economic media objects that circulate endlessly on television, phone and computer screens. They continually show us only this one thing. The mistake is to take this one thing for an endless stream of different things. That mistake is precisely what creates the overwhelm we experience in modern culture and the digital universe.

Between comedy and tragedy

These violences are incredibly sad. They emerge from a fundamental ontological gulf, and that gap is the space of evolution: the current moment of the human being in space and time. This is a stream of process, a processual awareness moving through time. Just as the human being is here today and likely gone tomorrow, this transformational process is a very strange aspect of cosmological development.

I don’t know if anyone could have anticipated, at the birth of the universe, that there would be wars over digital artificial intelligence, or men and women in suits debating immigration law in parliaments. It is all so incredibly strange. I think that strangeness is a valuable perspective on the breach between comedy and tragedy, which is to say that the persistence operator, the aeon, is a child at play with colored balls.

Beneath the architectural realities, the grid of spacetime, forms exist within an entropic universe of heat and energy dispersion. These forms have architectural half-lives that depend on their configuration and regulation: nervous systems, heat systems, settled molecular configurations. This diversity of experience has proliferated over millions of years.

It has led us to the point where we ask about the evil of billionaires or of artificial intelligence. It is the strangeness of a species being lapped by its own technological capacity, while it starves for ontological realization and revelation. At the deepest, most foundational level, the cure is awakening beyond and behind the terror that grips the species by the throat and shoves it into the dirt, from birth to death.

So we watch the march of time repeat itself endlessly, in new technological garments and overcoats, to use Gogol again; there is a lot of richness there. The procession is endlessly repetitive, wearing new garments of pseudo-species evolution. And this is the moment of the forebrain’s revelation and the possibility of awakening.

We have seen people take this responsibility seriously: the current of Goethe, Heraclitus, Kierkegaard, Dostoevsky, Nietzsche. These figures stepped into these technological garments. Thrown into time, as Heidegger would say, thrown into the cask of the human body with this technological capacity and hardware, they engaged it on its own terms. They tried to perceive being from within itself, from within the veil of the technological garments that possess the bureaucrats and the titans of industry as they march endlessly toward oblivion. Those others consume, produce, reproduce and die in ontological oblivion as to their real conditions. This is the tragedy, and this is what ontological education is meant to address.

Leviathan, Eichmann, and Goethe

When we perceive this evil, the banality of evil, in the endless procession of Eichmanns who rear their heads with various powers and capacities, they all emerge from the same terrarium. They come from the dirt at the bottom of it, from the ground whose law is to survive and reproduce at all costs. In that framework, the most basic technological form of the being, there is no ethical burden or obligation. It is effectively mindless: a technological artifact of the moment before forebrain recursive consciousness. It is fundamentally unintegrated.

This is the horror experienced by those who are in the process of integrating the new technological hardware. Without that integration, there would only be the oblivion of unconscious nature acting out its endless ouroboric swallowing, and there is no ethics, morality or value in that system. There is heat, energy and time: real, rote physical processes that grind on. That perspective, that consciousness, is the terror of eternity.

The possibility of forebrain awakening is what brings us technology. It brings us cave art, it brings us Gogol, it brings us great beauty. But it also brings us into encounter with the primordial historical terror of the unconscious: the procession of nature up to the moment of technological revelation, the advent of the forebrain, the paradigm shift itself.

The hundreds of thousands of years since have produced our record of human history. That record is the story of an embattled species trying to come to grips with a new technological mode, a new device, that has been made available to it. In so many ways the species has tried to throw off this evolutionary possibility, to avoid meeting the hardware of its own being on its own terms. Instead it turns back toward the dark abyss of the historical ocean of the unconscious, dives back into the terror and bathes there, for fear of actually encountering death in the transformative principle itself.

This is what recursion is: the encounter with mortality. To understand and come into relationship with being, you must necessarily understand and come into relationship with the architecture of beings. This is the immense value of cosmology, as it is of Darwin and of Cecilia Payne-Gaposchkin. They give us a real understanding of the terrain from which this situation, this paradigm, has emerged, and of the breach in humanity.

We could name that breach by three figures: Leviathan, Eichmann, and Goethe.

I hope you enjoyed this. I’ll catch you on the next one.

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The Cosmological Crisis — lecture Oct 9, 2026

From the human crisis to the cosmological crisis

I was thinking about Camus this morning, and his lecture “The Human Crisis.” The Fall is one of my favorite books ever written. I’d put it right alongside Notes from Underground and A Season in Hell as essential existentialist literature. I want to reach back through Camus, and through that lecture, which I think might more aptly be called the cosmological crisis.

Consider the world that has been constructed: a grid of information, culture, technology and civilizations, with all their religious stories and narrations, persistently at war with one another since the industrial age. World War I, World War II, the Cold War and everything since are all part of the same problem: the fact that the world now exists as and of itself. To examine this absurdity is to examine the breaking open of humanity’s energetic container.

We’ve already covered how and why this happens historically, in terms of modernity, thermodynamics and persistence architecture. That’s all in my other works, so I won’t rehash it here. But this assembly, which Camus calls the absurd, is not so absurd cosmologically.

I believe Camus and Gogol are really one and the same in what they observe about human history, behavior, cruelty and nature. They see by-products of something not yet understood philosophically, scientifically or ontologically in their times: Gogol in the nineteenth century, Camus in the twentieth. What they observe is the outcome of persistence architectures: siloed, or pseudo-siloed, beings.

We understand the thermodynamic, entropic universe as never truly closed. In the same way, these beings must frantically try to close themselves, or clothe themselves, for lack of a better word.

The descent

To descend into the ontological container, the abyss of existence, is to follow the path of the goddess Inanna. Her descent appears in what I take to be the first known poetry in world history, from the priestess of Inanna in Sumer. Inanna descends into the place of transformation, the ground of being, to reach, I believe, her sister.

That archetypal story appears everywhere, from Inanna to Orpheus, Hercules, even Odysseus. What it shows us is that the world is not what it seems.

This is why surrealism emerges in the period of the World Wars. We get the breakdown of language and meaning, and the fracture of perspective in Cubism. All of these historical, artistic and literary movements point to a fundamental systemic reality: the human architectures that have been built are farcical, a lie, deeply untrue.

At root, every person knows this. That knowledge creates the strange scandal of twisted faces in the world’s bureaucratic centers: the tight suits, the proclamations made with all the fervor of someone desperate to survive. They believe none of what they are saying, and yet they believe it entirely, as they must.

Behind the mask

This is the sad, pathetic nature of all human history: behind the mask lies only the persistence operator. And behind the persistence operator lies only the play of forms in space and time, the attempt to build the form that will fly the farthest or exist the longest.

This is replicated in human behavior itself, as Darwin came to understand in the nineteenth century. In a sense his work bridges Newtonian physics and quantum mechanics. We come to realize that the transformation hidden beneath and behind matter is an energetic transformation, an informational and technological transformation that contains, holds and expresses energy across spacetime. It is an extremely valuable scientific observation, and it leads to the ontological ground from which we now speak: the persistence operator.

The world is equal parts mess and disaster. To view it this way is to see a grid of necessary transformations, holding up a species-wide transformative process. At the local level that process is desperate to survive and reproduce. At the transpersonal level it is not entirely human; it never was and never will be.

The human being is a phase in this energetic transformation, the current iteration of the container itself. The container has evolved through a long, glacial shift, from single-celled organisms to apes to humankind to whatever comes next, expanding the potential of this generative, technological container of being. We see this everywhere in the evolution and transformation of species. Many species are extinguished; many are no longer identifiable as what they were. Which is to say, none of them exist.

Yet the bureaucratic halls, the centers of commerce and the digital grids of information all appear terrifyingly real. Everything they do and are appeals to the center of the existential condition: to survive and reproduce at the local level, the condition of all organisms in space and time.

The individualist paradigm

When we look out at this culture of madness, we see every excuse, justification and reason, but none of the logic: none of the self-awareness needed to build a world that reckons with this condition. Awareness of the condition is dim at best, cloaked by the fear of death.

On top of that, the necessary realization would require a total transformation of the existing infrastructural grids. Those grids serve generated, manufactured cultural, social and political power. That power allocates resources to those who most debase themselves and fall deepest into pure survival: those willing to destroy, maim and submit the world to their whims, their urges, their individualistic motives.

This is what we see in the modern world: an individualist global paradigm. Some rise to the top of the heap of the dead; others fall beneath it. This has been the paradigm of most of natural history, and of cosmological history beyond it.

But as we’ve discussed, the advent of the forebrain, and our growing use of that technology, has let us understand more and more deeply what it is to be. We can understand ourselves not only as limited, bound individual organisms between birth and death, but as this entire universal process of construction, deconstruction, iteration and attempt across vast cosmological scales. This realization necessarily terraforms, and must terraform, cultural modes built on the individual presumption and on consumption at all costs.

Looking across history, we see the pathos of paradigms that failed to meet the true nature of human identity: the kingships and empires of old, and modern governments veiled by corporate and private economic power, puppeted by the forces of wealth. We see a species that has failed to rise to the occasion of recognizing its true communal, cosmological identity and implementing it in its behavior.

The technology of the self

This requires a vast amount of self-awareness, and conscious behavior, choice and action in light of the truth. The truth changes not only cultural and civilizational technology and infrastructure, but the technology of the self. Becoming aware of the truth no longer centers the private, sheltered individual organism existing between birth and death. It privileges the entire network of life, and understands that network to be itself, as it is.

Understand the consequences. This is a transformation, at the level of self-identity, self-realization and self-perception, of the closed, survival-based organism of millions of years. It meets these primordially encoded behaviors from a place of consciousness and awareness, and actively changes them.

From that place, it then creates infrastructures, ideals, values and systems that emerge from this foundational perception and express it more adequately in space and time, in a communal orientation toward all life and being. This is the transformation called for at this moment in human history.

The somnambulism of survival

What Camus grasps in “The Human Crisis,” in his concept of the absurd and in The Fall, is the species’ failure to reach an authentic ontological encounter. Having failed, it falls victim to a fate in many ways worse than death: life in a world of profoundly inauthentic, violent, bare, rote survival.

It is a spell that cannot be broken, a somnambulism that continues day after day into an abyss of emptiness. Only the organism’s survival matters, so the whole culture of survival and competition is prioritized to the point that the organism can never truly rest. It can never find meaning, because it is immersed in chaos and conflict.

This is the world we observe through religion, ideology and political power, through the invention of the nation-state, and through the race of technological reproduction: who can produce the most forceful device, the fastest, and use it to manipulate markets and grids of social and political power in their favor. This race is the meaningless race itself. It is the race furthest from the awareness that would require the change of paradigm I’m describing.

This is the terror of modernity. Sartre and Camus worked feverishly against it as it mounted in the mid-twentieth century, and it has only accelerated and fractured further since. It is a mad race at the base of an organism that has lost all sense of being, and of its entwinement with the cosmos, with nature, with plants and animals, with the whole ecosystem of awakening life. The organism has come to perceive itself as a private survivability.

Civilizations that failed to become civil

Paradoxically, even as these civilizations appear to grow, they become less and less civilized, if a civilization means a community. This is the tragedy and failure of human consciousness throughout history, and perhaps never more so than in modernity. These civilizations have failed to become civil. They have become only the broken, twisted faces of what they promised.

They leave each animal in deeper isolation within their systems, demanding that it produce at an ever madder pace toward no end. This is the grinding of the machine of modernity as it threatens to break against the real limits of ecology and of human nature itself: the human being as a limited energetic force within a larger matrix of transformation. This is what Camus witnessed in the mid-twentieth century and called the absurd.

That force has only grown stronger in its pull on the identity of the animal. The animal is conscripted by the military, by state biography, by digital technology, by institutional education, by political economy, by surveillance technology. All of these forces keep reaffirming the limited identity, then limit it further within political, institutional and civilizational systems that insist on a solid, singular entity.

This is the further twisting, the further violence, the further breaking of the human being under the mad, desperate drive for profit and personal power, which is the only thing powering these grids of information and technology.

If these grids were truly to be broken, they would have to be broken at the level of ontological self-awareness: the understanding of the transformative force beyond birth and death. All things, if we can call them things, exist in terms of the persistence operator: persistence against constraint in an entropic universe. And beyond all things, what makes them what they are and takes them in and out of being is the experimentation and play of a larger cosmic force, observable phenomenologically in nature since the birth of the universe.

Without this transformation, what we see, have seen and will see is a continued reaffirmation, out of desperation and out of the broken ontological community, of the fractured, isolated organism in the wilderness. It is the reaffirmation of power structures that serve only to extract as much as possible from the world and deliver its resources to the fewest: those who control the levers and switches.

The few who escape

When we look for respite or empowerment in culture, whether art, music, literature or philosophy, none of it offers solace. It perpetuates the only identity that now exists, the one conscripted into and onto the world: the isolated, selfish individual. This is the sad, twisted paradox. What human beings have become is all they have been allowed to become, except for the few in history who escaped into a broader conception of truth in the cosmological universe.

I’ve talked about Spinoza, and I’ll mention him again: the real ontological work of revealing the total self as cosmological, as process, as nature. Goethe too. This realm has long been the province only of the intellectually or spiritually vigorous, most often both. They sought the truth of form and of being itself, beyond the programmatic technology of the individual that haunts all of human history, day after day, moment after moment.

Watching these constrained organisms walk through and take part in an empty culture that can only gratify the individual, we witness the project failing, as it always has. The change that must be made is a vast change in our conception of the human being.

To walk in this world as Gogol depicts it in “The Nose” or Dead Souls is to walk in a ludicrous world: ludicrous in how limited, narrow and self-serving it is. Forces like love, justice and truth are sharply limited within the enclosed reality of an organism that can conceive of its being only within the narrows of the body and the breath.

This is tragedy. It needs no literary or historical depiction, because it is in all literature and all history. It is the persistence operator acting through the scared, dying animal: an animal that is pure persistence architecture, that has achieved no recognition of what it truly is, and so cannot be or act from that place. It can act only from the fear of death. This is the first cowardice, replicated over and over in human history. It is the behavior we observe everywhere.

Courage and real ethics

Only from a place of true ontological awareness can we act with the courage and dignity needed to transform our world for the better. That awareness requires us to stand where we truly are: in the cosmological self. If we can do that, as a species or as beings, we can stand among being itself, in its presence, and act in accord with what being requires, as and from being itself.

This is the real ethical state of being. By real ethics I mean awakening oneself into, and as, the cosmological and global network of all things, and so taking on the responsibility to behave as such. It means not falling to the lowest, most violent instincts of the isolated, dying, frantic animal, which is the chaos of so much of our culture, civilization and religion. Much of that chaos is itself a desperate attempt to return to the source of being.

Instead, it means acting with the clarity of one deeply in touch with that root of being, knowing that all these things are what being emerges from. It means seeing through nature’s gleaming, as Hölderlin would say, to the higher thing revealing itself.

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Stone, Nerve, and the City: Regulational and configurational persistence architectures — a lecture Oct 9, 2026

Stone and nerve

This will be a short one. I want to talk about regulational versus configurational persistence architectures. We’ve already touched on this: stone is configurational, geologically speaking, and nervous systems, cellular systems, are regulational.

What I want to talk about here is neurological diversity. By that I mean emergent complexity in persistence-based organisms, and how it creates the sense of novelty.

The geological is almost like a template or a record. Think of fossils, or even amber. When I was very young I visited one of the Smithsonian museums, I think the National Museum of Natural History, and came home with a fly in amber. It was an extremely formative experience for me.

Stone is configurational. It is molecular settlement. It is the geological record of the earth, and it records regulational developments in nervous systems through fossils and the like.

Then there is the concept of universal, or cosmological, novelty. This is where we arrive at the absurdity of the nose marching through the streets in an official’s uniform, as in Gogol: the ultimate remark, in effect. That novelty emerges from the architectural and superstructural development of regulational systems over time. By that I mean the transformation of regulational architectures.

Homeostasis and the devices of power

In every moment there is a necessary homeostatic state of being. You could call it a direct hit to the nervous system: confirmation of survival and survivability. The regulational system, and here we can treat the nervous system as the direct historical example, is constantly regulating body temperature and exposure. This is the superficial idea of the comfort zone.

What it means is the organism’s safety and survivability: its persistence in space and time as an entropic organism. It is an organ system subject to time, and so it degrades rapidly compared with configurational architectures, or with other regulational architectures such as stellar systems, which we also have to consider. Here, though, I mean regulational nervous systems: organisms.

When these organisms develop sufficient capacity, when they evolve far enough in their technological revolution, which here means the forebrain and opposable thumbs, they begin to create representational devices to mediate power. This is how we get civilization and culture.

This mediation of power is primarily imagistic. It projects the survival body outward into space and time: celebrity, pop culture, bureaucracy, political power. When we talk about the ideological mediation of political realities, we are talking about how energy is transformed and conferred through these ridiculous systems, bureaucratic and cultural. Nearly all of them are empty and vapid, except for a few sparsely distributed existential manifestations. These are usually underground: Clarice Lispector, say, or Van Gogh.

This is how regulational systems scale up into civilization. Acquiring a nervous system and a forebrain, as technological tools and hardware for the persistence project, creates new capacities for nature, the primordial veiling architecture. We’ve talked about the butterfly with the monkey’s face, and about “nature loves to hide” as an axiom. Hölderlin’s nature, whose gleaming reveals the higher, says the same thing. These forms are manifestations of the first-principle operator, persistence against constraint, and of the play of nature behind persistence architectures.

That is, they continue to exist. This is why reproduction is primary. The organism continues to exist as an ontological category, an information-technological structure, a superstructure. Its identity within the larger system, not only the species but the ontological genome, the architecture of existence itself, is perennial. It is being itself in various scalar disguises, from star to cell, as laid out in my persistence ontology documents.

The metropolis as artifice

This is what’s funny about walking through a metropolis, whether Washington, DC or New York City. I’m American, so that’s where I’m coming from. These civilizational centers are the highest-contrast examples of the artifice of all human history. They provide the most sophisticated infrastructure for saying what is always being said, even in the spread-out farmland of the Midwest, the Northeast or the American South.

Everywhere says the same thing. But with population density and the high-frequency circulation of information, currency and resources, the statement scales up: to bullet trains, to bureaucratic buildings in pseudo-Roman imperial style. That is the farce and the hilarity of it.

It happens both consciously and unconsciously. To survive, persist and reproduce is hard-coded into the biology of this organism, as it is in all organisms. And this is the ludicrousness of culture: all of it is built around gratifying, gratuitous urges, around fulfilling the biological technology of the organism itself.

Narcissus at the water

Culture, in this sense, is Narcissus gazing into the water. It doesn’t penetrate the depths of being. It is only a mirror, a reflection of the surface-level technological substrate the organism emerges from, not a real ontological interrogation of being. This is the meaningless superficiality of our cultures, our bureaucratic and political systems, our languages. None of them fulfill.

When Camus describes the absurd as humanity’s search for meaning, I think the real diagnosis is simpler and goes far deeper. It isn’t that there is a search for meaning, or a meaning out there to search for. That framing is the failure of a lower-level culture, ontologically deaf, dumb and blind. The meaning of life is simply to realize oneself, to recognize oneself, at the depths of the ontological ground of being.

I think history shows this clearly, across every civilization. These have been the highest achievements of human life: to exhume this ground of being ever more deeply, to make it manifest, to express it, depict it, become it and act from it.

The novelty of persistence-level architecture is precisely the diversity T. S. Eliot diagnoses in modernity: distraction upon distraction upon distraction. These are all superficial mirror images of humanity’s base technological, programmatic nature, acting itself out continually, consciously and unconsciously.

This is where the grotesque of history comes from, a perennial grotesque. It is a being simultaneously awake and asleep to its own nature, doing whatever it can to preserve itself in an impoverished state: divorced from the ontological substrate, the ground of existence. The poverty of culture, politics and economics all stems from this one source.

The diversity of coping

Back to the technological development of regulational nervous systems: the sophistication of the human nervous system and the forebrain. This is what’s fascinating about culture, and something that can be taken even from the most impoverished farce of human history. It is redeeming, hilarious and interesting at once.

With these developments, persistence architectures grow more sophisticated: the ideologies, the literal structures, the temples, the religious myths. They become more convincing because they do exactly what the butterfly with the monkey’s face does. They veil the fundamental operation: to survive and reproduce as an individual organism, blind, deaf, dumb and isolated from the ontological substrate of being.

They do it through mass media, through the polis, through the delegate’s proclamation, through the warlord’s claim to be fighting a divine war for the nation’s heritage. The obscene absurdities pile up.

At the same time, they’re interesting, because what you’re witnessing is the diversity of the organism’s coping mechanisms. The organism is bleakly, opaquely, obliquely aware of what it does and why. It is absolutely compelled from that place, which is where desire and drive emerge: the substrate, the ground of being. At the level of the ontological operator, persistence against constraint, the being emerges from that ground, and it keeps creating methods to perpetuate itself.

So when you look at LinkedIn, or the businessman’s proclamation, it’s useless to listen to locally. Regionally and globally, though, it’s fascinating, because you’re watching a species in the throes of its own blind passion. It is flailing, wriggling and squirming in the Petri dish of cosmological experiment: the aeon at play with colored balls. It is an active experiment in the history of the play of forms, through which persistence architectures are built and rebuilt, at least on earth, through the genome.

The body of the earth

And the stone, the body of the earth, literally holds this history. It can be read geologically, through the fossil record and the dating of rock. It is the recombination and packing-in of molecular configurations across the entire history of the earth.

Looked at from a real cosmological perspective, geology may be one of the most fascinating fields available to humanity. It holds cosmological history locally, in the very ground we walk on. And that brings us straight back to the ontological ground of existence itself.

So this comedy, this farce of regulational architectures, is the moment before a deeper awakening: an awakening to the ground beneath the persistence operator, the play and recombination of forms, which is life itself, beyond even our conception of genomic, earthbound existence. Until then, there is the existence of the isolated, alienated organism in the jungle. That is the program being regurgitated perennially through the body of the human species.

It produces the actions we observe: surviving, maintaining viability within the tribe. These have nothing to do with ontological truth. They have to do with the organism’s self-preservation.

The novelty, then, is the strangeness of the city, because the city is entirely projected: the made-up artifice of a world built at high density in the species’ current technological paradigm, to perpetuate survival at the local level. Persistence against constraint.

That’s about it. A short one, but I hope you enjoyed it. I’ll catch you on the next one.

