Heraclitus, SLAM Magazine, NBA Street: American Civilization as Revolutionary Cosmology Beneath the Seeming Rubble of History

00:01

So I just took a little nap here and I think I’m ready to tackle this next phase. We really cracked into the metaphysical code of existence and creation using our modern science, using our history of philosophy, using our history of culture… particularly baseball.

And I think a lot about, or I have recently thought a lot about my cultural upbringing, which is an intersection somewhere between Nietzsche and Freud and Russian literature, and Marx — along with SLAM magazine, AND1, the Starbury shoes, the Shaqs. These are kind of classic early 2000s staples, NBA Live 2003… and the different cards, right? We’ve discussed baseball cards, but here I’m expanding it to basketball cards. There’s a particular set from the late 90s from Fleer called Metal Universe. And it’s a really fantastic set to me because it shows a lot of these kind of cosmic, almost matrix-like, very esoteric, very creative and highly stylized cybernetic… designs. Very early 2000s.

The Matrix as a cultural iconography of the era emerging just two years later. Blade as a movie was another very memorable one which touches this kind of aesthetic. A lot of the stuff with the cosmos and the intersections with technology. Very cool.

01:50

There’s these two that I was going to grab for this one. There’s one with Kobe Bryant and Ken Griffey Jr. They’re surrounded by the solar system and star systems. And there’s a lot of depictions of energy and light and planets and stars and even like prosthetic arms and attachments… like second and third and fourth arms in some of the set designs. Very creative.

And it made me think a lot about like things like NBA Street in relationship to NBA Live 2003. There’s a really profound creativity that we can associate, really, natively with sports, specifically the American cultural legacy of sports. It extends into multiple different forms of iconographony so to speak, or cultural technology which speaks the essential language of creation. A sort of hieroglyphics of profound implicit reference to the force and sphere at work. Video games that stretch physics. Shoes that allow for more flight and effortless movement. The human as a techne approaching flight.

There’s a very deep implicit metaphysical cultural literacy when it comes to the ball sport and the history of the ball sport in America… as basketball and football become more popular in the mid to late 1900s and into the early 2000s. And again, here we’re talking about the Heraclitean metaphysical blanket statement, the metaphysical generalization, summed up in, ‘the Aeon is a child at play with colored balls’. And again, when we think about atomic structure, cell structure, the solar system… these various different ways that we explicitly visualize wave forms and wave structures in space and time, we atomize the concrete physical structures of the universe. Even when we think about blood cells.

03:13

The way that we seek to literalize them is through a kind of sacred geometry or an ideal form as described in the ancient Platonic philosophy. To literalize their waveform phenomenologically and depict stasis amidst flux. But again, it can, in many ways… these wave forms can be ritualized into the form of a ball or into the form of a sphere, a discrete packet as much as a water molecule could be called a discrete packet — carrying information in an ocean of water molecules.

This is how we could distill at the highest level plasma as a form of cultural information, which is super social at the level of the cosmos, right? The cosmos itself is comprised… over 99 % of which it is, is plasma.

But I want to kind of articulate this hidden background that we experience — which is that profound form of creativity… is driving us, especially in this playful youth-like sense. Again, when I experienced competitive sports throughout my childhood, the, again, the intuition by Camus of sports and the field of the sport itself — he’s talking about European football, another ball sport — is that... it builds camaraderie, it builds something inherently moral, inherently decent and inherently courageous in the architecture of the human in terms of the ability to collaborate and strive to achieve a common goal. And not only that, but to participate in this implicit cultural literary form — with the play of the cosmos.

05:05

And this is something that’s not really being articulated and understood yet, but when we look at human culture, and specifically when we look at human physical culture and human ball sport culture — we’re looking at some of the biggest and most important phenomena historically in terms of participation and mass energy behind their production and consumption that are sort of politically decontextualized, are philosophically or intellectually disregarded, that are aesthetically disregarded — in the sense that they’re seen as populist, democratic, and... empty of meaning. Unsophisticated and as such important — distractions or not as worthy of contemplation due to them being so literally physical and in the mass sphere. That these are events that are by and for a proletarian group which is unconscious.

And this is… I think this is precisely the point. It’s to bypass what so much of these academic and high aesthetic structures don’t wish to realize about themselves, but the inanity of their construction, the power dynamics and systemization of status and control and knowledge which composes really the entirety of their domain.

It’s a culture of the creation of social hierarchies, which is not to say that these aren’t occurring in proletarian forms like baseball, but that rather these proletarian forms in terms of the democratic unconscious provide us with the most profound and powerful gateway and venue to view true human meaning.

06:26

And I’ve stated this before and I’ll state it again. It’s that the idea is not to interpret history or to interpret humanity as much as to let humanity tell the tale of itself. And the importance of ball sports, specifically if we just want to localize it in American civilizational history is a metaphysical literacy — a literacy incarnate and history which I don’t think we can bypass in terms of solving the fundamental problems of modernity… and the dislocation of in terms of when we talk about human purpose or human essence. The problems that we experience in modernity, including existentialist philosophy, political, social, cultural fragmentation, economic inequality racial and ethnic dispute over land, territory, power and status. All of these things can be reduced fundamentally to the essential problem of human meaning.

