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.