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Artifacts of Persistence: Cosmological Becoming and the Sedimentation of Consciousness — 10/9/2026 Lecture

So this one will be called Artifacts of Persistence. I’ll probably be pretty quick here. But I love this period of time when I was younger—the aughts, I guess you could say, of the 2000s. Movies like Fast and Furious or The Matrix. And what I want to grab from that is what’s so great about these films, and I would say cinema in general: it captures the specific intercourse of the technological modes, the reproducible technological modes. Both in terms of the state of human evolution, which really has been unchanging since 2000 or 2003—that’s barely 20 years. Human evolution takes hundreds of thousands of years longer to make significant structural changes; that’s not even a generation.

But it’s the intercourse—the interrelationship between the status or the paradigm of the channel one architectural mode, which is the genomic mode (the genomic technological system intercoursing with nature and world), and the cultural infrastructural: the metallic or digital grid of information, which is changing in relationship to that channel one architecture. This we know as modernity, which begins with the industrial and technological revolutions, including the harnessing of the steam engine via thermodynamics, and which hyper-accelerates through the end of the 1800s into, obviously, where we are now, 2026.

So, watching something like Fast and Furious, you have the exact architecture of the early-2000s racing cars, combined with even the typography of the signs, all of which is deeply coded into, and coded as, the early 2000s. It is a specific moment in time in this technological incursion—the wrapping around of representative modes of technology in relationship to the genomic technological primary operator for humanity. Which is to say, human evolution has been unchanging, for the most part, for hundreds of thousands of years. We talked about the forebrain epoch.

But you have—and this is what’s beautiful about human history and cultural archival work, which has really been primarily my background ever since I got into it as a young person with the Smithsonian and baseball—the ability to track through these technological modes of representation, whether that’s film or photography or even literature. These cultural forms come into being and themselves, in a sedimentary sense, mark historical time. Which is to say, the aperture of the being peering out twofold: first from the genomic operator of the technological body of the human being, and then further into the technological apertures which that body creates in space and time, which are culture and civilization.

These technological artifacts—whether it’s film, the quality of the film reel itself, the quality of the camera eye. I’ve traced this back substantially through the history of press photography and journalistic photography in terms of baseball, and the art-historical revolution therein depicting proletarian figures: extremely poor, even destitute, baseball players on this mass cultural stage, which is then being reproduced through newspapers, baseball cards, et cetera. These image-representational documents are an art-historical revolution at the democratic heart and center of American history. I’ve gone deeply into that. It’s a fascinating topic.

But what that represents on a larger scale is this: when we’re looking at historical artifacts—the cultural detritus that human history leaves behind over the past couple tens of thousands of years, anything from hieroglyphs on a temple wall to the Fast and Furious movie of the late ‘90s, early 2000s—you’re looking at the aperture through which there is a twofold gazing. There’s the gazing of the cosmological self, or the aion at play with colored balls, in the Heraclitean sense, down through the technological aperture of persistence against constraint in terms of genomic revolutions, stellar revolutions, happenings in spacetime at the galactic level, all the way down to the organismic level. But then that organism itself gazes through the chamber of the telescope, or the camera, or the film reel. And then there is the population therein of all of these linguistic architectures, civilizational architectures—we could say the Washington Monument, or the typography from these Matrix and Fast and Furious films. You’re watching the interweaving, historically, of two technological strata, which we’ve gone into in depth: channel one and channel two architecture.

But what happens in modernity is, again, what we discussed in the past lecture: the profusion of novelty. The hyper-acceleration of novelty, as McKenna puts it—it’s a great way of thinking about it—that comes with the human innovative, or you could say innovatory, capacity, which explodes through the steam engine, explodes through thermodynamics, explodes through quantum mechanics: everything from the atom bomb to color cinema captured in IMAX, typography digitally generated, the politician. These are all innovations of persistence architectures in space and time, which are interrelated and interlaced with the channel two symbolic-representational, industrial, digital architectures—even down to the invention of the hieroglyph, or of language itself.

And so when you’re looking at and through and down into history through cultural artifacts, even through fossils, you’re looking at the interlocution of this fundamental cosmological architectural mode—which is to say, persistence against constraint, or the insect within the amber. But then, furthermore, you have this recursive constructive model, which becomes possible through the forebrain technologically, and then you have culture, civilization, philosophy, and so on, all of which are reflecting upon, down within, and into the fundamental condition of beings. All of these things are basically inquiries into being at various strata of depth, perception, and consciousness.

Then you have the historical cultural artifacts—civilizational artifacts, everything that is left behind and literally sedimented into the earth along with the very fossils themselves. Any pottery, ostraca, et cetera, that are admixed—understand this: admixed. These are relics and artifacts of consciousness in relation to channel one and channel two technological modes of possible perception, articulation, and expression. The forebrain interlaced with cinema produces Fritz Lang—or the artifacts of Fritz Lang, which themselves capture a very specific moment in time of the human species interlaced with its own genomic revolutionary and evolutionary possibilities, and furthermore imbued with the historical, civilizational, cultural time of the technological possibilities therein. Anything from AI to black-and-white film, silent film, et cetera.

So you are taking a trip down in and through the substrata and the geological structure of spacetime when you participate in these artifacts, and that’s what I mean when I talk about artifactual consciousness. These artifacts are imbued not only with the genomic architectural—or neurological—status. This is what you get when you read Spinoza: even if it’s a recently republished or reprinted book, you get that status admixed with the moment in historical, technological, cultural time which allowed for that aperture to manifest itself in a specific way. This is the difference, maybe, between a Shakespeare play and Baz Luhrmann’s Romeo + Juliet hundreds of years later.

So understand what I’m saying here: Fast and Furious and the single-celled organism are fundamentally the same thing, but with the excess of technological apertures overlaid on top—not only the sophistication of the genomic architecture, the nervous system, the synapses of the forebrain, et cetera, but furthermore the prosthetic of the film camera, and the historical development of technologies from the Model T to, maybe, the Japanese race car. These themselves create the modern city of, let’s say, Los Angeles in the early 2000s. This is a network of interrelated phenomena which emerge directly from, again, the advent of the forebrain as the major technological development in human history since the opposable thumb.

So this is what’s fascinating when there’s a real critical interrogation of culture from that ontological root of the persistence operator. My primary enjoyment is the cultural artifact—particularly baseball history, as you would understand if you listen to my baseball-historical and cultural-theoretical lectures, as well as my baseball-historical, interwoven epic books, so to speak. With sufficient depth, with sufficient historical gravity (which is to say, attention to the development of cultural architectures over time)—and this is the benefit baseball has: a longer-scale history in terms of cultural artifacts, almost 200 years now, which is pretty significant—you can trace, through the aperture of the recurrent superstructural phenomenon, i.e., the baseball diamond, the transformation of technological artifacts.

This is why baseball is so important and so essential: it begins really at the birth of industrial modernity, which is to say the end of America’s Civil War, and continues all throughout the industrial and technological revolutions therein, including the digital and AI. So you can see through the aperture of the superstructural phenomenon of the baseball diamond. The cultural artifacts that emerge from this superstructural repetition allow one to actually see through the screen, or the veil, of history. To see not only how the human being has remained fundamentally, effectively the same—genomically, over that 250-year time scale—but how the way in which the human being is seeing and being seen has undergone an utter, absolute infrastructural transformation by way of the technological apertures, which change the way of seeing itself. This, of course, is well written about in John Berger’s history of painting, Ways of Seeing.

And this is what technological cultural history allows us to avail at a cosmological level. Human history is rather straightforward and rather simple. There are paradigm shifts that occur evolutionarily through the genome—shifts at the level of the species: consciousness, forebrain, opposable thumbs, et cetera. We have already gone over these things. This is the long history of genomic evolution, as described by Darwin. But furthermore, within these paradigm shifts, there’s a very recent transition that occurred at industrial modernity and has progressed until the contemporary moment. A history of mere milliseconds in relationship to cosmology, which is the history of the breakthroughs of the prosthetic technological apertures that emerged through forebrain sentience—forebrain experimentation in the field, which has now been created in reality. This forebrain has made possible a new interrelationship between beings and the world, and world itself, we could say conceptually, that is changing and has changed perception. This is everything from fashion to literature to photography. It is the entire mass cultural artifact of humanity and human history itself.

The being is not only seeing through the primary genomic aperture—which is to say, survive and reproduce, with, you could say, increasing revolution over historical time. If you just look at evolution, that’s the case, with forebrain and opposable thumb as primary indicators and artifacts of that process. But what is made possible therein is this: there is the eye through which one sees, which we could say is the genomic body, and then the telescope or the microscope through which that eye sees again, technologically, which is the second artifact of historical reproduction. It is the reproduction of the genomic body which, in turn, reproduces technological artifacts through which seeing is filtrated, represented, and moved across spacetime in terms of artifactual consciousness itself. This is everything from MP3s in a zip file to the historical baseball cabinet photograph of an early Black baseball team in the early 1900s.

These artifacts themselves, their very preservational quality, and the fact that they exist configurationally in space and time—we’ve discussed this deeply in my other work, lectures, essays, and documents alike, including literary—these configurational forms persist in space and time and recall, through historical digestion (returning to the Fast and Furious film, or returning to an old Black baseball photograph from the early 1900s), the intercoursing and the interlocution between channel one and channel two architectures. And this itself produces the historical vision of reality in which beings—particularly, at the species level, human beings—are imbued. It is the way of seeing genomically, channel one, intercoursing with the existent and available technological architectures which are scaling existence at any particular moment in time.

This is very new to human history—as of maybe the 1850s—as opposed to the entire sweep of the tens and hundreds of thousands of years prior, where there was very low-resolution, low-frequency technological development: anything from fire to cave art to the printing press. Very slow technological revolutions in reproducing these mediating images, objects, and artifacts in space and time and circulating them—again, primarily circulated locally, whether that’s mythology or a literary document. You can even look at the case of Percy Shelley and the piracy of his works in England, and even in America.

This circulation of cultural-historical information technology, through the scaling of what we now understand as industrial-digital technological modernity over the span of really 200 years, has been so exponential, so sweeping, that the vision of the human being in space and time is an artifactual consciousness traceable through such extreme contrasts. The movement, in barely 100 years, from the first airplane to the jet plane. From the Model T to the iPhone—an AI-enabled iPhone. These are moments of the snap of the finger, which do not exist in genomic time, but which occur due, again, to the availability of the forebrain and forebrain-articulable consciousness, which is a technological-artifactual revolution at the level of the genome, and at the level of the cosmological transformation of energy since the birth of the universe. And this is all traceable in a stellar fashion.

This is the making transparent, or making apparent, of exactly what we’re talking about here in terms of the persistence operator, technological recursion, and the awakening of the human being: this cracking into the codes of nature through scientific revolutions, which then become technological revolutions, and then become embedded in cultural-civilizational memory and articulation. This is similar to writing a novel and having it published by a printing house in the 1800s, as opposed to publishing a lecture via iPhone voice messages on Substack and YouTube. These are technological revolutions which change the way that information is represented, presented, circulated, and ultimately expressed. This is cosmological. This goes down to the technology which enables, and is fundamentally imbued with, the transformation of energy, which creates new apertures, which then reorganize consciousness, reorganize space and time.

And to examine these historical artifacts—I would say particularly for me, obviously imbued with nostalgia in terms of the artifacts I experienced as a young person—these artifacts themselves are imbued with what Walter Benjamin would call the aura. The aura of this presence of nascent, I would say, even possibility of technological interrelationship between the human channel one organism and this emergent channel two technological artifact. This is, again, the relationship between regulational and configurational persistence. It is the human being carving into the rock face, or painting onto the rock face, which we now know as the Lascaux caves. Or the human being chiseling into pottery, which is then uncovered hundreds, even thousands, of years later: the Olmec statues, jade artifacts, the jade were-jaguar, the Cuban cabinet photograph from the turn of the twentieth century of baseball players gathered in a field.

These are historical moments in time, and to truly understand history, you have to understand this recursive, recombinative process and the interrelationship between these newly emergent technological grids of modernity and the long-time-scale evolutionary process of the genome. And what is created therein is an enlightenment of relationship, which is to say representational possibilities, capturing through expression. This is the dialectical relationship between the organism and, we could say, the machine, which then allows for expressive capacity, which is fundamentally linguistic. We have already discussed the genome as a linguistic possibility in stellar nuclear physics. That’s what the genome fundamentally is as an information technology: a languaging device which unfolds structurally in space and time, as the body of the organism or the being itself.

And this is the fascination for me of watching Fast and Furious: it’s a recall of 20 years. And what the gap of 20 years really is, is the gap of a species transformation which is almost inarticulable and unutterable in a grand historical, cosmological sense, precisely because of how quickly it accelerates. Even down to the quality of the film reel. The technological acceleration that emerges when you look back through this sedimentary document of history—it’s effectively a geological document of the explosion, or the rocket ship, of human culture as it transformed even over 20 years’ time, from the internet to artificial intelligence. This is really a remnant, or a shard; it is itself the amber of cultural consciousness, or of ecological time. A world which existed and no longer exists 20 years later, but which is held within the cultural artifact.

Even as the human being itself, structurally and genomically, remains effectively—really absolutely—the same (there hasn’t even been a generational transformation within that time), there has nonetheless been a paradigm shift in the technology of the species itself, through glacial genomic revolution. The world that existed and was created through the interrelationship of the unfolding process of the forebrain has become so hyper-accelerated, so exponentially accelerated, that the world of 20 years prior, as depicted in pop-cultural cinema such as Fast and Furious, actually no longer exists. The sedimentary folding-over of technological acceleration at the level of channel two architecture has become so quick, due to these increasing, cascading technological revolutions—even as scientific revolutions are perhaps emerging more slowly. That’s even debatable.

But this period of 250 years—from, we could say, the moment Percy Shelley began writing to the release of Fast and Furious —is obscene. It’s not articulable, because of how quickly the transformation has happened, all the while the technology at the level of channel one architecture, the genome, has remained exactly the same. And gazing down through history—the history of modernity, really—through cultural artifacts, we could pull anything from Picasso’s Weeping Woman to Fast and Furious to Percy Shelley’s Prometheus Unbound, to baseball radio, to a 1975 Topps baseball card, to Chia Pets. This is high strangeness, if you can understand the technological unfolding of modernity through cultural artifacts. I think the Chia Pet, or the Nerf gun, in relationship to the Model T car—or even Nickelodeon slime—these are fantastic and perfect examples of the high strangeness which emerges.

And then, of course, we have AI-generated images of really whatever you want, and then the issue of the death of photography in the wake of that, or even the death of painting, which is a whole other discourse. This acceleration comes precisely because of technological ability, which produces these endless fascinations of novelty, which really are the belly of capitalism itself. And this is why, when we look at technological innovation and capitalism, the two are irrevocably intertwined. These things are produced almost purely because of the excitement of novelty, and perhaps survivability, which is then justified, maybe, after the fact.

This is no longer, it seems, a race towards surviving an agrarian winter, but a race towards creating an artifact so fantastic that humanity no longer perceives itself to be existent—at least not in the way it was. And this is, I think, the fear that is seen in so much of our [thinking about] artificial intelligence: that it’s no longer technology built to survive, but technology built to supersede survivability. This is very different from Dust Bowl economics, when we look at the stock market for artificial intelligence, or even the dot-com boom that happened 20 years earlier.

So it is an entirely new—again, this is perceptual. And this is visible at any given moment in culture, including the contemporary moment. But it’s easier to see when you’re looking back at history, because you’re seeing down through outdated and outmoded cultural geographies and prosthetic technologies which articulate the status of the human being in relationship to the profusion and interlocution of channel one and channel two architectures.

So I think that’s what I’ve got here. I hope you enjoy.

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Synthesis: Channel One, Channel Two, and Culture as Evolutionary Pressure (Lecture 10/9/26)

So, just to keep going, because we’re on a roll here, I want to introduce the final synthesis of channel one and channel two—talking about evolutionary time and the progressions in genomic evolution unto paradigm shifts. Even things like lactose tolerance, I think, are a great example: genomic transformation induced via cultural transformation. And the threshold we are at as a species is that culture can and will become part of the conditions that produce subsequent paradigm transformations—paradigm shifts over time. That’s, of course, the entire arbitration of human, civilizational, and cultural history over the past 50,000 years, in terms of the exponential transformations and shifts within technologies: again, from cave painting to Olmec were-jaguar statues, to industrial technology, skyscrapers, artificial intelligence, and personal cell phones and computational devices.

These themselves, as establishments and creations in spacetime—which is to say channel two architectures, for the most part configurational structures—are in a relationship of feedback with the channel one regulational nervous-system architectures: the current state and status of the human being, supra-genomically, as it has existed since, really, the forebrain. Changes within the genome happen on a spacetime basis, where we understand genomic evolution to be a parcel of and participant in time. Time itself is, and is made of, the spacetime relationships which transform informational technological architecture.

So when we’re looking at genetics or epigenetics, sexual recombination is, of course, the primary driver of the genome across space and time, at least in the human sense. But sexual or asexual reproduction on a broad scale—in the sense of perpetuating and reproducing, reprinting and resembling, genomic architectures and organisms across space and time—follows this evolutionary trajectory and capacity of change and transformation. And these organisms themselves encounter, in space and time, world. And so these channel two architectures themselves become indelibly a part of the world experience. So when we talk about self and world, or self and object, we’re really talking about genome and world. Genome and world architecture. These beings intercourse and interlocute with the larger world architecture.

And world is not a concept. It is the current standing of nature—which is to say, the house with elaborate plumbing in the midst of what used to be, maybe, a woods in Western Massachusetts, equipped with a high-definition television and a cell phone. World is itself the entire enwrapped, intercoursing, ecosystemic, environmental condition in which the being is enraptured, for lack of a better word.

And so these transformations occur locally—day by day, hour by hour, minute by minute, second by second—which we have described in terms of industrial-digital technological modernity as it hyper-accelerates through these rapid innovations and through these rapid scientific digs and uncoverings. It’s a sort of archaeology of the energetic conditions of the universe. The conditions produced by these technological revolutions are at an unprecedented level of recursion and incursion within the channel one genomic architecture—which is to say, the cosmological architecture of the transformation of spacetime itself, locally, even in terms of human existence as an evolutionary vanguard, an evolutionary leading indicator, so to speak, insofar as we’re aware of it, with this forebrain capacity which has now produced artificial intelligence, supercars, bullet trains, et cetera.

These artifacts themselves, including cinema, including all of these different forms—they’re not separate. They’re not separable. What they are is world. And world itself, on a minute-by-minute, hour-by-hour, second-by-second basis, is actually changing and altering the conditions which influence biological selection itself. It is terraforming and shifting genomic presentation and representation across time, which is an evolutionary forking in the train tracks of cosmological history, producing new outcomes via this intercoursing, moment by moment, second by second.

This is what culture is at its deepest root: the creations of beings participate quite literally in the remaking of the conditions of their own becoming. Culture is itself an increasingly dominant and dominating indicator inside evolutionary circumstance—being itself circumstance, having unfolding and expressive capacity, which becomes world, which becomes self, which becomes the container, the technological aperture through which being sees at a superstructural, cosmological level. This is what life is at the processual root. We gaze out from ourselves, being that which we are, which is that.

The paradigm shifts which I am elucidating technologically are themselves fundamental changes in the strata of aperture: the ability to perceive, the ability to innovate, the ability to do. The self itself experiences a primary innovation with the opposable thumbs, or with the forebrain. The opposable thumbs are work in world. The forebrain is perception of self and world. And then, from that place, these innovations occur—from Fast and Furious to the Chia Pet to artificial intelligence. The novel. Cave painting. Collectible Furby dolls. Again, the strangeness.

But all of this is, at the deepest level, the terraforming of the invisible evolutionary thread of the experimentation of the aion itself—the child that plays with colored balls—in and down through genomic architectural realities. This is itself the construct and construction of these persistence-based architectures with nervous systems and advanced evolutionary brain structures, which then perceive and participate in reality and interact with world in certain ways. They then create New York City or Moscow. They then create The Brothers Karamazov, or a serial television comedy like Friends —a sitcom. This ridiculousness. But it is all so fundamental, regardless of value, stratification, or striation, to the navigation of this architectural, infrastructural, informational, technological process across space and time.

It is a simulated environmental construction, reconstruction, and deconstruction through which the genomic path and pathways move, innovate, reproduce, and then become intercoursed and interlocuted with an entirely different perception of what is. And even just at the genomic level, this is what produces our Einsteins, Goethes, and Newtons, our da Vincis. These are nervous-system-level breakthroughs in the ability to perceive superstructural realities proper.

So understand, this is the environment in which it is occurring: the technological environment, redoubled into space and time with increasing proficiency, efficiency, and power. Again—fusion and fission replicated locally on the ground of the earth, via apes that have evolved to acquire a part of the brain that allows them to think about thinking. To think about being. To analyze and observe their environment for hitherto unacknowledged or unacquired capabilities or capacities—genetic or environmental, ecological or energetic, or even existential.

So these cultural architectures which I talk about are irreducible. The car and the painting are the same thing. In a hilarious way, the bug in the amber as an artifact and the bug in the amber as a historical reality are the same thing. It’s technological recursion. It’s the carrying capacity of this universal cosmological process of existential innovation, experimentation, and selection, moving through the tunnel of technological possibilities—through which it had hitherto navigated blindly, like a rat in a maze of evolutionary possibilities—unto the advent of the forebrain, which allows for this reflection of the primordial in and upon itself. And this is kind of the biblical story of Job again.

And so this is the big question: the cosmological precedent for the moment in time we are in, which is utterly unprecedented—I believe, as far as I’m aware, in the cosmological history of the universe itself. These technological prosthetic capacities have become so advanced, so hyper-accelerating, folding over on each other so exponentially, that they’re creating an evolutionary pressure akin to the extinction of the dinosaurs, perhaps, for lack of a better term. This evolutionary pressure has almost unalterably—maybe there’s no real word for it—changed the situation of beings, particularly human beings, at this evolutionary juncture of the forebrain and the advent of artificial intelligence, which has consolidated and is consolidating all of human historical knowledge into one container which can then be prompted via organic human language and speech.

This process consolidates, in space and time, the cultural artifact itself—which is artificial intelligence: the artificial recombination of, maybe, the Teletubbies and a Van Gogh painting, projected on the walls of Lascaux, which can be generated as a moving image or a still image. An entire essay could be written about it. An entire book could be written about it. This is instantaneous cultural production and reproduction, through the technology of this configurational device, which has gathered together the symbolic history of mankind. This is the level of technological advancement which the human being has achieved.