And the issue with the problem of human meaning is that we have various different locales of intellectual engagement — which include quantum mechanics, quantum physics, modern philosophy, mathematics, all of these different realms in which we’ve made significant advancements toward a total ontology of existence. And these realms engage primarily through conquering and this idea of knowledge as an apparatus, which will eventually tell us the truth.

07:55

Which I don’t necessarily disagree with… but the issue with a lot of these fields is that these fields themselves are looking too far into the weeds of material phenomenological problems within a certain valence or field of informational coherence — ie biological architecture — when they need to be looking structurally at a unitive theory, which spans across all different disciplines that reveals to us the essential evolutionary structure, the building blocks of nature and existence themselves.

And again, this is what is so important about Plato and the foundations of ancient Greek philosophy… which are lost to much of the history of Western philosophy and eventually redeemed very thoroughly, clearly and concretely by Heidegger and Nietzsche in the latter part of the German philosophical revolution, which spans into the late 1800s and early 1900s.

We’re talking about the loss of a unified vision of existence in reality, which necessarily must ground itself foundationally and utterly in a real, as we discussed in the last essay… a real cultural ritual embodied practice, which itself is the summation and the representation and the reproduction of the universal powers, which then is an extension of the scales of existence. It is the emergence of the essential identity and character of the universal within the scalar cosm of the individual.

09:23

This is an extension of the scales of existence, much in the terms of these Fleer Metal Universe cards — down through the spheres, which would be the sphere of the creation of the universe itself, into galactic formations, which are exchanging information via star systems… and then the gravitational pull and transfusion of energy through radiation, thermonuclear radiation, down through star systems via the... star itself, which is the primary principal and guide of the dance of the planets, so to speak — all of which are in various different space-time relationships to one another vis-a-vis the field of gravity, which is their total presence, which is their atmosphere in that solar system itself, proper… and then expanded outward again into galactic forms and neighborhoods. And then again, the universal whole itself. This is, if you can visualize it, a relationship of scales where this essential force is manifested phenomenologically down through differences of valence which are 'guises’, so to speak, of the primary cosmic form… which is all form and formulation proper. The creative force itself of Heraclitus’ Aeon.

We’re looking at time as an exploded map of space, which reveals to us various different spheres of information… where this essential form of being, which is to say the creative play, Aeon as a child that play with colored balls… the recombinative creative play of the universe itself is representing itself over and over and over again at different scalar points of relationship.

11:14

So when we look at a baseball or a child playing with different various colored balloons at the zoo, we are looking most fundamentally not merely at a metaphor, not merely at a symbolization, but a primordial reproduction of the same energetic principles of creation. It is a total reproduction of the essence within the scalar form of the human individual, or the human cultural apparatus and aesthetic object which is itself unconscious revelation. Do you see this?

The same principles that are described metaphysically in Heraclitus, are represented cosmologically in the universe. So when we gesture up spheres and scales of existence into stellar nuclear synthesis or the relative relationship between star systems and galaxies, we’re looking at a delicate, almost kind of profound superordinate balance between all of these different fields of gravity and their relationship at a grand cosmological level — as, again, this phenomenon of the Aeon as a child at play with colored balls. This is the essential character, namely and therein… of being at work. Being at movement and play in space-time. And the manifestation thusly and accordingly is a manifestation of that character vis-a-vis the cosmic lingua franca which is to say the capacity availed to it and through it evolutionary at and down those valences and scales at any given point in grand evolutionary time.

12:08

And so we want to understand the profundity of this metaphysical presumption or metaphysical subsumption of all of existence into the character of existence itself because… what this conveys and confers down through the scales of existence is a deeper understanding than materialist science would allow, which is to say the supposition of the character of the universe is implicit and explicit in all of its creations. And thus the universe itself is always seeking to replicate, represent and recreate this phenomenal aspect of play and incarnated into existence. When something is expressed, that which is being expressed unto the limits of its powers is the innate character beneath it. We could describe this simply as cosmic selfhood.

But again, the issue is an issue of translation. This is an issue of understanding and actually translating this primary creative impulse into existence. What is a panther trying to express? A child, grasping at language and meaning and the essential metabolic dictates of incarnate survival; expression of, as Terence McKenna would say, ‘small mouth noises’ to articulate its inner stature and tumultuous state of emotional feeling and psychic experience of existence and being in form and time?

And again, we see this through all aesthetic production in humanity — is the orientation toward the creative powers of existence. It’s to bring something greater than the human structural narrative of consumption, reproduction, and... production, let’s say, into play via that inherently unstructured creative energy, which is latent and present in the human form, but again, is being translated through this thermonuclear, thermodynamic possibility — which is the current linguistic status of the human being as it exists as a genetic form in space and in time. It’s the evolutionary status. The artist, much as creation itself, is attempting to express the true self; the true nature of the self — through physics as much as through the canvas or through language.

