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

Equanimity and Cosmology

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.