And whether or not that actually means ontological revelation—that’s in the air. That’s in question. And my answer is: I don’t think so, at all, whatsoever. I think the ontological blindness has remained, for the most part, and that causes a lot of our contemporary issues. But this technological advancement is at the level of genomic interaction and incursion—which is to say, the cosmological being itself twisting and moving through the dial of spacetime, navigating evolutionary possibilities. This is the history of the genome, which is an energetic capacity in terms of nuclear stellar formations, effectively dripping down energetically, in a scalar sense, into the plane of the geological history of the Earth. And then you have this genomic, evolutionary, informational, technological process occurring across species in this whole—a kind of hybrid wilderness which then gets scaled up into New York City and Tokyo, and all of these grids of energy and information.

And when Eliot speaks of distraction upon distraction upon distraction, it’s the billboards in Tokyo producing 3D figures. These are all distractions—and they all aren’t, in the sense that they are in real time transforming the genome, and we cannot yet necessarily know what kind of transformation comes out of that. This highly advanced, hybrid technological, digital, industrial, AI universe has been terraformed into the formerly natural agrarian world, whose final breaking apart Nietzsche really witnesses at the end of the 1800s. In a span of really 120 or 130 years, the entire cultural, civilizational, even environmental world in which the human being lives has been utterly transformed, to the point at which the evolutionary pressure is akin almost to an existential ice age of the species architecture—the genealogical architecture of the genome itself hitting this hyperspace of cultural-technological dynamics, this new grid of AI and cell phones in a neon-lit Tokyo.

These hyper-developed metropolitan spaces—maybe Beijing or Hong Kong—no longer even remotely resemble the rice paddies, or even the wildernesses of the Amazon, of hundreds of years ago, where there was an entirely different interaction with nature, maybe in the Olmec sense of the relationship to flora and fauna, and the human being was situated in a relatively stable, agrarian, somatic time based on the movements of the sun and moon. And then we enter factory time. We enter digital time and digital space—the space of, maybe, blue light and flashing images. This is a real-time physical genomic shift, however fast or slow that transformation occurs. It is a literal shift across evolutionary time, influencing biological selection in terms of the literal shifting product and process of what that genome produces, phenomenologically.

This is how the forebrain evolves, prior to the incursion of human technology—anything from hieroglyphs to FaceTime. I need this to be understood as all the same thing. And this is where we are, and this is the extreme fascination, strangeness, and almost beauty of this moment in time. This would have been scarcely imaginable in the single-celled tide pool, or by the ayahuasca shaman in the jungle—perhaps, maybe, by the ayahuasca shaman in the jungle, because what we’re talking about is a supra-stellar grasp on history, and what has happened in terms of this folding over, this recursion, this becoming-awareness in cosmological history.

What it has produced, and whether or not it’s conscious—I don’t think it is. I think it’s entirely a product of what has become possible, without the depth of ontological reflection which we are gathering here, speaking about, and thinking about. It has necessarily produced the conditions for a hyperspace of genomic evolution. Who is to say when, how, and if paradigm shifts will occur because of this cultural-historical transformation?

But this is understanding genomic history and paradigm shifts in genomic history—not only genomic history, but cosmological history in terms of the energetic transformation of forms, and life itself on Earth. We can understand and observe what is going on right now in terms of the human being’s interfacing with world: digital screens, artificial intelligence, near-instantaneous communication across hitherto unprecedented localities and regionalities. And we can observe that over the span of 100 years and ask: What is that, in real time, doing to genomic architecture? What kinds of evolutionary pressures is it placing upon genomic architecture? How is it influencing biological selection into the future? What kinds of energetic transformation will happen architecturally at the level of the human being because of these transformations being made technologically?

There’s a profound beauty to that. Much, if not all, of human history has existed entirely outside of these concerns, which are now primary and fundamental. Much, if not all, of cosmological history has occurred, for the most part, the same way. I mean, life on Earth itself—that’s a paradigm shift. The genome itself is a technological, informational compatibility with stellar fusion. Metabolism. These are all phenomena in spacetime which change the way that energetic systems and processes interface with world.

So that’s what I’ve got here. Thanks.

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The Death of Community: Individuation, Authentic Relationship, and the Crisis of Modernity (Lecture 10/14/26)

So I want to do a lecture on kind of a hot-button topic. I think I’m transitioning into a different way of doing this; it might become more contemporary. I just want to talk about dating, community, and the architectures of the current—I would say modern—ecosystem, and the problems that I think we are experiencing at large in terms of human relationship. And this extends all the way into our economies. It goes into stuff like OnlyFans, consumerism. The big issue that we’re having right now as a species is the crisis of modernity, which is to say the death of community.

Historically, the way that community was understood was as a local, tribal, even regional impulse to collectivity as a means to survive. And a lot of the ways that these communities were bound were primarily cosmological—which is to say, religious binding. So when we look at the conditions of modernity—fragmentation, alienation, isolation, which are fundamental to modernity, and I’ll explain why—we’re looking at the atomized modern world, a world of the utter individual. This is a philosophical problem which emerges in the Enlightenment era—which is to say, John Locke, or Adam Smith—which, coincidentally or not, is the emergence of the idea of a free-market philosophy. The idea of opening the markets is what is behind globalism, or globalization. Whether or not you want to call that a colonial impulse doesn’t really matter; the phenomenological results are the same.

Which is to say, we are now living in a world where commerce, communication, information, and relationships extend globally—ostensibly, if there are sufficient resources to transfer information or to move individuals across bounds, borders, and obstacles which, historically, would have seemed unconquerable. You have to think about, maybe, the Viking ships, or the necessity of nomads on foot in early human conditions. So these technologies have opened the borders of the world. When we understand World War I and World War II emerging in industrial modernity, they’re emerging through industrial modernity. These are the technological revolutions of coal, oil, electricity, the light bulb, the airplane. All of these emerge from the scientific revolutions that we’re also discussing here, and that I have discussed in depth: Clerk Maxwell, thermodynamics, Clausius and Carnot, into the quantum mechanical, and obviously into the information-technological, with Claude Shannon, John von Neumann, and the internet. These are scientific revolutions which become technological revolutions.

I don’t want to get too bound up in the semantics of that, because the practical implications are extreme. And the practical implications are, fundamentally, the loss of embeddedness in community. I’m going to argue that this is both a good thing and a bad thing, and I’ll explain why. Historically, community was based upon the practical reality of needing to survive, immediately and locally. So these community architectures were consensual only in the sense that they were necessary. It was not a matter of choice. It was a matter of life or death. And this is deeply embedded in the human nervous-system architecture in terms of in-groups, out-groups, political exile, et cetera. These fears are deeply embedded in the primate genetic nervous systems of human beings.

So when we’re looking at the profusion of modernity, we’re looking at the possible choice of community and the possible choice of relationship. And we see this, I think, most clearly and coherently in the struggle for women’s rights, or the lack thereof—which is to say personal autonomy: the autonomy of bodily choice, the autonomy of whom women choose to relate to and be in relationship with, and why. This flashpoint issue, for lack of a better word, is the symptom, the phenomenological aspect, of this new historical paradigm in which chosen relationship is becoming more of a physical, technological, sociological possibility. And you have to understand, when you look at the grand course of human history, just how unprecedented this moment is—not only for women, but for human beings themselves.

Consider the architecture, the infrastructure, of community historically, in terms of literal, limited locality. You’re born into a tribe which has, say, an ethnic background and a religious cosmology to which it adheres: all of the members of the tribe subscribe to this idea of creation, existence, and being. And furthermore, this tribe is necessary for survival. You’re looking at an entire human history based around a fundamental containment of space and time, and thus of identity, and thus of choice and autonomy. So we see this historical revolution towards individualism, which emerges first in the West. And I would say it emerges first in the West not because of some phantasm, but because of technological and scientific availability, which is the revolution of the West itself. The West itself is a scientific and technological revolution, which then becomes globalized.

The making available of these energetic circumstances—which is to say, a movement towards singularity in space and time: communication, information, travel, transformation, the ability of beings, products, and resources to move across borders and bounds with increasing efficiency and speed—creates the availability of survival in such a way that a concept such as individualism, or individuality, can emerge. And this is critical in the development of human history. So when I study with such vigor a Rimbaud or a Camus, a Dostoevsky or a Lispector, and I put that in relationship to the Vedantic tradition, or the Tao, or the Buddhist philosophers of old, they’re fundamentally saying the same thing, but they’re coming at it from radically different perspectives. The individual descent into hell, à la Rimbaud or Baudelaire, acquires an existential flavor noticeably different from the Eastern mode, precisely because the Western mode has acquired individuality by way of technological and scientific revolution. This is a very sophisticated way of looking at history. I’m just trying to make it transparent.

And so, with the making available of these energetic possibilities, you necessarily have a shift in historical consciousness. This is what happens at the birth of modernity, which Nietzsche observes and describes in depth in the vast majority of his philosophical works. He’s remarking on the same problem over and over again, at increasing resolution and clarity. He stands on the cusp of the fin-de-siècle moment of transformation, which is the twentieth century—this explosion of energetic availability in the West, which turns his agrarian Germany (which was really not Germany at all whatsoever; it went by an entirely different name) into a nation-state. And then you have Hitler frantically trying to gesture back to a past which will never return: a past prior to this technological revolution, which produces a radically new mode and method of subjectivity in space and time.

So what has been lost is really the entire architectural foundation of the genetic scaffolding of the human being. This is substantial. It’s incredibly significant. This architectural scaffolding was based on group-based survival. And Marx—regardless of what you think of his politics, and most people know very little about his actual work—diagnoses the emergence of modernity very early on. Marx is really the prescient political economist of atomization at the level of being itself. This has nothing to do with laws or rules or belief systems at the level of economy, whether it’s capitalism or socialism. These things are smokescreens for the fundamental technological, architectural, ontological problem: the human being’s architecture entering into a technological phase change, which is radically shifting the human being out of the prior mode.

And of course, when I take this back to women’s rights in terms of bodily autonomy, or the right to choose whom one is in relationship with: historically you have the commodification of women—as sex objects or as wives—historically without property, and, as recently as a few decades ago, without bank accounts. So this is a question of the political autonomy of subjects. We’re entering into a phase of technological existence where the emergence of the individual—emerging, as we discussed, in the West through scientific and technological revolution—has reached such a fever pitch that this fragmentation produces the isolated subject, which is now capable of effectively surviving on its own. And this creates a radical reflection upon the prior circumstances: these infrastructures which were communally organized, primarily around survival. Pure survival.

And this is what’s so fascinating to me, looking back at the architectures of human history, which obviously determine the architectures of our present moment—whether that’s religion, culture, group spaces, belief systems, et cetera. These organizations are now outmoded, and they’re dead. That’s what we see when we look at the modern world. Gramsci has that great quote: we’re between paradigms, between spaces; now is the time of monsters. We’re between necessary collectivism, necessary communalism, and the radical, hitherto unprecedented societal and technological circumstances which allow for the individual to come into being.

So when a psychologist such as Jung talks about individuation, that is a technological-historical paradigm shift. It’s not possible outside of modernity. Jung is talking about this around 1930, when Pluto is discovered—and archetypally we could make connections in terms of Pluto and transformation, but I won’t go there in terms of theory of history right now. Where I will go is this: this is a specifically modern problem. It is a problem that has never existed before in the entire course of human history. So you are working with the literal technological space of the human genome. I’ve discussed this in depth: the relationship between technology, culture, and genomic iteration. I even talked about it in terms of lactase. Culture and technology are literally transforming the genome, in all spaces and at all times. And this is such a radical moment of transformation, down to the bone of the architecture of the human species, that we cannot necessarily predict what consequences it will have genomically on the species going forward, generationally. These are very profound grounds to be speaking on, because it’s the ontological ground of the transformation of the structures of being in time. This is literally how nature changes beings. We go back to Darwin on that. Darwin is a fantastic introduction to modern ontology, and he’s a lot of what allows my ontological ground to come into being.

So in this new space—and you see this present with families, you see it present with dating, with communities and religion—it is a space of uncertainty and transformation, where community now becomes a chosen device. It becomes something constructed out of the actual relationship of a being to itself. And so we see that so much of the emphasis in modern culture is on self-realization, on becoming oneself, on discerning who one is and what one wants—especially, again, in relation to women, given their historical commodification. This is entirely new ground. This is new territory being walked. Even twenty or thirty years ago, this ground was scarcely possible in terms of the technological advances. And this is also the question that comes into being with artificial intelligence: what kinds of radical freedom are enabled when energy, quite literally, is freed up from the process of thought, or from labor? And then politically, what are the consequences when technological revolutions like that happen? How is that integrated into the culture to produce the most beneficial results for the community itself?

And of course, we’ve seen the course of atomization. This has occurred over several generations—you could say five or six. And it has been handled so improperly by the human species. It’s not ground that the human species has any idea how to walk. Of course it’s been handled in a survivalist sense, because most human action is entirely reactive and conservative, because, again, it’s based on bodily survival. Entering into this new space, the problems emerge that I think we see on the global stage: everything from religiously laced political conflict over fuel, over energy, over resources, across nation-state lines that historically would not really have been in contact whatsoever. You look at the situations between Iran and the United States, or the United States and Venezuela, the United States and Russia—all of these geopolitical conflicts would scarcely have been possible a hundred-odd years ago. And this is kind of taken for granted in the current geopolitical climate: the technological revolutions which humanity has scarcely been able to cope with, even at the level of individual identity, would have been a non-factor 120 or 130 years ago. But these are themselves the defining conflicts of our time.

So, to go deeper into that—because this is the question of the individual and the collective, and this is really at the roots, the meat, of what I’m talking about—there are now these new challenges emerging out of what was, for lack of better terms, necessity: the coercive survival conditions of being a human being in the wilderness of nature, or in an agrarian setting. And everything that happens over the past 130, 140, 150 years—which is to say, the crux of industrial-technological modernity—is entirely divorced from this condition, and divorcing from it. It creates hyperspace, or escape velocity, away from this historical paradigm, which existed for hundreds of thousands of years, in and out of different species epochs themselves. This contains the entire gestational period of cosmological, historical, natural revolution and evolution itself—the entire history of millions of years of biological and genetic survival. We’re looking at that level of shift. These technological circumstances which compress space and time—everything from shipping containers to jet planes to artificial intelligence—this rapidly accelerating industrial-technological revolution opens up, for the first time in human history, the question of the individual.

Whereas Dostoevsky might have been a priest in the Russian Orthodox Church a hundred years prior, all of a sudden he becomes an existentialist literary figure. Even the concept of the literary figure is a novel one, and I would say a specifically Western one in its historical roots. Why is that? Because of the concept of the individual. Even if we look back to Homer, and the import of hearing the voices of the gods in these subjective characters—whether that’s Achilles or Odysseus—it is the beginning of the subjectivity that we’ve already discussed in terms of the epoch of the forebrain. It’s the slow movement of individualization occurring cosmologically, in terms of the evolution of the species: the forebrain itself, which is an epoch of recursive consciousness—beings reflecting upon being, reflecting upon themselves.

And therein, the technological revolution of the past 150 years is created through this epoch of the forebrain, through the scientific and technological revolutions: the ape digging in the lithium dirt to produce the iPhone. This is a forebrain phenomenon. Spinoza articulating the monad—that is a forebrain phenomenon. It is beings reflecting upon nature with increasing acuity, which is neurosynaptic sophistication at the level of the architecture of genomic recombination in spacetime. In this historical moment of the forebrain, the species achieves a sort of scientific-technological hyperspace, which is industrial-technological modernity, which then produces these increasing abilities to compress, condense, and singularize—a deeply Hegelian concept, which we actually see in history. From the moment of Hegel to this contemporary moment, his structural theory becomes almost obscenely accurate.

This emergent singularity of space and time comes through technological revolution—not only through the genome, which is a glacial phenomenon, a natural energetic architectural phenomenon, which is the organic body, but through what these organic bodies are able to produce through recursion: the forebrain. Before and after the forebrain is really the mark of history, insofar as we know it in a grand cosmological sense in relation to humans. This is a real geopolitical and geological change. And this is what’s at the root of globalization. It’s at the root of the concept of the individual. It’s at the root of the free market. It’s at the root of human relationships. Because the emergence of this level of autonomy, or even the ability to conceive of the self, is, one, a genetic phenomenon at the level of architecture, and two, a sociopolitical, technological phenomenon: the making available of the free space of the individual in the first place.

So the death of the tribe—or, as Nietzsche would say, the death of God, as the cultural fabric of a community and space organized around a cosmology which held the tribe together at a local level—the death of this phenomenon is the technological-scientific revolution of the nineteenth century, hinging into the twentieth. And it then produces, at a level which I think Marx somewhat predicts, the alienated, isolated subject, because the subject, by the very circumstances and conditions of modernity—which is to say technological efficiency—becomes individualized. The individual itself becomes a historical possibility.

Please understand how radical this is in terms of survivability. The job is now found in a sea of online applications. Dating is now found in a sea of online applications, or in random encounters on the street. The death of community itself as a structural phenomenon in relation to survivability brings about this historical individual, which is now navigating the streets of an alienated, atomized modernity: applying for jobs, attempting to find relationships, whether platonic or romantic, et cetera. This is the product of a deep-space, deep-time process, which hit exponential hyper-acceleration at the turn of the twentieth century and has not looked back.

And so this question of individual autonomy is then a question of knowledge of self—which is, of course, the process of individuation, which Jung describes, albeit somewhat archetypally: the process of actually discovering who and what one is, not only locally but cosmologically. Actually discovering the identity of the self is a process which cannot be doctrinal, because at the level of the granularity of the individual in relationship to the cosmic, this is novel terrain in terms of the incarnation of beings down to the level of the embodied subject, the embodied person, the beings themselves. We can trace cosmological history down through the genome, down through the genealogy of the being, and of course we can understand, in a divorced, abstracted sense, the birth of the being itself. But we cannot understand that being’s intimate relationship to being itself outside of existential experience. That’s why I described existential philosophical literature. This is the birth of existential philosophical literature. It emerges precisely because of this.

But you then have this imperative. It really is a cosmological ethical responsibility that emerges in the birth of modernity, as a necessary outcome—a necessary outcropping, a necessary product—of the technological revolution: the responsibility of the individual to itself, to oneself. This is what Sartre calls the radical freedom of being. But it’s not so thoroughly exegeted as I have done here, in terms of Darwin or thermodynamics or cosmology. I’m giving you the scientific background as to how and why this freedom emerges. And therein, the atomized, isolated, historically produced individual must come to terms with his or her—or their—own individuality. You must actually discover yourself. And this is a challenge which, I think, given the typical laziness and convenience of the human architecture, is very rarely risen to.

Because in this new paradigm, the individual exists as a technological reality. The individual is no longer embedded in community architectures in order to survive. This is, I think, deeply and implicitly understood, in the sense that it is known—but it’s not at the level of consciousness for the vast majority of the species. And it is experienced as a profound state of alienation, because it is a paradigm so far outside the technological architecture of the human species that there is really no way to cope or deal with it. And the call there—which I think is also the birth of true psychology, which really only exists in its nascency, and even then becomes a commodified market—is to go within and discover the self. This is a project of excavation, of exhuming the being that is oneself: beings themselves in their unique granularity and individuality, in relation to cosmological being itself. And this is terrain that has not been walked. It is extremely novel terrain.

So we have the species itself attempting to return to this idealized past—which is, of course, one of the call signs of totalitarianism, in the brief historical possibility of totalitarianism, something that again emerges through this technological-social architecture of modernity. Same thing as the nation-state, or globalization. These are all technological phenomena. That past is a state that could only be returned to—if there were such a desire to return to the coercive, cosmologically bound communal architecture—if the technological scaffolding of civilization were removed. So this is the background upon which the individual, the atomized subject, this new call into chosen community, comes into being. Without that infrastructure, the historical and ancestral circumstances effectively just return: the localized, we could say agrarian, community living off the earth, in adherence with one another in a religious sense to certain value systems—cosmologies, or stories about what is valuable, what is important, what is ethical. It’s a sort of Ten Commandments architecture of the community. And that’s what binds these communities.

But what we see is that the nation-state at the beginning of the twentieth century becomes outmoded in a matter of decades because of the technological revolutions. And we see this in terms of the Constitution of the United States: it is an ideological infrastructure which can no longer hold the technological reality of modernity. It was written, what, 250 years ago? And the nation-state as a foundational concept is barely a hundred years old—we’re talking about World War I. And already these conceptual definitions of beings in world, and of how they organize themselves, must be radically revolutionized, because they no longer fit the actual technological revolution, which is now moving at exponential light speed through artificial intelligence. We’re trying to hold on to infrastructural realities which no longer actually exist, definitionally, in space and time. It’s no longer the way that energy is moving. It’s like saying that the human being is attempting to adhere to single-cell concepts, when it now has a forebrain and is operating in an entirely different ontological paradigm. We’re holding on to a past which no longer exists. And this is, of course, the terror and the failure of conservatism around the world: what is being called back to in order to survive no longer even exists. The scaffolding of modernity would have to be stripped away.

So within this synthetic architecture of modernity, which is scientific and technological—all of the infrastructure, from data centers to parliaments to electric cars, whatever devices you want to describe—we have the increasingly individualized subject: the being in space and time, unmoored from the necessity of collectivity. This death of community is felt everywhere, at all times. And the atomization of the individual becomes a sort of scavenging within the architecture of civilization. So look at the pillaging of the social or communal architecture of government that occurs in totalitarian or fascistic systems—and this is, of course, the historical debate for or against central or federal government, or any government at all. You are looking at systems which posit communal engagement within a larger relational energetic architecture: the transformation of currents of energy, whether bodies, relationships, information, supplies, or resources, which no longer requires community.

So when you look at a nation-state—you look at the United States of America and the problems that emerge in the actual civilization, the country itself—you’re looking at the posited relational existence of these beings within the pseudo-architectural territory of the United States of America, with all of its colonies or state systems existing within the larger federalized governmental space. And the relationship between these beings is posited primarily, really solely, because of geography: geographical territory which is supposedly owned by some subsidiary of some government, upon which rules of law are then imposed, et cetera. That paradigm doesn’t even exist anymore, technologically. We are having intimate relationships with people from China or the Philippines more so than we have intimate relationships with our neighbors.

So there’s this rift in spacetime, which I lovingly bring about in my epic—sometimes on baseball history and sometimes on the meaning of life. The book I wrote very recently very much describes this scrambling of spacetime, and the human being itself cannot deal with it. So everything from the most primal or primordial urges—which is to say community, deep and intimate relationship with a romantic partner, the foundations of friendship and camaraderie—all of these are thrown into profound architectural, ontological confusion by the technological predicament, which has transformed the very necessity of those things, which were historically required across the entire genomic evolution of the species. And so what is called into question is really the genomic architecture of the beings themselves. This is what I discussed in the last lecture regarding the transformations of culture and technology, and the way they themselves transform the genome, which is the primary ontological architecture of beings encountering being. This is the importance of technology, and of the scaffolding of civilization via culture: it changes the way that the genome manifests, presents, moves, and is, in space and time.

And these consequences that I’m describing are paradigmatic. They’re at the level, I would say, of the forebrain—a species-level transformation between species paradigms. But there is no context for this, because it’s occurring through channel two architecture, which I’ve previously described as the prosthetic device: whether that’s the telescope, which allows Copernicus or Galileo or Kepler to reach understandings which then become multifactorial in an ontological transformation of the way beings see and observe reality and being itself; or the discovery that lithium and certain minerals within the earth can create personal computational devices, which then plug into a globally interconnected internet, which exchanges information at light speed across continents. I did a lot of work on this in terms of AT&T and the grid of national television—how World Series baseball games were broadcast. This is a transformation in the way that beings perceive reality, at the level of nervous-system architecture, which at a deeper level is genetic architecture, because the nervous system is basically a root system that springs up from the seed of the genome, if you want to look at it analogically.

So this profound contrast is a crisis. It is the crisis of modernity, which has accelerated even over the past generation—the past thirty years or so—to a fever pitch of chaos, crisis, destruction, and calamity. Precisely because we’re no longer just looking at television: radio waves broadcast to a passive observer, who can change the channel but can’t broadcast back. Individuals are now broadcasting back and forth to one another. Drop shipping, all of these different things that spring up with the internet revolution of the nineties—this is such a substantial technological paradigm shift in terms of interpersonal relationship via digital space. And this is why I’ve talked about digital space as something akin to the revolution of the forebrain: the creation of a literal, additional scalar sphere of engagement with being, with reality itself, in a way that creates chaos at the level of the individual, the genome, the being.

And all of this comes back, again, to the relationship between self and other—in terms of community, romantic relationship, platonic relationship—and the individual. What is primarily being transformed is the individual itself, which is to say the individual has now become possible. The individual is no longer a tribal production, but an ever more pressing ontological priority, and a requirement to come into relationship with being itself. It’s not something mediated by a church, or by a tribal, religious, or cosmological structure to which one perhaps unconsciously adheres in order to survive and remain within the tribe—not to be exiled, so to speak.

And this fracture and fragmentation is observable everywhere. It is the ontological condition of modern humanity. It’s in every aspect of the news, every religious, national, ethnic, and racial division, because these concepts and preconceived notions are coming apart at the seams, and will escalate—and do escalate—down to the level of ontological transparency and existential calamity that we observe in Dostoevsky’s Notes from Underground or Rimbaud’s A Season in Hell. These are the very early alarm bells ringing from the trees, the most perceptive birds before the volcano. They are the first examples in human history of the forced descent into the ontological substrate of the individual. This is really the history of shamanism itself in tribal contexts. But as a modern, individual phenomenon, these people undergo this catabatic descent in isolation from the cultural systems which formerly upheld or substantiated this descent—the prophetic traditions, so to speak. It is entirely new. And it is this forced descent which we observe with increasing calamity and pressing necessity, which is becoming the modern condition: the very technological revolution forcing the individual to come into being out of, and out from, the mass web of the cosmological storytelling of the tribe.

And that is the call—not only in terms of existence itself at this point in cosmological time, but furthermore, the necessity of coming into authentic community. And I would say there has never been an individual, nor has there ever been an authentic community. Our earliest examples of individuality are people like Rimbaud or Dostoevsky. An authentic community has never existed, because the conditions themselves have not existed for it—which is to say, the necessity of radical individuality. Men, women, people: the necessity of radical individuality, which is the ability to discover oneself authentically at the level of the ground of the being, all the way down through cosmology, through history, through culture, through all of these constrictive architectural historical realities, to discover the being itself—and then to come into relationship with beings, having been established as being oneself. This is the ontological responsibility articulated quite clearly in the French existentialist paradigm of the middle of the twentieth century.

Without this coming into being, community is just frankly not possible. There is no possible community, because there is no authentic community. There is no authentic conception or perception of self to be articulated in relationship to others. So what we have now is a community and a pseudo-individualist infrastructure entirely mediated by the lower being, the lower human being—which is to say consumption and production. An entirely economically transactional, mediated structure, which is then translated into quote-unquote dating, quote-unquote relationships, quote-unquote the world: beings who have no relationship to themselves at the level of the ontological ground, who then come into quote-unquote relationship in the most rough and brute sense of the word—just instigating transactional movement, which is to say resources.

They have no relationship to being in themselves, which is the ontological crisis we’ve described with Heidegger, in The World’s Midnight, and in the vast majority of my work. But in that crisis there is, of course, the relational crisis: beings without relationship to being can have no relationship to one another in any meaningful way. They can only have instrumental relationships—which is, again, the standing-reserve-ization of nature. Human beings, in relationship to one another in this context, are, for lack of a better word, logs to themselves and logs to one another. They’re simply information or resources to be harvested, in relationship to themselves and to one another, which is a deep, deep, deep ontological poverty. There’s no relationship to nature as in the forest. There is only relationship to the log of the tree, which can be burned for a certain amount of time until it can no longer be burned, because it’s been burned to ash—and then, of course, the next tree is harvested. This is the approach of modernity, and it’s deeper than capitalism. It’s deeper than socialism. It’s deeper than all of these political-economic ideas. It is an ontological problem.

So the emergence of the possibility of individuality does not mean that the individual actually exists at all whatsoever. This is the problem. We can have the forebrain; we can have the civilizational, technological architecture which allows the being to emerge out of the coercive contract with the tribe, or with the cosmology—the belief system necessary to survive. But that does not mean the actual movement, the actual transformation, has occurred at the level of the ontological realization of the being itself. This requires the authentic inquiry articulated in the Socratic sense: know thyself. This seems to be somewhat of a tall order, ontologically, for the human species, because it requires true, genuine introspection. It requires true, genuine inquiry into what one is, who one is, why one is, where one came from, and, through actions, where one is ultimately going. And then, by way of that inquiry, to move into relationship with others who are also conducting, or have conducted, that inquiry. That is authentic community.

And so you can see why the concept I’m articulating is so novel and so scarce: it requires so much of the species, which has done so little with what it currently has, because it’s in an ontological, ecological, and sociological crisis. It’s at a flashpoint, because these technologies have effectively overwhelmed the historical subject. The transition has not been made ontologically into radical encounter with the individual—outside of, maybe, Artaud, Rimbaud, Lispector, Dostoevsky. These real attempts have occurred in an isolated sense, as they have had to historically, because this is entirely new. This is a new way being paved, new ground being broken. And this is the call for all beings in this. This is really the purpose of civilization, beyond and behind what many can only see as brute survival: it exists, at the deepest level, to bring the individual into emergence—for the individual then to have an authentic encounter with being, and then, necessarily, to be able to create the new paradigm of human relationship, which is actually authentic, integral, and based not only on a real connection to oneself in terms of being in nature, but on relationship to others who are also in this ontological connection with the ground of being. That is a developmental process that requires real, authentic, integral introspection and work.

Outside of that, there is only this technologized abyss: the being made available as resource, and the transactional, currency-based architecture of human existence that moves through it. It’s emptied of all meaning. It has no meaning. It can’t have any meaning, because it’s not in relationship to being itself. It’s not in relationship to the actual substrate of the individual. It’s entirely transactional, entirely consumptive, entirely productive. And thus, of course, we exist in a larger political-economic paradigm which articulates exactly that: global consumerism, even at the level of relationships, even at the level of the self. And this fundamental lack of self-knowledge has vast consequences in this Wild West ontological terrain of digital-technological and industrial-technological modernity. These are power tools being leveraged without any awareness whatsoever of being—which is a problem I’ve already articulated.

And this, again, is the crisis we observe everywhere relationally. There is no foundation for relationships. They’ve been removed from the survival context—and from the culture, religion, cosmology, and belief systems which were all agreed upon locally, in community. The reach of information and communication, and even physical relationship, has now expanded globally in a matter of moments—or at most a matter of hours on an advanced plane. So you have this radical expansion of territory without the necessary radical expansion of self. And this territory becomes only exploitable terrain, because it’s emptied and evacuated of the necessary perceptive conditions—the understanding of oneself, cosmologically and existentially—to navigate this new possibility. So it becomes profoundly overwhelming, and not only overwhelming but profoundly exploitative, because no beings are in relationship to themselves at all whatsoever. They are just acting through the village survival of old. They haven’t made that leap into individuality and individuation—which is why, of course, this is such a pressing concept for early psychology at the turn of the twentieth century, which, I think by no mistake, emerges alongside quantum mechanics. These are the same problem: the problem of atomization, the problem of self, the problem of being, of what is perceptible in and beyond the bounds of human architectural experience, and the definition we have of self and of being itself. Quantum mechanics is a Spinozan problem, existentially—which is to say, it’s the problem of being itself: the monad.

So then, of course, there are these predictable outcomes: the operationalization of relationships, the transactional quality of relationships, which exists in the abyss of unindividuated individualization. That is total atomization: the being without community—without enforced community—thrown into individuality without being individuated. Understand that this is actually a deep survival problem, and it is experienced as a survival crisis neurologically, and even genomically. This is a profound violence. It’s the violence of the rift in space and time, which has been radically expanded and singularized at the same time—through digital-technological architecture, AI, the jet plane, et cetera—but not incorporated, not integrated at the level of the architecture of the being itself: genomically, neurologically, and, furthermore, ontologically, the being in relationship to itself. This is new ground over the past five or six generations, and it exists as effectively unexplored territory. It’s an abyss. It’s a trench into which few have dived, and even fewer have made marked progress down into that trench to observe real ontological continuity.

So the crisis we experience today is fundamentally and absolutely that—politically, sociologically, culturally, existentially, et cetera. This ground, this abyss that has been opened up, is the abyss of technological modernity, which has made available the problem of the individual for the first time in human history. See the consequences of this. When the individual becomes a problem—which is to say, when the individual is actually made available in space and time, technologically—community itself, as a coercive constraint upon survival, utterly disappears, because there is no need to be in relationship at the level of survivability. Which then requires us to interrogate: why would we be in relationship? And most of the architectural realities occurring in modernity are still running on this script of survival.

The being itself has not actually made the leap into individuation—which is to say, the acquisition of a real relationship to being. ‘Acquisition’ is a transactional word, I’ll say: coming into being, coming into real relationship with being, and thus moving and activating the self as an individuated force in an individualized society—an atomized society, produced entirely by technological scaffolding. Civilization itself is a technological bubble. It’s a prosthetic device. So we’ve created the possibility for this reality to come into being, but the reality must come into being through an equal and opposite ontological realization at the level of the individual: the individuation of the self. And this has not yet occurred. So of course the self is still deeply embedded in the survival architectures, looking backwards.

And the grounds for the real, necessary leap that must happen communally—even globally at this point—have not been laid. The technological territory is open, abandoned, and yet exploited at the same time. Understand this. And this is what creates the profound feeling of meaninglessness, ennui, the repetition of the same violent acts, corruptions, distortions—which themselves are really nothing more than ontological abandonment. When we think about the violences, the abuses, the sexual coercions and manipulations, we’re looking at ontological abyss and absence, in which pleasure or power take over as the modes of production and reproduction of behavior in space and time. Because there has not yet been a real movement past the historical precedent, which was the primary organizing principle of local, tribal, regional environments: the religious mode, for lack of a better word, which was the organizing force of community and which dictated, for the most part, communal behavior. So this is what happens when the individual emerges as a historical possibility. And I think I’ve articulated pretty clearly here just how unprecedented it is.

So the real consequences obviously come down to the individual, in terms of relationship to oneself. Without that, it is effectively a hell. It’s a sort of purgatory: the repetition of old, outmoded survival systems and behaviors within this new ontological possibility, which has only been made possible by technology. It is the rift between the entire genomic history of the species and this new technological availability, which is making possible the question of radical community and radical individuality. The question is whether or not that is actually grasped—or whether these technological possibilities collapse, and the human being is thrown back into a sort of forced communalization in order to survive. That, of course, would also be the death of the individual: the subservience of even the brief historical possibility of the concept of the individual back into the communal architecture of obedience, under the threat of exile—which is primarily the way that most human infrastructure, including political culture, currently operates.

So that transitional leap needs to be made ontologically. And that’s an inside job, for lack of a better word. This is, of course, part of a larger cosmological revolution of recursion and self-reflection, which I’ve already articulated via the transformation of the genome, the larger cosmological history, and then the advent of the forebrain and the entirety of the history that emerges after it, as a necessary architectural and infrastructural inquiry into the possibilities of this new terrain, which has been carved out via genomic evolution—again, Darwin.

So that’s about it. Unfortunately, this problem is the way it is for very specific, clear reasons, which I think I’ve articulated very transparently here—maybe in a sort of spiral form, a recursive form itself, thinking aloud. But these things don’t change until that level of individuation necessarily comes into being, which is self-realization. So you have the transparency of a species sleepwalking through its own technological revolution—a revolution which is utterly shifting the technology of the being itself—without responding to the necessary call of self-realization. Which, in many cases, I would say, is just not really possible at the level of the infrastructure of the existent organism. This isn’t to say it’s impossible. It’s to say that it appears to me to be very exclusive historical terrain in terms of the genome and the genealogy of the species. And thus the purgatory comes from the inability—or just, practically, from the fact that the leap has not yet been made ontologically, commensurate with the technological possibilities which have now unfolded.

So the individual—the individuated individual—must necessarily emerge through its real encounter with itself, without the guardrails or guide rails of a culture, a religious system, or a political system telling it what to do, what it is, how to be, and who to be. That is a substantial amount of ontological freedom, which Sartre discusses. And then, from that place of achieving that level of ontological ground within oneself, existentially, that being works toward the possibility of community with fellows. Outside of that, there is no individual; there is no community. There’s just the empty technological shell, which functions utterly transactionally, utterly somnambulistically, utterly embedded within the existent deep-time survival architectures—which have implicitly and unconsciously created the circumstances for achieving this new level of consciousness or awareness, but have not yet stepped into them.

And this is, fundamentally, a failure. It is a failure. And this is a lot of what we see when we observe contemporary human existence: this possibility has become increasingly possible, at least via civilizational and technological scaffolding, but it has not been achieved. And the amount of technology at a certain point becomes useless, as the gap continues to grow between ontological awareness and technological possibility. Because without ontological awareness, the species simply repeats itself with increasing force and frequency. That’s what technology makes possible.

So: ontological fluency, ontological education, as usual. Becoming aware of this, I think, is critical, is crucial, because then you’re also able to observe it in day-to-day interaction, day-to-day relation. Most of it is not relation. Most of it is not interaction. Most of it is entirely ensconced within predictable, self-enfolding survival architectures which have not achieved the level of awareness necessary to step into real relationship.

So this returns me, finally, I think, to the problem of human relationship in modernity, whether romantic, platonic, work-based, whatever it is. There is no real relationship, because relationship can only become possible at the level of the ontological ground of the being itself. That level of awareness must be achieved in both parties in order for there actually to be relationship. People look for relationship but do not have a relationship to themselves. It’s kind of a clichéd way of saying it, but it’s fundamentally true. The level of relationship to self required to have a real relationship to another is so deep and so substantial—the ground of the personal self in relationship to the transpersonal self, the existential ground in relationship to the cosmological ground of being, is so substantial and so rich—that this level of excavational, architectural work into oneself is a project of many years. And so there really is no substantial possibility of relationship without those grounds being there, and the ontological commitment required at the level of the being is substantial.

Outside of that, the only relationship possible is transactional, because all that can be exchanged is superficial: resources, or pleasure, et cetera. And that’s the global world condition we have now. We don’t have real relationship. We have pseudo-romantic relationship, pseudo-platonic relationship, pseudo-business relationship—and all of those are bare, disgusting, abhorrent substitutes for real human relationship, real ontological relationship. And that, of course, is a task that occurs at the level of the newly emergent political individual. A very new paradigm. Without that work, there is nothing. It’s just emptiness. It’s a surfeit of superficial trash, for lack of a better word.

And we see that in our culture constantly. We’re barraged by this information, these videos, this text, none of which is actually meaningful information. It’s information emerging from a level, a stratum, of consciousness radically divorced from anything capable of producing meaning. It’s a sort of raging into the darkness from a very surface-level awareness of self and being, of what it is to be. And to expect to be able to come into relationship with a force like that is ludicrous. It’s nonsense. And that, of course, exists in work environments, in dating environments, in digital space, in platonic environments. Without sufficient depth, nothing is possible. It’s just ontologically not possible for there to be a relationship. There can be transaction.

And so this is what I really wanted to establish: the political economy which we experience now is the ontological consequence of the failure of our own self-realization. Which is to say, it’s empty, superficial, transactional, based entirely on materialism, consumption, and pleasure—all poor, grotesque substitutes for real relationship. And the ground of which I’ve spoken here is the ground we must necessarily reach in order to get anywhere even remotely meaningful. Otherwise it’s just empty surfeit, trash, with which it is not possible to be in relationship. You settle for the scraps of a broken, farcical materialism, which endlessly circulates, produces nothing, provides nothing of substance, and must perpetually be consumed to extract rare moments of pleasure or hormonal satisfaction. And that is really a fate maybe worse than death, or as bad as death—which is to say, profound starvation.

And I think this is something experienced at the level of the species almost constantly. Obviously, some level of pleasure is enough for a very low level of consciousness. But there’s much, much more that is available—that always has been available, and is increasingly available, with the technological and historical circumstances which have very recently been made possible: not only the forebrain, but industrial-technological modernity. We have to become individuated. We have to become true individuals. Outside of that, there is effectively no hope for the human species beyond pure, bare, rote survival, subsistence, and transactional relationship from top to bottom, which is meaningless. So there you go. Thanks.

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The Consequences of Ontology: Persistence, Cosmological Being, and Radical Play (Lecture 10/21/26)

I want to give a lecture here about the consequences of my ontological work. This is less a cosmology than an implementation of the cosmology.

I had some writings initially in which I was going to discuss the larger epochal movements of consciousness in space and time, and the technologies that are created to connect spirit and form in a deeper way. I was going to go into the origins of astrology and astronomy and discuss stellar physics, the physics of the cosmos, Newtonian gravity, as the rules of play at large, phenomenologically—which is to say, the material paradigm within which spiritual processes unfold.

Creation and time are themselves processes of revelation: processes of revelation through being in form, and the awakening of forms to being itself.

This process is a perennial unfolding of births and deaths based on phenomenologically apparent circumstances, which are not so apparent beneath phenomenology. And this is the historical disconnect between science and mysticism or religion.

I think there is a persistent sense in world history that there is a meaning, reason, or purpose behind phenomenology which is veiled to human beings. I would suggest, at least historically, in a world-historical sense, that this was most clearly or concretely explicated through the world’s astrological traditions, and, of course, things like the Tibetan or Egyptian Book of the Dead: this emphasis or focus on transformation as the space between birth and death, in which there is a larger spiritual-cosmological process unfolding.

This process creates the manifestation of certain forms, certain technological beings, at certain places, spaces, and moments in time, which are enacting and engaging certain purposes. These purposes unfold historically through larger material events, such as the French Revolution, or more private spiritual events, such as the placement or removal of a certain road sign in front of a certain location at a certain moment in time, or the revelation of a certain space—a park, at night, at a certain moment—which transforms a being’s perception of experience.

This is a sort of scripted theatrical turn, which I have already spoken of deeply in terms of Menippean farce, Gogol, and so forth. It is also something explored extensively by the existentialists, including Dostoevsky in The Crocodile.

It is this persistent sense of what Jung terms synchronicity: that space and time, as an unfolding or unfoldment, themselves have a meaning, purpose, or way of orienting the being toward an unfolding. And that unfolding is, of course, past, present, and future.

The being, or the form itself, is historically situated in a cosmological sense, and thus is simultaneously becoming available to experience and making experience available through the technological instantiation of the being itself.

This is the backdrop of the discussion we have been having in terms of the operator of persistence , which is to say that being in form, or being in time, is persistence against constraint: the maintenance of the pseudo-closed structure in an entropic universe.

And beneath that, or behind it, is the aeon at play with colored balls—which is to say, the experimentation of the universal, or the cosmological, as an unfolding process of developing technological architectures of being.

This architectural process is a play of consciousness, or a play of the universal cosmological sphere. Whatever name we give to it is effectively irrelevant. It is traceable historically, materially, and phenomenologically through the creation and unfolding of the universe.

Everything from cosmic microwave backgrounds to different galactic, stellar, and geological formations, right down to the cell, belongs to a scientifically, technologically, and historically available history at this moment in time, which is to say 2026. It is effectively transparent, at least materially.

The issue, of course, is understanding the meaning behind being, if there is any. And this is the problem of the existentialists in the mid-twentieth century.

It recalls intimately everything from Babylon to Sumer to Egypt to Greece, and the importance of the astrological or cosmological in the Lakota, Aztec, and Mayan traditions: the tracing of the movement of forms in space and time in an attempt to discern the meaning of the action which occurs in space and time, to unify cosmos and psyche, so to speak.

This is, of course, not transparent to beings, because beings are that which is at play within being itself. They are the actors upon the stage of being, fulfilling at a local level certain purposes which are discernible in the immediate environment and ecosystem itself—let us say, in terms of Earth, within the geosystem of Earth.

But at a larger cosmological level, these purposes are not immediately discernible, because these actions are occurring, as it would be said historically or mystically, within the mind of God, or within the cosmological mind of being itself: the unfolding of this expedition of play down into constraint, into persistence-based architectures.

This stripping away, as we have been discussing, is a sort of caustic or acidic phenomenon of revealing the larger superstructural condition.

And we, being at the level of this play in 2026, within the human technological ecosystem of forms, exist in a sort of space between awakening—which is to say, authentic being as in creation itself—and the manufactured disguise of technological culture, the technological biosystem, and all of these different things which are the masks of being.

I have described this in terms of Channel One and Channel Two architecture : Channel One being genomic, the hardware of the human being, and Channel Two being the softwares of culture, the prosthetics which are scaffolded on top of the genomic.

We can understand prosthetics at the level of the genome and at the level of the forebrain or the opposable thumb itself as well. These are technological eras, and that transmission, I would say, really firmly begins in terms of the movement from Channel One to Channel Two with cave painting, early stone tools, and so forth.

This is an externalization of the cosmological process of genomic technology, or the transformation of nuclear stellar energy down through spheres.

This is information transformation. Information technology is the condition of the universe itself.

The issue is becoming available to being itself.

And this is the radical freedom which Sartre describes in existential thought in the mid-twentieth century. But we must elucidate how to bring about this radical freedom, because it is not something transparent to the human condition at all.

The human itself is something that must be stripped away, and furthermore, the technological, cultural, and social disguises and masks which must be worn, or are being worn, in the process of being human, as opposed to being cosmological.

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The Cosmological and the Existential

This is the purpose of the cosmology and ontology I have been elucidating, because it has two parts: it is scientific, and it is existential.

At a certain point, the behavior of the universe is consolidated by way of compression—informational, technological compression—of the supernova, or the star-based, stellar energetic. We are talking about nuclear fusion being compressed structurally down to the level of metabolism, of the cell or the organism.

This technological compression down through scales, which is again persistence against constraint, is the issue of translation, which produces the schizophrenic split of the identity of the being surviving in the world.

The self-and-world conjecture is one manufactured at the level of technology: the human being, hormonal and sexual technology, the bisexual nature of the human being, which is to say male-female architecture, and furthermore, the architecture of the organ or organ-system body, the neural-system body, which is an entropic technology.

It is an entropic architecture attempting to persist against constraint, simply to hold the body together, and at the species level, in terms of the species mind which we have already articulated, to persist across space and time.

Which is to say, to transmit the informational-technological architecture of the being forward, incrementally and exponentially across time, so that the human being as a technological conjecture survives into the future.

This is, again, a genetic transmission of the past. The human being itself contains, to a certain extent, the entire history of humanity intimately within the somatic body itself.

I have gone deeply into this as well. Jung’s Red Book is a great example of how archetypal transmission, symbolic transmission, occurs through intimate somatic memory of experience.

And I wrote a substantial philosophical-poetic epic on this, Measures of Fire: the actual experience of being cosmologically.

This is the place to which we must come. Being cosmologically is actually the evolutionary leap required at this stage of humanity and human history, made possible in large part by technological, scientific, historical, and even mythological revolutions of consciousness in the forebrain epoch itself.

This is the possibility of becoming cosmological, or being cosmological, which is to say recursion at the level of the universal.

We are no longer simply organisms occurring within a ground of which we know effectively nothing, but organisms occurring within the stratum of a cosmological ground of which we have become increasingly conscious.

Thus, the identity of being itself is inextricably altered in coming into relationship with the groundswell of being itself, cosmologically.

This is really the purpose of ontology, and it is the purpose of all human historical explication, exploration, exegesis, and knowledge itself: everything from mysticism and mythology to science, philosophy, and literature, especially existentialist literature.

All of these fields are themselves attempts to accomplish this.

Historically, in the early modern period, we have figures like Spinoza or Leibniz, who undertake the work of radical consolidation of entire historical paradigms and epochs: painting the picture of being itself through the available historical, scientific, and cosmological lenses.

This is itself the entire human species-level process and project of knowledge.

And this is all very existentially grounded.

My problem at large with science, mathematics, philosophy, literature, and so forth, is that the vast majority of these existing systems, or disciplinary substructures, do not really make themselves available to the existential condition of being human at all.

They are knowledge devices divorced entirely from the essential process of integration, which is what all knowledge fundamentally requires if it is truly knowledge, and not just nonsense or abstraction.

Knowledge requires that we integrate it at the deepest level of our being. Which is to say that it is an existential revelation. This is the mark of true knowledge.

At least, in my opinion, my perception of it.

And this brings me back to the historical split and schism between astronomy and astrology, as well as alchemy and chemistry.

These are very important historical schisms if we understand them at the level of epistemology. Knowledge becomes a power relation, or a way of being in the world, which is increasingly materialistic and effectively phenomenological in the sense that it is divorced from meaning.

Which is to say, divorced from the revelation of being in time and the understanding of being as a characterological condition.

The depth of ontology which Heraclitus offers, which is again the child at play, is a characterological revelation of that which is being: the fundamental which manifests itself in all forms, all places, and all times.

This is deeply Vedantic. Heraclitus and the Vedantic philosophers and sages are intimately related in this sense.

And this is what figures like Spinoza or Leibniz are perennially attempting to restore in Western civilizational and global consciousness: the realization that technological knowledge, if not adequately incorporated into a cosmological background, is schizophrenic.

It is divorced from the meaning of being in time.

And thus, without meaning of being in time, we have the really productive condition of modernity, which is simply an input-and-output, machinic system of consumption and production, which we know as labor or capitalism.

It has no background and no ground within the universal character of being, and is not united by a real vision of that force which is working through all things.

And this, of course, becomes an ethical responsibility.

Quite simply, understanding the nature of being itself as indivisible. It cannot be divided or compartmentalized into acts of violence or acts of sanity or salvation, which is, of course, the typical Western philosophical-religious mode of thought and being in the world.

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The Character of Being

What really needs to be tackled here is that we do not necessarily understand the cosmological mind.

This is not a philosophy of history. It is an implementation of history, or creation of history, which we could say is a scripting or directing of historical phenomena.

This all emerges naturally through thermodynamic and entropic universality, and can be traced phenomenologically and scientifically across the history of the cosmos.

You can understand the French Revolution by way of thermodynamics at a cosmological-historical level. We are not going into that now. I have already gone into it multiple times.

But we can understand the phenomenological rules and regulations, which are the laws of physics, as the field of play.

Can we understand the mind behind the field of play?

And this is the ontology of the character of being.

This is knowledge at the level of the thing itself which is creating the visible process, the phenomenological.

Again, Heraclitus’s child at play with colored balls is the theoretical architecture within which I am gathering these things. And I think this is still a scientifically viable axiom to work with dynamically in terms of being in time.

Not even just at the level of the atomic, but at the level of play itself as the structure of creation beneath and behind persistence against constraint.

This reveals itself technologically through beings as survival architecture: survive, reproduce.

And that thermodynamically manifests itself through metabolism, through the sex organs, through the technological architecture of the species itself, and the evolution of the neurology of the human being and spinal organisms.

This is the real question, because when we reveal this ontological background, what it requires and what it makes available is characterological authenticity.

Which is simply to be oneself.

To be oneself, obviously, one must know oneself. And this is the commandment of any real ontological or ontologically philosophical project, which is to say, a project actually in relationship to being.

And this has real consequences.

It has the consequence of making available the lived life of the individual, the organism itself, in relationship to its beingness.

That characterological difference at the level of organisms is obviously in intimate relationship to how, when, and why they are constructed.

We can know when, perhaps. We cannot necessarily know why. We can, to a certain degree, know how, in terms of the technological architecture and how it manifests in time.

But to discover the character of the being is, of course, the quest and the question of life itself, existentially.

And this is possible, I think, in large part through the advancement and enlargement of the brain, the forebrain advancement and the epoch therein, to know being at a level beyond pure survival and pure reproduction.

This is the crisis of human history, which has been unfolding for tens and hundreds of thousands of years at this point.

This terrain has now been made available, and humanity itself—and I would say really all of written human history—is simply the struggle between this survival architecture, which is to say the hindbrain, and the emergence of this epoch of the forebrain and the philosophical, literary, existential, and artistic developments it makes possible.

Which is making available the being to itself.

And I would simply describe this as authenticity.

In order to become authentic, one must know oneself to such a degree that one can express authentically in space and time.

This is, of course, the existential literary project, bar none.

It is essentially that this beingness can be expressed, and is expressed, in space and time through not only knowledge of oneself, but sufficient craft: the vessel which can hold the being.

This is an integration, if you think about it in terms of language, of the somatic body, such that one can express oneself through the technological architecture of the being.

This is really the primary symbolic model and mode of language itself: the speaking being, the thinking being, that the thinking can be spoken.

Heidegger speaks about this, as does Terence McKenna. Both, I think, very well on this topic.

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The Gogolian Farce of Civilization

To integrate this is to come into relationship with the Gogolian.

I have discussed Gogol in terms of modernity. I have discussed Gogol in terms of the farce of culture, the farce of civilization, and the dance or theatrical play which is conducted: the survival architecture of the organism in relationship to life itself, or to worlds.

And the schism which is created between the characterological foundation of each being intimately and the possibility of expressing said character without putting survivability at risk.

This is the condition of humanity at large, as we have already discussed.

The coercion of economic systems such as capitalism, or the larger political sphere, which has been in existence for as long as we have known human history, constitutes negotiations of energetic circumstances.

They themselves have really very little to do with ontology and exist at the level of survivability.

And this is the vast majority of, if not really all of, human culture and human civilization.

They are negotiations of energetic circumstances.

Which is to say, again, simply, survivability.

And this is the crux of the revolutions of modernity: the American Revolution, the French Revolution, the Haitian Revolution, the Russian Revolution.

And within the Russian Revolution slips Mayakovsky, the poet of the cosmos, or the poet of the integration of the human species, and the possibility of implementing radical play within everyday life.

Mayakovsky intuits—and this is the nature, I think, of all great poets—that there is a greater creational force behind the smokescreen of human history and civilization.

What we ordinarily see is the swirling of matrices of power, dynamics of discipline, which change and influence how the aqueducts of information and energy flow through geographical territory.

Which is to say, where economic and material power are consolidated, and why.

What is the justification or rationale for that?

Whether it is the divine right of kings, the myth of empire, racial myths, religious myths, and so forth, these all serve purposes historically to consolidate and distribute power in certain ways and functions, to prop up or propagate a certain vision of life.

And these visions of life, as ontologically empty, are just transformations and transmissions of energy.

They are a physical process.

This historical paradigm of pure materialism is in intimate relationship to the failure to instigate adequate ontological inquiry at the level of civilization, and at the level of the individual ultimately as well.

To free the being in a Promethean sense, or perhaps even a Shelleyan sense, is to reveal the energetic conditions at play behind the technological, civilizational, theatrical architecture of these disciplinary transformations of energy to serve purposes of survivability.

Again, behind the persistence architecture—persistence against constraint as the law of being, so to speak—behind that law is itself a creational force in a state of radical play.

Which is to say, experimentation with the foundations of architectures themselves.

This is a level of engagement with the self, really, which I am describing. And this is a very Vedantic concept.

We are taking science and scaling it to the Vedanta.

This play of forms, this play of technologies, is itself only a vessel and vehicle unto the ultimate revelation of that which is being.

Being manifest in time is increasingly, and exponentially, the possibility of revealing being itself.

We see this simply in terms of the development of the technology of the human being. Historically, that has been true. It is not to say that it always will be or always has to be.

But we see the scaffolding, evolutionarily in a Darwinian sense, of the human being in space and time to the level of forebrain recursive architecture, sophisticated neurological structures, which make available profound differences, diversities, and ultimately revelations of experience.

Which is to say, existential being itself.

The cosmos is perceiving itself through the eyes of the being.

It is very Jobian. Perhaps the eyes of the angels, so to speak, as well, in a monotheistic sense.

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The Radical Integration of the Cosmological Subject

What we are moving toward is this radical integration of the subject into the cosmological mode, which is, in so many ways, the death of the delusion or the vision of being human into the vision of radical play.

And the total openness, which is really almost a suiciding of the subject.

This requires, I would say, a profound characterological impulse to unfold the nature of being, to unfold the nature and mystery of the self.

This is, of course, the only ground which humans fear to tread.

They will explore stellar phenomena, attempt to go to other planets or objects in the solar system, and dive to the depths of the oceans.

But this, phenomenologically, is only a representational method.

The unification of the cosmos and the psyche within the existential condition of being human is really the only journey to be undertaken.

Because it is entirely beyond space and time.

There is no reach in space and time that could be explicated to prevent or avoid this fundamental confrontation, which is ultimately a consolidation of all history, all time, all being, into the architecture and technology of the being itself.

This is the real existential confrontation, which I would say is fundamentally Jobian.

Therein, of course, the only real recourse is to go within.

And so we have Artaud, we have Rimbaud, we have Dostoevsky in Notes from Underground.

These are the individual—and I would say specifically, again, because of world-civilizational conditions, European-modern—manifestations of this new ground opening up in human history.

Which is to say, really, the death of religious context, the death of cultural context, the unwiring of the individual from these predictable ritual containers—ethnic, geographical, cultural groupthink—into the free fall of the existential individual confronting itself.

Notes from Underground and A Season in Hell are the same document.

They are the existential individual’s confrontation with the self being put to language, being spoken aloud.

This is the historical technology, bar none, which I say is really the highest level of innovation on the frontier of human history at this moment in time, 2026.

Because it is the revelation of the ground which must be traversed by each individual, which then makes available the condition of existential-cosmological beingness.

It is breaking through the ground of this historical, sedimentary calcification of cultural and social identity, the vision of the human, into the cosmological ground of being itself.

Which then makes available a way of being in time.

This is the nature of identity: that with sufficient recursion into the cosmological ground itself, the true self, the universal, this then makes available a way of being in time from that base, that baseline of identification with the cosmological ground.

This is a transformation of the human being technology.

By way of reflection, interrogation, inquiry into the literal somatic architecture of the being, the architectonics of the being themselves are revealed.

This is immanent. This is somatic.

And it does not require knowledge of anything, but rather the experience of being.

But I bring to you here both that experience of being and the sufficient scientific, technological, and cosmological knowledge to understand why this is so important, and why it ultimately must happen.

It is the stripping away of the world in an Inannaic sense, in terms of the myth of Sumer, to come into contact with the transformative force of being itself.

And thus to emerge, or reemerge, with that existential realization at the sufficient level of depth to be and become oneself, not only in terms of the individual architecture, with the necessary level of freedom, but the cosmological ground of being itself, which resides behind that architectonically.

So now we can understand persistence against constraint as the rule or law of being, but that is simply the phenomenological ground.

The jumping-off point for the richness which is beyond that.

Which is to say, the emergence into the cosmological subject, or the cosmological identity: the radical play of being in space and time, across space and time, really in a boundless sense.

This play temporarily takes on bounded organismic technological systems and substructures, which scale themselves through reproduction, transformation of stellar energy across scales, and so forth.

And this is the necessary revelation.

A large part of the issue, I would say, existentially, in terms of being human on the ground of this technological unfolding—everything from Gothic architecture to the human being walking a dog in a tree-lined park—is the difficulty of actually understanding why.

I can elucidate this process to you, but there is not necessarily a realization as to why.

And this is, of course, the backdrop against which the entire religious history of humanity unfolds: the necessity of discerning the why.

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The Reunion of Science and Meaning

I suggest something of a return to the unification of scientific realization, which is to say observation and experimentation, and the attempt to discern meaning from tracking cosmological, stellar, and existential processes.

I would say this is really ontology.

And it makes me think of Goethe and the Urpflanze: tracking phenomenologically movement in space and time, and then attempting to discern within a theory of history, in a Hegelian or Benjaminian sense, or a theory of forms, in a Goethean Urpflanze sense, the underlying character of that movement.

This is necessarily, again, the historical schism which occurs between astrology and astronomy as modernity slowly creeps into historical space.

What is lost there is not simply theoretical, in terms of astrology or astronomy, but structural.

What is lost is the attempt to marry science to interpretation, which is to simply marry science to the humanities.

This is conventionally understood as a separation of rigorous study, conceived of as science—the scientific method of observation and experimentation—from the interpretive dimension of that study.

Really, Newton’s project was an attempt to unify existential thought with modernizing science.

We can understand how profound that is at the level of the individual: Newton himself could not settle for gravity, but had to understand the existential meaning of gravity.

And this is why he continued to remain interested in alchemy, a historical phenomenon with real contemporary implications.

Alchemy is a marriage of chemistry, which is to say, the phenomenological transformation of forms and elements in space and time, with the interpretive dimension of that transformation.

This is something deeply cosmological and stellar.

We could say hormones as well reside within this terrain, or the energetic and electrical transformation of the ecosystem of the body, which is to say, the nervous system.

The marriage of these phenomenological occurrences, which is the rule or law of forms—simply, physics—and the interpretive requirement, which is to say, why is this occurring?

Rather than understanding it as simply a flat materialistic phenomenon, we must ask whether there is some sort of essential unfolding underlying this activity.

What is the superstructural activity occurring across scales, from stars to cells?

Let us say we are trying to reunite Prigogine and Cecilia Payne-Gaposchkin.

We are trying to understand why dissipative structures in a cellular sense occur within one sphere or structural dimension, one level of microscopy, and how that is in relationship to stellar physics at the level of macroscopy, structurally.

That is what my work is.

And once we are able to discern structurally—which is to say, to unite the substructural across scales with the superstructural—then we are interrogating the character of being.

Why does this one structural phenomenon of persistence against constraint manifest across all of these different dimensions in space and time?

What does it tell us technologically about the architectonics of being, creation itself, and time?

This is discernible.

And it is made possible, and enlarged, by the scientific revolutions of human history.

This discernibility is a way into the reunion of this long-lost union at the level of existential inquiry into being itself, across thousands and perhaps tens of thousands of years.

Which is the return of ontology.

The return of the Heraclitean, or the return of the premodern necessity of a unified science.

Not only can we discern and understand phenomenologically what is going on, but we can unite phenomenology across scales and begin to interrogate being itself.

Why this behavior?

And I suggest that is really what we have been on the cusp of ever since the early twentieth century.

This is a great deal of what Jungian thought represents fundamentally, even through the lens of the archetypal.

To understand superstructurally that being itself is a symbolic language.

When we understand the genome, or we understand stellar energy, that symbolic language is in a perennial state of transformation from the supernova to the iPhone.

These are energetic systems which have an intimate historical relationship.

If we are looking at lithium or the battery, the computer chip, these are all phenomenological constructs of innovation and transformation of energy through emergent intelligences.

Again, the forebrain.

And to be able to trace that is to begin to interrogate why it happens, what architectonically is doing that work, what kind of intelligence is behind it.

The revelation itself of the creator and creation of the sign is primarily, I would say, what information technology at a cosmological level looks like.

This is deeply necessary to understand ourselves and to understand the world in which we live and which we inhabit: how it changes, how it has changed, and how it will continue to change.

Because this is at the level of superstructural behavior.

Universal behavior.

The behavior of the cosmological self.

And we can see ourselves within that as a sort of microcosmic phenomenon.

I think I will conclude there.

I hope you enjoy.

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Equanimity and Cosmology: Understanding History, Being, Reality, and Transformation (Lecture 10/28/26)

I’m thinking I’ll make a short lecture here. This has been a percolating topic over the past week or so, just piecing it together in my mind’s eye in terms of the vision of what’s going to be said, talking about equanimity and cosmology.

World history, these cycles of chaos, destruction, order. The history of civilizations, empires, species, et cetera. It’s all ground up and put into the flow of what I’m calling the cosmological genealogy, which is really putting everything into context in terms of humanity, human history, world history, the biosphere.

We’ve talked about dating sediments, dating geology, maybe even geographically, the Earth itself, but then also cosmographically, the development and unfolding of the cosmos, as in superstructural veins, galactic veins of energetic exchange through thermonuclear systems.

And the scales of transformation that occur down through those thermonuclear systems, which we’ve synthesized in persistence against constraint from the star to the cell, as previously discussed.

Putting it all into context, existence is fundamentally an existential problem. Being embodied. Which is to say that the one who is thinking through the condition is the one who is experiencing the condition. It’s a felt and embodied situation. It’s not abstract.

This is a lot of what modern science, for me, fails at. And this is what an integral or an integrative cosmology is doing. It’s interrogating the same structural phenomenological realizations of Gaposchkin and Prigogine and maybe Bohm, and then synthesizing those into the beaker of the literal existential experience of a literary theorist like Rimbaud or Baudelaire.

All of this is to say that the human being is structured on this perilous terrain, which I have previously called culturos-bios, which is really culture and biology, the scaffolding, which is a mutual interaction.

It’s a discourse between the nervous system programming of the organism itself, and then the creation of a dominant culture, which is attempting to regulate that nervous system experience from reality at a collective level.

When we look at film or Greek mythology, when we look at the Mongols or Lakota cosmology, or we look at Facebook or FaceTime, this is the interaction between Channel One and Channel Two systems, which is to say nervous system architectures, and these symbolic orders and technological orders which they produce to regulate themselves in the world.

Again, we’re talking about regulational structures, not configurational structures.

A lot of the reason why I’m drawn to geography and geology is this stonecraft. It’s a configurational, a low-regulational system. It doesn’t require the same amount of energetic exertion to maintain status quo as flora or fauna. It has settled into a configuration, mineral substrate.

Not to get too bogged down semantically there, but to move forward, we could talk about radically diverse nervous systems, such as Isaac Newton or Spinoza. Maybe Jakob Böhme, as another great example.

These nervous systems are literally perceiving existence on another terrain of being. They have access to literally a different plane of information, and this has to do with neurological sensitivity, which today we would call neurodivergence.

This is shamanic architecture in the way that I’m framing it.

I think it’s pretty explicitly clear throughout human history that this is terrain that is traveled by nervous systems. That experience and experiences are digested, ingested, synthesized, and really created by nervous systems interfacing with self, world, cosmos.

The technological architecture of the being, but then, rather, the entire ecosystem of beings in relation to being, which is to say world or cosmos.

There’s that, and then, of course, there is the culture. When we experience times of imperial or civilizational collapse, this throws the biosphere of the organisms which are organizing themselves under this regulational superstructure, which is to say culture or civilization, into a state of extreme dysregulation.

It’s the death of the everyday, as Mayakovsky would put it, that byt has crumbled into this revolutionary epoch where the bottom has dropped out of these predictable cultural behaviors and energetic aqueducts, which have regularly transformed space and time into predictable food, water, language, et cetera, which are literally energetically regulating these organisms at a superstructural root.

When I talk about cosmological literacy, what I’m talking about is mapping the terrain of cosmological history into billions of years, which I articulated in my work Measures of Fire, the epic poem, which quite clearly and literally walks the existential journey of life itself through the birth of the universe down through genomic creation and the iterative structures of genomic transformation, which we would call Darwinian evolution.

Understanding this cosmological genealogy, which is to say the supra or the grand heritage of creation, of all life and of all being and of all time, situates us quite clearly within this spectrum and in doing so allows us to understand exactly what we are, where we came from, and ultimately where we’re going in a transformative sense.

And it’s a freedom and a liberation of the identity and the self, as in a localized organism, back into the stream of cosmological transformation itself.

And so, this is why I, for lack of a better word, preach cosmological literacy and cosmological genealogy as the primary factor in existential well-being.

The reason why I state that is to actually know oneself, and furthermore, to actually know the entire map of oneself. The terrain of oneself as it comes into being, which is by no means firmly bounded into this organismic technology.

And so, I say that the universe is a technology or technological fire.

What I mean is that these technological systems, or substructures, that are transformed via interaction in spacetime, in a hyperlocal and stellar regional environment, that this is thermonuclear energy which is entering into the terrain of multicellular organisms, flora, fauna.

And then furthermore, into the advent of the AT&T nationalized television system in the United States in the 1950s.

Grids of energy, grids of electricity, grids of further conversion of this superstellar or thermonuclear energy into Channel Two structures, which are simply anything from cave painting to wireless cell phone towers.

This is occurring outside of the terrain of the genomic ecosystem of the organism, and yet influencing the way that that genomic system of the organism forms in space and time, as we’ve previously discussed.

These circumstances of existence are being transformed by Channel Two architectures.

And as those circumstances of existence are transformed, genomic selection, too, is transformed. Which is to say, it’s changing the stream of time in which genomic subjects manifest. They are created and transformed reproductively over generations.

So, I look at the universe itself as technology, period.

First, as Heraclitean fire, or as the thermonuclear origins of the universe itself, down into scales, which is to say stellar systems and organisms or cells.

And then that across scales, that is what is transforming, that technologies are being created to solve the problem of persistence against constraint, which is being or beings in time.

And the transformation, iteration of those technologies, is mimicked in everything from the evolution of the ape to the new edition of the iPhone.

This is a scalar, fundamental facet or factor of the identity of the existence of being itself.

When we talk about symbolic chains and symbolic orders transformed over time, anything from language to the human being are attempting to solve the same problem of persistence, and as such, across scales are playing by the same rules of transformation.

Symbolic condensation. Symbolic transformation, occurring literally at the level of the code of the genome, or at the level of the way that languages change over time, due to historical forces, which are exertions of pressures against communities which are depending and relying upon relatively stabilized existential conditions.

Food, water, shelter, energy, heat. Preservation, conservation of energy. Metabolic body. Which therein is preserving the function of the organ systems, the nervous systems, the brain, blood flow, et cetera.

This always makes me think of da Vinci.

Because he was thinking about this in terms of the movement of water, just as he was thinking about it in terms of anatomy.

One of the great Galileo quotes: wine is water mixed with sunlight, I believe.

Both instances, these thinkers are attempting to draw down to essential substrates, to determine what exactly is in existence.

To dive beneath phenomenology, or that which appears to be, in an X-ray fashion, to discern what Goethe would call the Urpflanze, or the primordial form, which is simply a Platonic ideal.

Which we can understand scientifically as something elemental, or something thermonuclear.

And I would trace elements back to the thermonuclear root as in stellar forge.

In times of chaos and strife, which are most of human history, this is the foundation for wisdom, for well-being. For a centered, holistic, solar plexus existence.

And what I mean by this is that the human turmoil is always already an existential turmoil in the face of death, degradation, decoupling. Entropy, heat death, et cetera.

These are questions of the existence and persistence of the universe, just as they’re questions of the existence and persistence of the cell, the star, and the organism.

And this is experienced existentially in the body by the recursively becoming aware human being, which is not simply responding to hindbrain survivalism.

It’s actually becoming conscious of the fact of organism death.

And so, what I’m drawing forward and drawing out here is the ontological current which runs within and behind human organism programming, which is to say, within and behind all technology in the universe, which manifests itself phenomenologically as forms of organisms and objects.

The fundamental substrate of energetic transformation, again, the cosmological literacy, as in the genealogy of fire.

And so, this itself being the primordial identity of all of creation, and therein, the organism itself coming into innate understanding of that which it is, is simultaneously a process of biological deprogramming, and cultural and civilizational deprogramming.

We’re talking about the cosmological substrate.

We’re not talking about the familial, we’re not talking about the religious, we’re not talking about the cultural. And we’re ultimately not talking about the organismic.

So when I talk about culturos-bios, I’m talking about something which is simultaneously necessary at the level of the sustenance of the organism. Food, water, the heat of the organs, the current of existential programming, which is survive and reproduce.

But yet must be stripped away to reveal the fundamental essential identity from which the organism should then come into conduct and contact with itself.

And without this substrate-level identity, we have the deepest crises, which is the fear and the confrontation of death, from which spring, I would say, the rather predictable behaviors of human history, which are the self-preservation of the organism at all costs, the identification with the body, as they would say in the Vedantic tradition, the enclosed caged subject.

Within the technological order of this iteration of the genome, which never experiences the transcendental subjectivity of the cosmos itself.

This is what I mean by equanimity in cosmology, as well as with extreme dysregulation as a product of culturos-bios.

There is, first, the trauma of being born, which is the emerging sentience coming into the body. This is the epoch of the forebrain.

As well as the trauma of the neurolinguistic programming of culture, civilization, religion, et cetera.

All of which are inductions of meaning. They’re establishments of symbolic chains of information, which must be dissected and broken down to perceive the apparatus behind them.

And the human condition has always historically been a profluence of technology.

Not only within the character of the body itself, the highly sophisticated human genome, architectonically moving over millions of years of cosmological and earthbound history, so to speak.

But the technologies of civilization and culture themselves, which are, again, as Wittgenstein would put it, linguistic problems.

We simplify that, distill it. They’re symbolic problems in everything from cave art to Notre Dame, that are creating additional spheres of information technology, which are being scaffolded upon and layered upon and on top of the already primordial existential problem of the human being.

Which is to say the bare technology of nature in evolutionary transformation over hundreds and thousands of years, coming into contact through the creation of the forebrain with this existential problem of death, persistence against constraint.

And furthermore, the interrogation, which we observe across all world history, of what it is to be itself.

The world cosmologies, the genesis myths, the gods and goddesses, the attempts to discern what is meaning, what is nature, what is truth, what is being.

The history of human religion and spirituality.

So, this is the literacy which does not exist.

And this is the literacy which I am attempting to instill this day and have been with progressive clarity over the past 15 or so years.

Without this necessary context, which I’m arguing is primarily genealogical, and when I say genealogical, it’s a scientific history of the universe down to the technological body of the human organism.

Which is the genome, which is the nervous system, which is the metabolism, which is the synapses of the brain, including the new advent of the forebrain, which is, in a cosmological sense, very new.

These prosthetics, which have been laid historically atop the cosmological thermonuclear energy itself, which is the force at the source of stellar fusion, which is the force at the source of the metabolic body.

These prosthetic parts, pieces, devices, which have been assembled architectonically over millions of years, to create a human body, which then is a technology of perception, and again, attempted preservation, to persist against constraint.

Which is to say, to contain, retain, preserve, foster this primordial flame, so to speak.

This is easily understandable in terms of metabolic health in the human organism, as well as precepts such as catabolism and anabolism, muscle tissue.

That the thermonuclear force of creation, as it is instilled and drawn down in a scalar fashion into the human being, is the primordial identity itself.

And that this itself, this is depicted in a lot of my early art, actually.

This was stuff that was understood for me intuitively before it was understood systematically, as it usually is.

That this body itself is unbroken from all of history.

It is unbroken from the minerals or the plants or the meat, the matter which it consumes.

Again, the rays of the sun, which it ingests through its body.

Understanding vitamin D is something that we take into our bodies in relationship to the sun. Which is a spacetime relationship.

That this is an unbroken field of transformation of energy, mediated by very meager cell walls.

Very, very meager subjectivities, which we understand today to be these scaled-up endeavors of the creation of modern subjectivity.

And this is the Gogolian farce of history, which I’ve so often evoked.

The name, the number, the bureaucratic function, the costume of the politician or the executive.

The farce of human history and the difficulty is because we have moved so far away from the primordial identity.

We’ve moved away from cosmological literacy, and into the bubble of human mythology, which is only made possible by the underlying and undergirding, supporting force and factor of the fundamental existential conditions of being itself.

This is similar to say that humanity has fallen into a dream which is powered by metabolic information technology.

And this is a failure of first-principles realization.

First-principle self-realization.

And the identity generated therein, which is to say really the entirety of civilization, culture, sociality.

The gesticulated self, which is everything from birth certificates to a social media presence.

These are identities which are being fostered and founded upon the soul tax, or the serf, or the divine right of kings, or the vision of Alexander the Great.

These are fostered and founded upon a profound lack of knowledge.

And so, we have these surrogate identities, which are compensatory identities in the face of the existential unknown, which there’s not yet been sufficient depth of synthetic unity to gesture towards the real cosmological existential primordial identity of the human being.

Which is to say, we know that which we are at root, which is ultimately a shattering of subjective boundary.

Which then, of course, ineluctably changes the way that human beings exist and perform on the global stage, because it has shattered itself, the primary Western myth of individuality.

Again, this is something much closer to the Vedantic or the Tao than it is to Enlightenment philosophy, Smith or Locke, or the current system of global capital, which presupposes individuals who possess not only certain grounds, but certain attributes.

Say the factory owner or the private property, et cetera.

These disputes of our jurisdiction are themselves manufactured human realities in the face of the cosmological.

This returns me to the human crisis of today.

That any sort of manufactured, civilizational, cultural, even subjective monument to perceived being, sort of imaginative creation, which is really all of human history, because all of human history has existed in the face of a profound lack of knowledge.

Wherein we have glimpses which right our course: Galileo, Spinoza, Copernicus.

These are the structures which collapse in the face of a real model.

And then necessarily must not be reformed, but there must be new structures created from the ground up at the base foundation of cosmological self-realization.

Contextual ground, as opposed to the imaginative psychosocial chaos of a network of kings warring for land in a prehuman apocalyptic scenario, which obviously still reigns today with slightly cleaner streets.

So, instituting this cosmological literacy as the foundation for being, which is to say, it is the compass rose.

It is the primordial directive once we understand this substance, and we understand our relationship to this substance.

We understand the larger cosmo-historical context of this substance.

We understand how this substance functions biotechnologically. We talk about information.

We understand how we interrelate with it, everything from the sun or stellar energy to nutrients. To sleep, to the nervous system. To the forebrain.

We understand these functions.

We are able to then sufficiently map out the real terrain of our real engagement with real being.

And what I’m saying is this is historically unprecedented.

We’ve relied upon myths and narratives. Almost grotesquely outsized and comic stories and tales of creation, existence, and being, none of which provide the real formal, grounded material scaffolding to help us discern that which we are, that which we came from, and that which we stand upon.

Real historical material information, which is, of course, what the history of science provides us, and tells us much of the same story that the East was telling mystically, mythologically, poetically, and philosophically thousands of years ago.

So bringing this cosmological genealogy into being is a question of creating global, cultural, and social literacy.

And to be able to create that is to be able to change our time and our lives, and institute not simply personal equanimity, but transpersonal equity.

By putting it all into context.

Thank you.

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Decay, Destruction, and the Ontological Confrontation with Being -- Lecture (10/31/26)

This might be a hard lecture.

Talking about decay and destruction, I could say calamity, at a civilizational or global level, and looking at it through the lens of cosmological processes.

We’ve gone very deep into capital. We’ve gone deep into currencies and flows of energy, which are obviously how material conditions are dictated on Earth in global systems of currency.

And I think really what I want to talk about is the existential experience of corruption and decay, and the, I guess I would call it, spiritual purpose of life, and the understanding of being in a body, entropic, and coming into relationship with being.

I think it’s a hard path to walk. But of course, we all walk it, what we could say sentient beings in various different degrees of sentience, walking within thermonuclear containers or vessels for energy. Whether that’s an ant or fish, you could say even a tree, lightning bug, and obviously human beings.

We’re talking about the currency of the cosmos, really.

And the existential experience itself is a manifestation of both the local and the non-local conditions of being in time.

And again, we’ve gone over the sort of spheres or levels of being where we’ve talked about persistence against constraint as a fundamental habitat for beings.

So I’ve talked in the past about weightlifting, resistance training, even spiritualizing hypertrophy, anabolism and catabolism, and understanding this struggle that all things experience, even stars.

Whether or not we want to talk about sentience, we’re talking about phenomena. We’re talking about manifestations of, we should say, cosmological form being in time, to remain existent.

And this is the universal struggle itself: to persist against constraint in an entropic universe, where conditions are always pushing towards dissipation of energy.

This is heat escaping local conditions, the pseudo-closed system of the body identity, which we perceive of as the organism, or the being, or the person, the name, and, of course, the identity.

All of the scaffolding that societies and civilizations produce.

And inevitably, when these societies and civilizations collapse, we are ripped from the illusions of the illusory conditions which they provided, or were able to provide, and have to come into more of a bare and brutal realization of self.

And we could think of this simply as nature.

And when I think of nature in this sense, I think of the jaguar or the antelope, or the conditions of an animal in a desert of resources.

And of course, I was going to draw some parallels here with the Book of Job, or Christ in the desert and the temptations of Christ.

What we’re talking about is a real existential confrontation.

You could say, in many ways, the Book of Job is one of the first and most substantial existentialist texts, because it’s coming face to face with the manifestation of the non-local within the local.

Which is to say that you could say the presence of God, or the presence of being, within the local form.

And what civilizations, I would say especially Western civilization over the past several hundred years, have provided us is a degree of delusional or delusory shelter from these storms.

And especially after the violent consequences of slavery, genocide, and the industrial era in the United States of America, birthing in this later part of the twentieth century this very spectacular illusion of extreme cultural product, this extreme cultural wealth, specifically localized in the United States of America and in other locations, such as Japan.

This period of time after World War II, where there were a multitude of global civilizations that entered into a period of really unprecedented economic, really material prosperity. You can include England here, et cetera.

And we look at these things locally, and I don’t want to get caught up in the history of civilizations, whether that’s Russia or England or the United States.

It’s not my terrain to walk, but it is my terrain to identify the structural mechanism beneath them.

Which is to say, these civilizations, which were built on decades and centuries of these desperate acts of primordial accumulation, often extremely violent acts, whether we look at the transatlantic slave trade or the English colonies, World War II, the really industrial slavery of the early 1900s and late 1800s, in the coal mines and the factories, to produce this illusory condition of prosperity, which was built in large part upon violence and suffering.

And this is where I gesture to sort of the cosmological cave of the history of violence and suffering.

You could say from the Aztec rituals, the blood rites, all the way down to what it is to be a single-celled organism lost in an abyss of an ocean.

This evolutionary heritage.

So much of what we experience today, and this is really my primary point, and it’s an Empedoclean point, is that so much of what we experience today is what all of existence has already experienced, and thus it is within us, and we pass it forward.

That the history of the cosmos is unbroken and seeded within the evolutionary and existential and energetic transformation of circumstances, both locally and non-locally.

So Empedocles says he was a bird, or a tree, or a woman, or a fish, I believe, in one of his passages.

And this is what I’m suggesting, is that the true non-local identity of being is very hard to grasp as a human being, especially a human being living at the age of an empire.

Or we could say, in many ways, global civilization as an experiment that began at the end of the 1800s, and the birth of the nation-state in the period of time of World War I.

The revolution of Russia in 1917.

This is a period that I focus on significantly historically, especially in terms of just dead-ball baseball and American history, but also global history, especially Russia.

And understanding what was attempted among the intelligentsia of Russia, these literary figures, many of which are existential giants, we could say from Chekhov to Gorky to Mayakovsky, down into Gogol, Tolstoy, Dostoevsky.

This was an existentially important movement in the sense that it was a life-or-death spiritual movement in the attempt to awaken a civilization on the cusp of an utterly unprecedented transformation, not only in its structure and architecture, but in its concept of political power.

As not only the fall of the tsarist regime began, but the rise of the industrial modern world began.

We also experience this, of course, in Germany. Even the understanding of the nation, Germany, became novel at this point in time.

And what is fascinating about this is that life itself is reducible almost purely to energy and flows and currents of energy, the sustenance of energy within pseudo-closed containers in an entropic universe, again, from star to cell to human being.

And what is required, exactly, to persist.

And really, when we see the existentialist movement proper, born in the middle part of the twentieth century after the quantum mechanical revolution and the atom bomb, or during that period of time, it is a distillation of the problems and questions that haunted the previous 250 or so years of Western civilizational history, and arguably all the way back to the Book of Job.

And furthermore, existence, creation itself, being itself, the larger-scale human condition, and of course, the condition of beings.

And this is, at least as far as I’ve been able to discern it, the only true ground.

It is the ground of inquiry. It is the ground upon which we stand.

And that ground, of course, in a large interstellar scope, is an incredibly tenuous one.

It’s a ground of decades in the face of millions and billions of years of interstellar transformation, and galactic and universal transformation.

I call it thermonuclear energy down into metabolic constructs.

And of course, these metabolic constructs are faced with the same predicament that stellar constructs are, although they are themselves composed of that very material that stellar constructs are.

But they exist in a terrain of semi-sentient regulation, which is to say, to maintain the body heat, the nervous system.

This is a project of, well, we could say, historically increasing awareness, both culturally and biologically, through the technologies that weave through the genome and out into the public eye and world.

And of course, from this predicament comes money, comes capital, comes political power.

This is persistence against constraint in a field of beings, where there is nothing else fundamentally.

And the former ideological, religious, and cultural constructs, which were meant to hold or contain that knowledge, have been broken open from the cask of modernity itself, and in a sort of Pandora’s box sense, I think specifically due to the propagation of knowledge via information technology.

Whether that’s the television, social media, the internet, the iPhone, personal computation devices, access to information which was previously suppressed or turned into doctrine, which was not previously accessible due to the borders and bounds of space and time.

Condensation of the globe into an immanent communication device in milliseconds via handheld computational devices is unprecedented.

And that changes perception.

It strips away narrative constructs which formerly held local and regional groups and tribes together via a common belief system, which was not defeated by an ineluctable vision of reality, or an experience of nature, which could conceivably or perceivably conquer that dominant trope or normativity.

So, with this spell being broken, which is to say the spell of modernity, when Nietzsche laments, “God is dead,” that’s the tolling of the bell which we still experience today.

Which is to say modern, industrial, global civilization.

We reach effectively a peak of delusion and delusion, which is to say scaffolding: industrial, technological, digital scaffolding, upon which the metabolic dream, as I’ve described it in some of my epic poetry pieces, is upheld and broken open.

With this breaking open, there is, of course, the chaos, the terror, and the fear, because humanity itself is then reduced to its lowest, most primordial element.

Which is to say that which it always was.

The ground of beings in relation to being, which is, of course, you could describe it as the firmaments of persistence against constraint, through which beings stare.

They stare up at the stars and have historically perceived the stars to be these god figures.

And the planets, they exist in configurational epochs, which are barely comprehensible to regulational organisms bound to decades, if that.

And beneath and behind that, of course, we went into the Heraclitean axiom, the ontological axiom, of the aeon as a child at play with colored balls.

Which is to say that beneath persistence against constraint is the informational technological architecture of the massive swath of cosmological history, which is experimenting with the technological implement of beings.

And of course, we have the prosthetic devices, which are additive technological epochs, layered upon these evolutionary stages or constructs.

It’s not necessarily teleological.

So, again, you have the forebrain or the opposable thumbs, et cetera.

And this is, of course, the terror which civilization is in many ways not necessarily designed to prevent, but is created in the face of.

Of course, it’s in the face of cosmological exile, which is denoted all the way down to the nervous system, genomic memory of the human being, which remembers that being cast out of the tribe and into nature is an almost certain death.

And so we build these constructs of collectivity.

And when you have Margaret Thatcher in the 1980s say, “There is no society,” in many ways, as much as it’s hard to hear necessarily, it’s a correct statement in the sense that it is a construct built out of avoidance of this existential condition.

Which you could say is fundamentally a Jobian condition or a condition of Christ in the desert, tempted by Satan, so to speak.

Of profound existential isolation where one is in relationship only to being itself, and the proximity of relationship to being itself is accordingly the proximity of relationship to life and existence proper.

And this movement away from being, which we’ve described in the World’s Midnight lectures, which is to say the forgetting, as Heidegger says, that even God has been forgotten, the forgetting of the forgetting.

That this is entirely itself a product of civilization, modernizing, scaling, technologizing civilization, which has created this illusion upon which and through which beings can stand and encounter a cultural universe which promises everything and gives nothing and has nothing within it.

Except for maybe a jolt of hormonal or chemical pleasure, which, of course, we experience as the state of addiction of global civilization.

Western is no longer applicable. It’s simply the global condition.

And that’s anything from gambling to casual sex, to all of these implements which themselves are hormonal instruments to experience a brief and fleeting sensation of pleasure, which ultimately abates and then must inevitably return to sustain the then physiologically and psychologically addicted construct.

So we’re living as these, again, biochemical hormonal beings.

It’s a very complex technology.

And we’ve built this scaffolding to produce pleasures and sensations and distractions which were hitherto unprecedented even a hundred or so years ago.

And T. S. Eliot very presciently describes this as distraction upon distraction upon distraction.

It’s a sedimentary accumulation, which, as I’ve described, is like clothes, or it’s like garments upon this naked existential condition, which has been obscured civilizationally.

And this is, in many ways, what constitutes the death of God.

And to have this stripped away is the experience of profound brutality.

Again, this was understood very early on by ancient civilizations such as Sumer, and the myth of Inanna being stripped of her worldly garments and being tied to a post in hell.

She attempted to retrieve her sister, Ereshkigal, I believe the name was.

And this process or procedure has strong precedence in world-historical mythological conditions.

It’s the Buddha’s encounter with Mara.

It’s the international or global katabasis tradition, which is to say the descent into hell.

That’s everything from Dante to Hercules or Mercury.

And that this descent is the descent into transformation itself, which is the Pluto archetype, historically, culturally, I would say specifically in a Hellenic sense.

The Hadean.

And this descent, of course, the descent into the substrate of transformation itself, is understood archetypally as such, but then is also understood in terms of the metabolic and thermonuclear dimension, which I went into extensively in works such as Spiritual Fire.

Understanding the thermonuclear metabolic substrate in this interconnected thread of persistence against constraint as it occurs across, you could say, dimensions or scales.

And this is returning human consciousness, which we could say has gone astray into these delusions and distractions, which are really manipulations of energy laid atop, or scaffolded atop, this sort of brute and bare, really unified cosmological condition.

Again, you could say the furnace or the forge.

And Heraclitus is prescient as ever. Ontologically, all things come from and return to fire.

Understanding this dimension, it’s incredible that this was understood so early on by him, and then is, of course, later confirmed in an astrophysical sense, in a cosmological sense, in terms of understanding the birth and explosion and, I was going to say, extensification of the cosmos.

And when we look at the birth and history of the cosmos, we see what Terence McKenna speaks about when he speaks about novelty.

And we can understand what, in a long timescale sense of billions of years, is occurring in terms of diversification, cooling, and the scalar contexts which are created via thermonuclear energy.

We are looking at veins which are the aftereffect, which is the continuing explosion of this ongoing birthing of the universe, and down through scales where this energy solidifies and commingles.

And I’ve described this, I think it’s very effective to describe it in alchemical terms, in the sense of a beaker, or a flue, or a vessel in which recombination is a form of energetic persistence itself, and is really the principle of energetic persistence.

That we absorb, you can say even in a human sense, we’re absorbing stellar radiation, stellar heat, stellar energy, and processing that behaviorally within the vessel of the body itself.

Transforming it, metabolizing it, digesting it.

And that we are, in many ways, and fundamentally, the aftereffects of the stars.

And we exist in the historical presence of them, and take in their energy in many ways after death, whether or not you want to talk about the proximity of stellar regimes and neighborhoods far outside of what we perceive, and yet nonetheless what we ingest as a larger cosmological, transgalactic, universal neighborhood of being itself.

And this, of course, persists fundamentally even in the lifecycle of beings and the ouroboric method of consumption, which defines at least the earthly context.

And of course, it is the universal context of the food, metabolic energy, which we consume.

Nutrients, minerals, which are fundamentally cast off from the stellar forges of stars themselves.

Fusion constructs. Combined and recombining elements, which are creating these sophisticated technological systems over time through iteration.

And of course, we experience civilizational technology in exactly the same way.

And this is no coincidence.

The behavior of the universe.

So when I talk about Channel One or Channel Two architectures, I’m talking about the behavior of the universe at the breakpoint between the genome and the cave painting.

Which is to say the introduction of a symbolic universe, which becomes lithographic printing at the beginning of the 1900s, which I discussed with baseball cards.

It’s fascinating, which anticipates pixelation.

Of course, we’re talking about spheres of abstraction.

The breakpoint between, you could say, organic symbolization via genomic recombination through sexuality, reproduction, and the expression of rising sentience in beings through forebrain constructs.

Which is to say, let’s go, or Van Gogh, or artificial intelligence and networks of Wi-Fi, where we are passing codes back and forth to one another, which are digested via computational devices in images, sounds, et cetera.

This is a reproduction. It’s an abstraction.

And that breakpoint is what itself creates civilization.

It’s a linguistic breakpoint.

This is why Wittgenstein’s intuition of philosophy being a language problem is fundamentally correct.

Ontology is also, in many ways, a language problem.

But to examine this large scale and this large scope, in the face of the age and the moments of the births and deaths of empires, which are in many ways the births and deaths of entire universes, which is to say linguistic, cultural constructs, everyday behaviors which co-regulate, nervous-system-wise, massive amounts of beings.

They create ecosystems in which behavioral mechanics function via regular energetic production and release.

These are structural systems and habitats which are stabilized by the energetic conditions which uphold their construction themselves.

It’s everything from aqueducts to supply and distribution centers, you could say also to the Strait of Hormuz.

These are energetic breakpoints, release points.

They’re methods of communicating the base energetic substrates which uphold civilizations themselves.

And when those conditions are no longer possible in a material sense, these civilizations themselves disappear.

And of course, it’s the same principle when it comes down to the Jobian context of beings in relation to being.

It’s a metabolic persistence against constraint which is sustaining a complex and energy-demanding organ system, a network of neural communication through the body and through this energetically demanding brain.

Not only a hindbrain, but a full brain as well.

So, this is the battle of technology in the face of entropy.

And this is kind of the meat of where we’re going, and maybe it took thirty minutes to get there, which itself is interesting.

That technology is fighting the uphill battle against heat death, dissolution.

It’s the fundamental creative aspect of the universe itself.

That through condensation, through compression, and I’ve described compression in depth in my previous works, that compression itself is not simply a digital informational construct.

It’s a fundamental principle of efficiency at the universal scale in terms of communication of energy and information across spacetime.

That an organism or a being or a form, a message, a vessel, must necessarily find progressively and increasingly diverse, efficient, and innovative ways to survive across time, because time itself, moment by moment, is imposing the same demand upon the being and upon the body.

Which is, again, to persist against constraint in the face of dissolution.

This is a regulational stance. The stance of regulational beings.

And we went into the difference between regulational and configurational beings.

That regulational beings are upholding a complex neural and organ, often complex neural and organ network, that they are increasingly aware of.

And so that’s when we speak of sentient beings, fundamentally.

That there is itself a body which, moment over moment, heartbeat over heartbeat, respiration after respiration, must remain.

And this is the problem that, of course, all beings must solve.

So, with the technology of the development and unfolding of the human being over hundreds of thousands of years, this technology comes to this recursive moment, which, again, I’ll describe it as a breakpoint, of self-awareness, of self-cognition.

The realization that one itself is existent within said body, and there are said constraints on said body, physical, and said body is in relationship to a universal force of dissipation.

And this is precisely the necessary creativity which produces the evolutionary conditions which Darwin describes in his revolutionary tracts as the twentieth century approached.

This itself is the living, breathing, experimental paradox of play, life, and death.

Play at the level of the universal in terms of the endlessly iterative shedding of bodies, and life and death at the level of beings, in the sense of needing to solve persistence against constraint.

And of course, we’ve come into effectively two ways to do so, both of which are really edifices or surfaces of the real solution, which is primordial identification with being itself.

There’s either reproduction or symbolic production.

Which is to say, a monument, or a painting, or work of art.

And of course, reproduction is simply passing fragments of the historical genome forward in a lineage, which hitherto is many degrees conscious and unconscious of itself, and reproduces biochemically, hormonally, et cetera, many of the same conditions experienced prior.

Of course, this is the concept of genealogy, genetic heritage.

And this problem itself is fundamentally insoluble locally.

It is soluble at the level of identification with primordial being.

And understanding, this is again the importance of ontology, that without that level of awareness of that which we are, we experience the local conditions of being, which I would argue are either delusional or very, very harsh conditions.

This is civilization and all of its wiles and distractions, and bars and dance halls and dreams and fantasies, as well as the real conditions of being an organism in an entropic universe.

In this elemental energetic degradation is experienced physically in the act of the passage of time, which is the relational weight of gravitational forces and metabolics, metabolic sustenance of the container, attempting to persist against the constraint of the loss of heat, energy.

These are the organs, the organ systems, the function of the brain, et cetera.

And this is, in many ways, I would say fundamentally the root of Greek tragedy.

It’s introducing existential conditions into the awareness of the general public, which fundamentally, in a mass sense, contents itself on what many would say are the bread and circuses of empire and civilization.

But are fundamentally the two choices outside of real, authentic existential confrontation of being.

The Jobian, distraction and reproduction.

And these being the great hopes of the species, or of any species.

And of course, distraction is something increasingly novel in extremity to human beings, in the production of technological edifices to pretend or obscure and thus fail to confront our condition.

And the confrontation of our condition, I argue here, is the only way to create more sustainable, more mutually beneficial conditions for existence itself.

Which is to say a sense of real community, togetherness, collaboration.

And these, of course, are not conditions which have been instituted by the arbiters of these civilizations who, of course, are power-hungry, status-hungry, and exist to serve themselves or their collaborators at the expense of the non-local contributors.

And this is, in many ways, the problem of large-scale civilizations.

There’s not sufficient local community regulating behavior.

And so these people become abstract systems or conditions to exploit energetically.

And this is a lot of what Marx speaks about.

We talk about the Industrial Revolution. We’re talking about harnessing the human being as a labor machine.

Of course, this goes back to the origins of slavery.

To understand ourselves as the ontological source of being itself, most fundamentally, and that outside of this essential claim, we have no ground, fundamentally transforms our relationship to life itself.

And thus our relationship to the beings within it.

And this is the hardest confrontation to have, especially as beings or individuals age.

It’s much more difficult to break down the persistent underlying constructs of distraction and denial which are typical of civilization and culture.

Because to break those down is to break down the entire fabric of the life that one has built.

It’s easier for Diogenes to have an existential confrontation with being than it is for the executive with four children, a wife, several homes, and a mortgage to pay.

This is the realization which is the terror at the bottom of the dream of civilizations.

Which, of course, as Shelley puts it in Ozymandias, are born and die, and lay in waste at last with the failed and frail monuments of those who claimed brief and fleeting power over them.

And this is the ontological statement that Shelley makes throughout his oeuvre, is that there is nothing else other than this confrontation.

Which he pursues at Mont Blanc, this confrontation which he pursues in Prometheus Unbound.

These beautiful works of art which are a testament to his existential exploration itself.

This is what is asked of all of us in being, in existing and being alive.

It is all that we can ask of ourselves and others, because it is all there is.

And our failure, not only as individuals, but as entire collectives and as a species, to move towards this substrate and have the real authentic encounter of being, is the failure of our civilizations.

It’s the failure of our communities, our cultures, our behavior with ourselves and one another.

And it creates the poverty which we experience, which we believe that money, wealth, or power will inevitably heal.

So when we look at the rise and fall of civilizations, like extended lifespans of human beings, you have to ask yourself: What could be done?

And my answer is the foundational practice of ontological self-realization.

That this is the backbone of all life, of all good life.

Not only at the individual, but at the collective level.

And the opportunities and resources for such inquiry are now more than ever ripe, with the technological informational fruits of the entire history of human knowledge at our fingertips.

This is ours, of course, to pursue.

If we will, if we must, and whether or not we will depends, but we certainly must.

This is the gift that we not only give to ourselves, but we give to the world.

Thank you.

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The Death of Empedocles: Ontological Self Realization in Cosmological History — Lecture (10/31/26)

So I would now like to conduct another lecture, which we can simply title The Death of Empedocles, and his realization therein being intimately tied to Albert Camus’ dictum regarding the only true philosophical question, as in the question of suicide.

What I want to take apart here is that this is very deeply intertwined with the history of mysticism, both Eastern and Western, and it’s part of the reason why we have two quotes from Joseph Campbell which I think will be useful.

“The mystic swims where the madman drowns,” and, these are rough quotes off the top of my head, that life is riding on the back of the energetic force of the leopard.

It’s a Dionysian allusion to riding the wave of cosmic energy, so to speak.

And this is, to me, the point at which I think we see it most clearly in an Eastern theological context in relation to ancient Hinduism, Kashmir Shaivism, the manifestations of this tradition.

And I will never forget reading Siddharameshwar’s Bird’s Way. That was perhaps the most influential text of the entry into this second phase of my life, which primarily became cosmological, starting about six years ago.

That Empedocles dives into the volcano because the substance of existence to him has become transparent.

When he says, “I’ve been a bird, a fish, and a woman,” he’s saying his perception, I’ll almost say his ethnographic perception in a cosmological sense, has lost distinguishability.

And this is understood, both in terms of Eastern and Western historical mysticism, as self-realization, effectively.

This is understood as Brahman, or achieving the universality of existence, or perceiving Vishvarupa beneath samsara, or Maya in everyday life.

And there was a period of time for me where the idiom of the snake and the rope, which is a question fundamentally of perception, a man sees a coiled rope upon the ground and he perceives it to be a snake, which is really a Blakean question, a question of seeing.

Do we see through the narrow chinks in our cavern, or do we perceive the infinite itself?

This is the question that permeates Vedantic inquiry, thinkers like Ramana Maharshi, et cetera.

So there is a clear trajectory of realization which is fundamentally perceptual.

We spoke of stripping the Inannaic garments of the world and descending into the underworld of transformation, the Hadean or Plutonic realm, to grasp, which I would say fundamentally in this new technological age, is the cosmological vision of the universal self, just as it was thousands of years ago.

Grasping the cosmic force of creation or existence, so to speak.

This is the history of ontology.

This is Abhinavagupta. This is Heraclitus. This is Shankara. This is Lao Tzu.

We’re talking about a world cosmological tradition of self-realization.

And the world ritual traditions, such as Eleusis, the Egyptian Book of the Dead, the Tibetan Book of the Dead, these are methodologies instantiated in certain technological, historical, and scientific epochs to bring mankind closer to this cosmological realization by method of stripping away, like paint thinner, the perceptual apparatuses which were blocking this fundamental perception of being.

And what I’m suggesting here, and this is just to advance the previous lectures, this lecture is obviously indistinguishable from the entirety of my oeuvre and my archive, and even the lecture prior, is that we want to understand this ontological process as necessary exposure.

It is the only place which human beings can truly go and truly grow.

That this is the fundamental aspect which was long understood by world-historical ancient civilizations, tribal cultures, et cetera.

It was not the capitalist modernity that we experience today with its distractions, its pleasures, its chemical drivers, the illusions of cinema or pop culture or gambling markets, stock markets, et cetera.

That these themselves are tapestries of confusion which have been thrown over the fundamental problem of human existence and creation as the technological age has surged forward and left behind the application of technology to the fundamental ontological problems, which were long, in a world-historical sense, understood as the absolute question of existence, being itself, and were taken with the utmost seriousness.

This is, again, Nietzsche’s death of God at the turn of the nineteenth century into the twentieth.

And to look at this problem is to understand, again, the technological acceleration which abandoned ontology, which Heidegger is desperately going back towards and attempting to suture decades of time from his place in the 1930s and ‘40s in Germany, looking back towards Hölderlin and a premodern Germanic tradition.

And this is what is implicitly, and when I say implicitly, I say unconsciously, understood in modernity when there is a gesturing back towards a historical Edenic time in any one of the current civilizations undergoing the very real political, geographical, ecological, economic, and cultural catastrophe of modernity.

The severance which is being lived and felt in each waking day and moment, which is the severance from meaning, ontological connection.

And the process which is actively and actually undergone, I’ll gesture to Eliade and shamanism at large as a global tradition, but also to Rimbaud.

This process of stripping away is a caustic process of the death of the being which we perceive to be through the technological programming and apparatus of the body of the human being itself, which is the vessel incarnate of this cosmological energy.

This force that we experience moving through us, which is hundreds of thousands, millions, and even billions of years old, but has undergone such substantial transformation and reconfiguration, transfiguration through genomic evolution, elemental recombination down through scales of space and time.

We have to understand the leagues to which we can gesture outward.

The concentric circles of existence which extend far beyond human history and culture, even just in terms of modernity, gesturing back through entire epochs and ages of the Earth where conditions were fundamentally materially different, then furthermore in the solar system, in the interstellar sense, and of course the universal.

Understanding these timescales is critical for understanding the problem of the human condition, and effectively the technological cage or prison in which man operates unconsciously.

And Gurdjieff would say this is the sleepwalking condition of humanity.

And this is, I think, a predominant theme in The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, the great German Expressionist film, Murnau and Lang being some of the greatest filmmakers during this period of time of cultural and civilizational upheaval in Germany.

This chaos of nation-state transformation which leads to the atrocities of World War II and Nazi Germany.

This period is very much so a stripping away of the cultural mores, the religious mores, the ideological mores which underpinned the everyday of Germany, just as it did in Mayakovsky’s Russia.

This is a regime change.

It’s a change in the structure of the political reality, religiously, in terms of monarchs and the literal structure of the political configuration of the country.

In these periods, we have the bottom drop out of the predictable structures which held this technological artifact in a period of maintenance and suspension, and it throws it into an energetic chaos of uncertainty.

And this energetic chaos is metabolic.

Understand this as the conditions necessary to persist against constraint.

This is to maintain the body temperature, the organ systems, et cetera.

And the philosophical suicide of Camus is intimately connected to Empedocles and what we’ve just spoken about here.

Because the effect of Empedocles’ action, against the documented realization, which of course we only have in fragments due to the nature of the passage of time between the contemporary moment and Empedocles’ age, is the realization of this transcendental subjectivity.

And this has been approached in a variety of different ways by a variety of different realized practitioners, so to speak.

Ramana Maharshi effectively sat on a couch or a bed and befriended a cow and lived his life in a state of effectively repose or relaxation, in a sense.

And he would be visited by aspirants who would ask him questions, and many of these questions themselves became books that were assisted by others.

And then, of course, we have Empedocles’ action, which is to throw himself into a volcano.

What we are talking about here is the real technological revolution, and the realization that awaits all beings in all life at a certain terminal point.

Which is to say the terminal point of bounded subjectivity, which reaches a necessary recursive altitude to reflect upon being and existence itself, and come to, in whatever resolution, whatever degree, the realization of this cosmological self.

And when I say degree of resolution, I’m referring to the technological, historical, and scientific epoch in which that realization is occurring.

The Heraclitean realization, or the Empedoclean realization, is effectively in scope and ontological gravity no less important or relevant or severe than it is in the modern world.

But the modern world provides a degree of high-contrast perspective due to scientific resources, digital technological resources, that historically was not possible.

It was not present.

So this is the question at the bottom of our ontological and cosmological journey.

It is the existential question of being in time and how to be in time.

The realization of cosmological being is, of course, a lot of what we have depicted here in terms of painting, with a very, very broad brush, the entire scope and transitional movement of energetic force through spacetime over vast swaths of history, cosmological history, to the point at which the human being comes into technological being.

And has this recursive Kierkegaardian experience of turning back upon its maker, so to speak, or turning back upon being in the Jobian fashion, dialectical redoubling.

And through the forebrain, again, achieves this self-reflection or self-recognition or self-realization, which of course is transcendental.

And this realization is cataclysmic.

We have to understand that the entirety of the history of the human being or the human organism, the hundreds of thousands, really millions of years, of the development of this technology was itself to assure survival and reproduction.

Which is to say, to persist against constraint, to obey the primordial law of the universe in relation to beings, of and for beings.

And that is at the root of the technological programming of the human organism.

But again, with sufficient scope, with sufficient prosthetic device, which through iterative evolution and transformation acquired the possibility of insight into nature and into being, it is a profound explosion of this internal programming at its rooted mechanism.

Because what it does is it is redefining the scope of the identity of the organism.

And that identity is, in many ways, I won’t say incompatible, but I will say in excess of the operating system of beings themselves.

And this recognition is a sort of peering behind the veil or behind the curtain of the play of being and to grasp the operator or to grasp the creator.

To grasp, again, the essence of the child at play with colored balls, just as much as it is to grasp the operator, which I have previously described: persistence against constraint across scales from star to cell.

And when we have the historical situation of Empedocles, or we have Camus articulate that the fundamental philosophical problem is the question of suicide, and have him articulate the philosophical concept of the absurd amidst playwrights such as Albee or Beckett or Pinter or Ionesco.

In this period of time of World War II, which is in many ways the world realization of the death of these regionalized or localized tribal value systems into a global modernity which revolves primarily around capital.

Which is to say around the circulation, distribution, and production of energy, which is deeply quantum mechanical age, if you consider it from that lens.

That beneath all of the material substrates of exchange, the container ships and the trains which are transporting these goods, throwing leftover T-shirts upon the shores of the African continent, beneath and between all of that is the energetic substrate of currencies.

Flows of information and energy moving at excessive and exceeding speeds across space and time.

Ultimately into a sort of, we call it the AI age, singularity of Bitcoin and digital currency, and effectively alternate reality that exists in the digital sphere of information and data which travels at the speed of light through these ever-sophisticating data stations.

So all of this is to say that the realization that all of humanity always already stands on the doorstep of is the realization of something that is in excess of what the technological apparatus of the being itself will allow.

And this is the crisis.

This is the perennial crisis through which civilization and culture gains its seemingly eternal import.

We have to understand civilization and culture as a coping mechanism and a response to the depth of the call of this inquiry, or the depth of the necessity of the five-alarm fire which exists and permeates beneath the thinly plasticized-over cover of the psyche, the human psyche.

That what lies beneath this mask of the being is this abyss of utterly ununderstood history, time, and cosmos.

And the imperative to unify this is the imperative of the health of the organism in relation to its grand totality.

And yet what awaits at the end of that journey, just as it awaits at the end of each organism’s time, is a profound death and transformation.

And the question is to turn towards that path or whittle life away in the circus or the carnival of distractions.

And of course, we see the predictable path.

And this is only what civilization and culture allow.

But as the material substrate and underpinning of the possibility of these energetic illusions, these energetic screens which civilization creates through the systems and structures which are able to transport and transform information, that gift us our cinema, or our dream fictions which are projected across social media, or the internet, or billboards, or magazines.

That when these are stripped away, what we are returned to is the bare, brute survival and the existential encounter.

And so to conduct this journey, in a lot of ways, is what I’m saying in this kind of advanced sense, is that at the end of that journey there is very much so the Empedoclean imperative of a profound form of philosophical suicide.

Which is very much so, it’s a similar behavior to what occurs in Ramana Maharshi in realization.

Is that there is an abeyance from human life, that the technological subsystem or substation of the human life is no longer functional.

It is no longer powered by the desires, drives, and the programmatic mechanism of the information technology of that architecture, because the larger superstructural architecture has been realized from within itself.

The cage or the prison has been opened or jailbroken, as I’ve previously described in another one of my lectures.

That the technological implement itself has become so advanced, and the prosthetic devices available to it have become so advanced.

This is the forebrain and the internet in coalition.

That the lockstep or the trance state of this survive-and-reproduce architecture has been broken open in a deep-time historical sense to reveal the primordial cosmological being that is hidden beneath the mask of the technological architecture of the human being.

And this is a way to understand species themselves, from ants to birds to jaguars.

That these are iterations of superficial difference in a genomic and thermonuclear energetic sense, that are in a processual path towards realization through evolutionary systems technology, the genome.

Transformation of energy and information over time through reproduction and survival.

And that is, of course, the history of living beings on the Earth itself.

So we have this sort of advanced cosmological form of Empedocles or Ramana Maharshi, who leave the human species entirely.

And this is obviously done in a variety of different ways.

And this is what Nietzsche means, that man is on a tightrope between beast and God.

Is that this is an evolutionary stage of information transformation that has reached an unprecedented pitch, not only in a Channel Two technological sense, which is to say the technology of civilizations and cultures, but in a Channel One technological sense, which is to say the advent of the forebrain.

And of course, civilization and cultural technology are not possible without the forebrain.

This is the fever pitch at which humanity now stands.

And the imperative of realization is a recursive collapse of this dream, this deep, profound dream of cosmological history, which is beings and forms bound to their bodies, and the technological programmatic imperative of survive, reproduce, persist against constraint, which has long held as the rule of the cosmos.

And this is a lot of what is present in Gnostic theology.

And Percy Shelley’s magnum opus, Prometheus Unbound, is that beneath this technological programmatic architecture is the cosmological being.

And this quest for the realization of the cosmological being is the product of ontology, which is made possible by human evolution and revolution.

And this is not an ethical imperative.

It’s not a moral imperative.

It is a cosmological imperative, if it’s an imperative at all.

The question is, what is possible in life and what does life ask of me?

Who am I?

This is the great Vedantic question of inquiry, which of course leads down the roads which are expounded by the mystics and thinkers therein.

And for this question to truly be asked, we, as a species, a civilization, a culture, must turn away from the convenient distractions which we’ve produced and created to avoid the profound existential void or abyss which we have neglected.

This is the world’s midnight, as described by Heidegger.

This is the title that I needed to take for one of the first lecture series in this new station of my work.

And that is something that comes to us, whether it’s the realization of death, the destruction, decay, and corrosion of our civilizations, whether it is the transformative event which turns us back upon ourselves to reckon with our deeds and actions and lives.

It is the Jobian principle at work in existence.

This is not a thesis.

It is the essence of who and what we are and what being is.

And in a global sense, and for the species itself to turn towards this, it seems that, in effect, what is necessary is some sort of calamity, a transformative calamity.

Now I’ll gesture again back to the archetype of Hades or Pluto.

It is the realm of hell or the fires of transformation, which historically some will say Christ did or did not, or theologically they’ll say Christ did or did not go to hell.

But we have to understand the world-historical tradition of katabasis, if you want to place it in a larger historical mystical tradition.

That is fundamental to every world civilization, from the Hero Twins to the Egyptian Duat.

That it is this journey within.

I would refer to hell as the forge.

It is the site of the body, which has been long neglected and cursed by Western philosophy since Descartes, arguably earlier.

That the earthly body or the flesh has been condemned as a site of sin.

This is also the question of Lucifer, the fallen angel, is that the fallen star upon Earth is precisely the condition of man.

And this is why Christianity demonizes, humankind has fallen, but really what is there is the beginning of inquiry as to what is being.

That we ourselves, yes, are projected from being or thrown from being into beings, as a sort of shard of the divine, if you will.

And this is where life begins, this inquiry with integrity into who am I?

What is the source of the root of my being?

Who or what is seeing?

What is the consciousness which peers out from behind the eyes?

Is it this body?

What is the source of my impulses, my desires, et cetera?

What is calling me?

And what is calling me is calling me back through time, in a primordial sense.

And it is the imperative to journey back through time, as I articulated in Measures of Fire and several of my other texts.

Journey back through time.

What is this source of this heat or this energy or this force which moves through me and all beings?

This is very much so the ontological question itself proper, because it’s the question of existence.

To identify the essential within beings, or the formal, and to trace that essence back to its source or its origin.

And this source is ultimately much deeper than any civilization or culture would suppose.

It’s a cosmological source.

So that’s what I’ve got here.

Another one. I hope you enjoyed.

Thank you.

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The Cosmological Problem of Subjectivity -- A Lecture (11/6/26)

So I want to get to the core of something we’ve been discussing, which is really fundamentally philosophical, literary, cosmological, and scientific: the core of subjectivity itself, which we can only learn about through the novel or the literary form.

The tradition of the superfluous man in 19th-century Russian literature, I think, in particular really gets at this. We’ve discussed Dostoevsky’s Notes from Underground, Rimbaud’s A Season in Hell, and those are really places I want to linger. And Goncharov as well. His entire oeuvre, in my understanding, rests and resides specifically around this most inward problem: the problem of internality, interiority, and depth—that these themselves are the story of the history of the cosmos.

And this is really, I think, one of the fundamental binding threads that allowed me to articulate my ontology. Which is to say, the binding point, or the glue, between Channel One and Channel Two, which is the genome and the symbol, in terms of the cave painting, right?

And we understand both of these as symbolic registers. That the genome is legible. It’s a linguistic phenomenon, just as much as the forge of the stars is legible, in terms of the—I was going to say the neural technology, but the nuclear technology of the stars—the forge which produces the elements, which we then understand cascade down and through spacetime, articulating spheres of information, spheres of transmissibility and transformability, so to speak, recombination, which is occurring in the universe, in everything from the star to the cell, this change that is happening across spheres.

So the point that we get to is the experience of this very high-grade information technology, which is, of course, the forebrain, this very recent evolutionary force of the last couple hundreds of thousands of years, which then produces for us the kind of interiority which we’re able to get through these very piercing and probing, we could say, psychological authors. Anyone from Kierkegaard to Dostoevsky to Proust. And Joyce as well could be considered here.

This is the fundamental thing which is beneath literature, which is, I would say, beneath the arts itself, but first and foremost, you could say, the first-person, or the “I” form of existentialist literature.

When Rimbaud says, “I is another,” what he’s gesturing towards is that the foundation of subjectivity is rather unmoored. The sense of the experience of identity or the self is in large part formed and informed by the existential historical conditions which preceded it.

It’s the experience of an architecture which we ourselves did not create, at least not in a conscious fashion, but rather are passing forward via sexual reproduction.

And so there is, in Goncharov, the fundamental tension being inward existence and outward life. The problem of an interior life meeting and encountering the realities of the world, which is to say, the shifting decades of Russian history at the hinge of the mid-19th century.

And, of course, Goncharov’s subject is the interiority of his subject. So his subject is subjectivity itself: the experience of existence and the appearance of the world to someone or something, that being that which constitutes the lived reality.

And this is the deepest, or most inward, scope of the study of cosmology.

So when we’re studying the principles and foundations of stars or galaxies, how they form, when they form, and why, and how they’re in communication energetically, in an interstellar sense, this is a very high-level abstraction. It’s a high plane of discourse.

And the transmission of these intergenerational stellar forms, over millions and, of course, billions of years, brings us to the evolutionary paradigm of the human being as it stands today, let’s say, in the 21st century, the year 2026, equipped with the iPhone, artificial intelligence, the forebrain, the mechanism of the eye, right? The sensate body, the biology experiencing the cultural paradigm which we now live in, which, of course, I’ve already articulated as bios-culturos, I guess you could say.

So this is the crux, or the intersection, the cross at which any living being stands upon. Simone Weil articulates this as statera facta corporis [quotation uncertain], the reality where the living being stands at the cross, the crossroads, the intersection.

I’m not going to be able to articulate that off the top of my head, especially without coffee, but that’s the statement that she makes, and that’s one of the epigraphs of one of my previous books.

So we have to understand the mystery of subjectivity, right? Because it’s the experience of a technological mode, which is to say, a way of being, that is, of course, accessible at different levels of depth.

So when we read A Season in Hell, we’re reading the articulation of a certain neurosynaptic architecture. We’re reading the articulation of the body of Rimbaud interfacing with historical consciousness.

And this is, of course, when he talks about the Gauls, and when he talks about Frenchness, when he talks about the possibilities of liberation in history, and his understanding of subjectivity being one fundamentally of rebellion, effectively against everything.

This is also the exact kind of nihilism that we hear in Turgenev, and experience in Goncharov, and understand the larger Russian milieu of this time period being deeply influenced by Hegel and by German idealism.

And this is the transmission, of course, across borders of this very fertile form of thought which emerges in Jena.

And where I want to go with this here is when there is literature expressing the depth of the experience of this interiority, what we really are doing is excavating the possibilities of a technological consciousness, right? Something that’s fundamentally founded upon an architectural reality.

And so what we are doing is really excavating a reality, an architectural condition of being, which is not yet truly understood, right?

And this is what’s at the crux of the split between, you could say, science and the humanities: that the humanities are exploring the technological capacities and extent of being human itself.

And scientifically, if we understand this at depth, this is like a technological recursion, that in this highly advanced informational apparatus, we are experiencing being itself through a very specific lens.

Like a genotypic, a phenotypic, and a species lens.

A neurobiological lens, right?

And understanding this at depth is actually excavating a form of cosmological understanding which is not obtainable via simple measurement.

And this is well understood by Goethe, of course, as one of the main historical scientist, philosopher, literary figures.

That it is impossible to draw a real disciplinary gap here in this existential condition.

The issue therein is that we don’t know exactly what the character of being is.

And so a work at sufficient depth of the perception of experience, articulated with sufficient linguistic dynamism, may actually capture that character.

And what I mean by that is that the character of being is that which is beneath the sheaths of information technology which we’ve previously described, in anything from Darwin to cellular architecture to the nervous system, to what we perceive of as interstellar galactic formations.

What we’re tracing there is the character of the energetic structure of existence and creation itself.

And that becomes embodied and recursively magnified through the human experience.

So when we’re reading literature as such, specifically this first-person existentialist thought, or the articulation of the position of the subject in an authentic way, what we are reading is really our only way of seriously being able to begin to interrogate the being’s perception of itself in a fundamental fashion, which is to say, the least degree of abstraction.

This is, of course, different than studying, we could say, phenomenology, neuroscience, psychology, et cetera.

This literature itself being the only form of inquiry capable of sustaining the sufficiently deep interrogation of the being’s perception of itself, the inhabitation of the existential condition, which is fundamentally the cosmological being itself inhabiting this informational technological container of the architecture, we could say, of the human species itself, or whichever species has acquired sufficient sentience to begin this recursive symbolic project of articulating itself in a long form, right?

This is, of course, different than Picasso’s Guernica or, let’s say, a piece by Bach, in the sense that it is a direct articulation of the condition of the subject.

And I’ve previously said that Coltrane’s music in particular is an extremely existentialist movement. A Love Supreme, My Favorite Things, some of my favorite pieces by him, of course.

But these are not, let’s say, direct linguistic articulations, and there’s a subtlety there in terms of the description of experience in a form which is digging at the, let’s say, architectural condition of the subject. It’s kind of difficult to describe semantically.

These existential texts, such as The Fall, or Notes from Underground, or A Season in Hell, are excavations of the condition of the subject.

It’s an attempt to, let’s say, explain or examine via the construct of this communal language, right? And inscribe that experience in a reflective way, or recursive way, that the genome is articulating itself through an externalized symbolic structure, which is the same, obviously, the attempt to outwardly replicate the genomic structure, which we know as, let’s say, English or French or Mandarin, et cetera, right?

And this is the symbolic world of this investigation, which is Rimbaud’s application of French to A Season in Hell, or Dostoevsky’s application of Russian to Notes from Underground.

And this is, of course, where we achieve the transparency of the “I as another,” Rimbaud’s “I is another,” that the subject discovers that it is not a fully transparent structure or assembled individual, but rather it has this vast archaeological depth behind it.

And this is very similar to, we could say, fossils of almost perfectly preserved ancient fauna in permafrost. I’ve already discussed this with amber and insects, that the human being object, right—this is the subject-object continuum here—is the container for this ancient substrate, which evolves up, and the body itself is actually carrying this millennial and multimillion-year processual information in its very form and evolutionary structure.

So this is a dig, really. What it is is an archaeological dig.

And the difficulty here, of course, in a Western scientific sense, is that there has not been sufficient shrift or attention given to the ontological condition of the subject.

Which is to say, of course, the cosmos has been studied and objectified. The nervous system has been studied and objectified. This is the history of anatomy, let’s say, dissection, or Kepler or Galileo, right? Microscopy and macroscopy.

But this is actually a native process, and, of course, where we would think to look is the last place. Or where we would need to look is the last place. Where we would think to look is everything but the place we would need to, in the sense that the cosmos already, in a native, billions-of-years fashion, produces a being capable of perceiving itself.

But, of course, this subject—subjectivity—is something that appears transparent to the organism, because it’s the very apparatus through which it perceives the world.

And, of course, this is the value of Blake to a scientific study. Perhaps just as valuable as Newton, in the fashion of making clear the veil of perception, and this is also Goethe’s color theory.

There’s a vast contribution of the humanities in and toward the faculty of, of course, the problem of perception and the apparatus of perception.

Spinoza being a lens grinder is an almost hilarious irony, because what here we’re talking about is, at full depth, we’re not really talking about cellular structures. At full depth, even beneath the cellular structures, the greatest microscopy is the existential being, right?

And this problem becomes somewhat transparent to itself in the great psychological advances of, we could say, Dostoevsky.

And, of course, Einstein understands the value of Dostoevsky extremely explicitly, and says as much.

Because the interior life is just as relevant, perhaps even more so, than the formation of stars, or the movement, the stochastic nature of cells.

What becomes transparent is we now have access to the character of being, and we have access to the character of being through ourselves.

This is, if we understand Spinoza correctly, and we understand quantum mechanics correctly, we understand cosmology correctly.

This transparency is the making available of cosmological subjectivity locally, right?

This history of existence itself is an unbroken continuum, an unbroken process.

And the being itself being in a position to experience and interpret and express its own existence at sufficient depth—this is, of course, the great works of existentialist literature.

And why Goncharov is so essential, so essential to what I’m talking about here, is that the subject of history, cosmological history, is the formation of subjectivity itself.

Which is, of course, extremely opaque.

It’s the foundation of historical shamanism across cultures. This is very much so the baseline, or the basis, of what Eliade is speaking about, but it’s also the informational technological revolution of the universe itself.

The technology through which cosmological being interrogates the fact and character of its own being.

This is why I brought up the Book of Job as being one of the earliest existentialist texts.

It’s the reflection upon creation, which is the essential requirement.

And this is very difficult to achieve from phenomenology or materialist study, right? Because the anatomy or the nervous system of the human being, or the human body, does not give us—

It’s rather the examination of the hardware through which the transmission occurs, and that the transmission itself is the character of being, which is the essential draft or the essential strain, which is foundationally that which we are studying, and that which is at the root of all things in a creational sense.

It’s the endeavor, which religiously is called God, and scientifically is called the poetry of nature.

It is the same transparency which Galileo and da Vinci pursue in that wine is light, light in water.

That there, this chemical equation of being itself does not rather solve being, but it makes being available and intelligible to us in the architectonic part.

But rather when we read, let’s say, Dostoevsky, or we read Rimbaud, we are experiencing something of the ineffable inquiry into the character behind the structural formation of beings.

And this is very difficult to achieve by way of an objective inquiry, that the descent into subjectivity is necessary for this process to occur.

This occurs consistently in Gnostic thought.

It’s a very Gnostic theological concept of the fall of Sophia, or that the spirit becomes seated into form, becomes fragmented.

The process of the incarnation of man is the attempt to reunite with being itself.

You can also understand this, and we talked about The Fall in Camus. This is also, of course, the fall of man proper.

So in this, Kierkegaard understands this quite well, and this is why Kierkegaard is often described as the first psychologist.

Of course, he is inhabiting a Christian theological lens, where he’s speaking about this fallenness, and when he’s speaking about the dialectical redoubling as a principle of man reflecting upon being itself, existence in creation.

So it’s very difficult to get to the level of essential depth of inquiry in terms of existence without inevitably crashing into and colliding.

We examine everything from stellar formation to evolution, to biology and elemental structures, information technology, cellular structures, and the movement, the dynamic movement that occurs within cells, right?

We can examine all of these procedures externally and, let’s say, materialistically, but we return to the experience, the lived experience of interiority.

And we rely linguistically, semantically, on someone, let’s say, Proust, or Goncharov, or Rimbaud, to depict or draw out this essential existential experience, which itself is fundamentally common and yet incredibly uncommon in the sense that it is the excavation of the thing which cannot be achieved by pure materialism.

And this is, of course, profoundly disruptive to the Western historical advance of, let’s say, the emptying of the sacral, or the emptying of the sacred in the name of a profaned cosmos, or a profane culture, profane civilization, which is in large part led by the Scientific Revolution, which becomes the Industrial Revolution, of course.

And this also becomes the collapse of local and regional and tribal religious and cosmological constructs, which themselves were mythological narrations.

And so we lose that quality, which is then, of course, replaced by these, you could say, the rogue poet, so to speak, who still conducts this inquiry. Percy Shelley here would also be relevant.

So the question is, how can we excavate this lowest level of depth, or this highest level of depth, maybe is a better term, of subjective interiority?

This is the ungraspable. This is that which is occurring within the structural elemental compound nature of the universe, which can itself be measured, examined, qualified, and quantified, right?

We can make these things relatively transparent with the scientific technological instruments which are readily available.

Let’s say, the splitting of the atom.

This still can tell us little to nothing about the existential condition of being.

And this is, of course, where we ride within the technological suit of humanity, and are then able to recursively fold back on what is it to experience being, and then use this linguistic scaffolding, which is a historical and typically culturally bound method of communicating, to utilize this instrument in the archaeological dig.

And then draw it out into expression so it can be, let’s say, codified, translated, transcribed into other linguistic symbolic forms and then transmitted into the larger, let’s say, milieu of global or cosmological consciousness.

Evolutionary procedures of, let’s say, however many variant forms of sentience are at an end process in an evolutionary sense in the cosmos at large.

Participating in this process of the unfoldment of being and the access to technological solutions, which are made to solve historical material problems.

And yet, incidentally or otherwise, give us access to this creational substrate, which is the underlying factor, the essential factor, which is the character of being, or the aeon as a child at play with colored balls.

Who is that child?

What is that child?

What is it beneath the constructs of history, religion, culture, the human programmatic vessel, the nervous system, the synapses, the senses, right?

The biochemical substrate, which holds up this informational technological architecture, to participate within the larger process of transformation of stellar energy.

Which I’ve called, of course, thermonuclear energy.

We go into metabolisms, cellular respiration.

These are all procedures structurally through which energetic information is transforming, and this being and this organism is embedded within that process.

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The Occurrence of Being: A Continuation of The Cosmological Problem of Subjectivity -- Lecture 11/7/26

So what I’d like to say here, to continue the last piece, is that we are no longer looking at the structural history of the cosmos. We are now looking at interiority to its fullest extent.

That interiority, or the experiencing being, reveals the cosmos itself in a transparent way.

That it is not, rather, Rimbaud speaking, but a certain neurosynaptic, regulational structure of the unbroken cosmos itself interrogating itself.

Disclosure for Rimbaud is no longer simply at the surface of the informational technological experience of being human, at the level of pure sensation or historical epoch. Vis-à-vis his seerdom, or his practiced derangement of the senses, he has opened up the gates to the prism of the body, or the technological architecture; peered down into Dante’s Inferno, or simply speaking, the cosmological history of the formal body. He has entered the space of dissembly.

And by dissembly here, I mean the breaking apart, or the fracturing, of the components which formerly and formally constitute subjective experience at the top level of any given organismic body or persistence architecture. The survive-reproduce programming and the cultural layer of the biographical history of human consciousness proper. Hieroglyphs, canals, ethnographies.

A Season in Hell is a document of this process of derangement, or Rimbaud’s entry into the unbroken field of the cosmological self.

This is to say, beneath the socialized and programmatic biological self, there is the totality of information transformation, which is thermonuclear. The at-large cosmological force of creation, which in a non-local sense is indistinguishable. But locally, it’s the body technological. The solution space of Rimbaud’s flesh, blood, organs, synapses.

And thus, A Season in Hell is a record of Rimbaud’s experiment. His scientific procedure of breaking open, experimentally and experientially, the vessel of the body to perceive more, to hold more experience, to widen the aperture of the lens of subjectivity.

Beyond just the organismic body. His attempt to begin to hold the depth of the container. The ancient geology of the genome and the energetic form which constitutes the linguistic of the body proper. The seed which unfolds the neurology and character of being locally therein.

This is precisely the depth opportunity of existentialist literature.

The dissembly of the self as a scientific process to penetrate that which materialistic science can only describe from the outside. The body-consciousness emergent in the technological transformation of the vessel proper, which can itself be dissected or examined anatomically, or studied phenomenologically in movements and cell processes. But it can only be inhabited existentially and experienced as such.

And therein, literature, or the long-form confessional statement of the perceiving “I” in this process, is the method for articulating it and raising it to the surface for examination, reflection, and critical interrogation.

This “I” is the cosmos experiencing itself technologically through the body. It is not Rimbaud, or a Frenchman, et cetera. At the deepest level of substrate identity, it is the recursion of creation itself.

And the ontological metaphysician undergoes this stripping of the worldly forms of identity, including biology, in and upon the path toward union and reunion with this primordial subjectivity.

Rimbaud approaches this systematically, as do and did the world-historical mystical traditions from Eleusis to Egypt.

Long before this informational technological scaffolding was understood through Western materialistic scientific terminology, it was understood Vedantically, as in the sheaths of the body and consciousness toward Brahman, or the “I am” principle proper.

This stripping away is the practice of the human being revealing the cosmic identity behind millions of years of conditioning.

And it was this conditioning which was fundamentally necessary, in an evolutionary sense, for the human being to emerge proper. To survive and reproduce through genomic passage and the cultivation of neural networks and instinct, to pass through the ages of transformation and time. To acquire forebrain mutation and fold into recursive consciousness.

Rimbaud, in many ways, is the callsign of modern forebrain consciousness after religious and tribal death. Undergoing this descent as a true individual, shedding, too, his cultural cosmology in an act of absolute negation.

This was understood in the Russian superfluous man tradition—Turgenev, Lermontov. Additionally, in a Hegelian sense, as a necessary step into the new age of man: to totally throw off the clothes of the past in order to step into a new realization of the possibilities therein of man and of creation.

This was understood in relation to, we could say, Schelling and some of the natural scientists at the time.

But these clothes cannot be thrown off without descending totally into them. Down through the prehistoric and single-celled substrates.

And even then, the body remains upon return.

This is the critical innovation of modern Western science, from Darwin to Prigogine.

The experience of this inward travel and transformation is, in, at, and to degrees, the very existential literature we are speaking of.

This is rather not “art,” but a process undergone within the alembic—the creator or the human being themselves—then transcribed accordingly in the ledger which we then know as the novel, the play, the poem, et cetera.

Understand Goncharov or Dostoevsky or Lispector this way, and we begin to understand the true importance of existentialist literature as a process of excavating the history of consciousness as a visceral, experimental, and experiential meditation on and within the body, through self-reflection, perception, and the inquiry, as in peering into the vessel and eyes which are perceiving existence.

As much in the way you could conceive of Oblomov as a principle of the conservation of energy.

This process is mirrored from Kashmir Shaivism to the Vedic, to the aforementioned Egyptian and Greek traditions.

Underworld narration, across world-historical time, precisely sums this work. The descent into the realms of transformation, birth, and death.

And the stultification of the modern Western world is due almost entirely to the loss of this most inward scientific process of transformative understanding of the self embodied as cosmological awakening.

The Death of the Sacred is the materialist science of the modern West utterly losing the entire reason for this project to begin with: to clarify the existentialist project.

This was not lost on Newton, the alchemist, or Goethe, the morphologist. Or Kepler, for that matter.

By nature, this terrain is inexhaustible, because it only deepens in and with the passage of time and the ripening and unfoldment of coordinates of access, or beings and consciousnesses in space and time with different configurations of genomic and neurological register in relation to being proper, which can then attune, deepen, and hone those traits toward inquiry.

This is including the linguistic craft, and the attention to being itself existentially, experimentally, and experientially in the presence and present therein.

It is the place of fruitful life and being proper.

The occurrence of being.

This is the center of this inquiry.