13:37

So when we’re looking at — this is great metaphor for me — is the kind of primal nature of the animal wherein beneath it, what really the animal is concealing or protecting is this essential primordial energy, which is native to creation, which is being translated down to the organism and the organism is attempting to preserve and pass this information forward.

But rather this is the essential information which is being tweaked at the smallest scale genetically across all different formulations of species proper, which they themselves are in various different stages of transmutation of this energy, which can be described most clearly as an articulation of it. In this way, life is an alphabet of waveforms. And this… the most kind of proximal description that we could have for this energy itself in its essence is love. Again, the child that play with colored balls, the profoundly creative, essential, naive force, which is inherently harmless, bumbling, seeking, experimentational, inquisitive, inquiring — as to the nature of itself and experimenting with the recombinative possibilities of organizing and ordering these balls in different patterns to create different constructs. Different structures which emerge different phenomenological appearances and outcomes as in articulations of self vis-a-vis this fundamental and essential symbolic chain of the character (of the child at play) elucidating or speaking via symbolic or phenomenological relationship of being in time as in form or formulation, or planet in space (with colored balls).

And again, when we look down at the genetic chain as it’s popularly depicted, we see the various different nucleotides in that genetic chain are depicted as precisely…. as colored balls.

So when we’re looking at different representations of scale, we tend to be looking at spheres, spheres of representation, ecosystems, fields of gravity, cell structures — which are energetic packets, which are really wave forms that materialize in fields. So again, you could look at the electromagnetic field of the human being, the way that it represents itself in space, which is clearly… not necessarily natively visible to the human eye — is toroidal. But when that manifests itself in space in a toroidal way, it’s a sphere of influence, which itself is a circle. Right? We’re talking about the limits of perception and the thin line biologically between a supposition of life as chemical and elemental building blocks… just as much as we are talking about the thin line between the supposition of materiality and waveforms and fields. This problem represents itself historically and philosophically, if you can see… as the mind body split. Psyche and form. Spirit and form.

15:48

So this is a concept which is also profoundly manifest in the Jewish mystical tradition — in reference to the Kabbalah — of the Ein Sof or the divine light or the eternal light. And there are various different concentric circles through which that Ein Soph is represented. It is scalar. And so when we talk about these concentric circles — and again, when we talk about the metaphysical structure of the universe as scalar representations of this Heraclitean principle — we’re talking about the essential poetry of science.

And this is one of my favorite quotes — by the physicist Chen Ning Yang… who won the Nobel in 1957. He said, the scientific equations we seek are the poetry of nature. And this is what is consistently understood among the most advanced physicists and scientists and mathematicians in human history — is that we’re using science and maths much as the poet uses poetry… to reach an understanding.

The poet goes within — much as Dante’s descent into hell — whereas the physicist goes without. We could say, Galileo’s ascent into the universe via astronomy and study. These are the same metaphysical journeys or the metaphysical arcs into the above and the below, which are primordial representations and mirrors of one another across scales at the highest and the lowest or the smallest and the greatest. And this is what these concentric circles in the Kabbalah represent as spheres of representation and total presence. And this is precisely what Heraclitus’s axiom represents. It represents a total knowledge or a total essential character… which physics is looking to grasp outwardly and the poet is looking to grasp inwardly.

And the primordial unity between the two of them is that essential character or nature of the energy which is constructing phenomenological reality and the experiential reality which we would construct as the psychology of the organism or the animal or the human being.

17:46

And so… looking across these concentric circles, when we look at the human being as an existential form in space-time, as an existential predicament, as an organism in a state of becoming — where it has not reached necessarily its end or nor does it know its beginning, truly understand itself — it’s in medias res. It’s a organism which is attempting to reach up through scales and grasp the cosmic, which is... in a more Abrahamic sense constructed as God — that God is above, and to reach below and deduce the terms and conditions of that which is within it, the most kind of primary, the most fundamental… that which again, right, cannot be seen phenomenologically because it’s so small and because it’s so mote… so opaque and veiled by incarnate experience and the density of self reflection upon being embodied…

To again, grasp the scales — which you could say are the microbiotic, right, the very bacterium which forms the human form in the most materialistic sense. But then also again, the intergalactic relationship and network of systems, the macrocosmic, which they themselves are and give profound insight into those systems at a high structural level of energetic functioning and transmutation as well as insight into the most mote — in terms of the human experience and the essential nature of the one who is perceiving or the total makeup of the human organism that is necessarily within that supragalactic, supraordinate architecture.

Or even beneath that, the various different microorganismic relationships which compose the health and wellness and status of the planet Earth as an ecosystem… a grasping of all of these different terrains and terrariums, so to speak, of universal energetic form and source… would allow for the necessary enlightenment of the species, of the individual, of the organism to occur — in terms of its real relationship and status.

19:39

Again, as above in the highest sphere and below in the lowest sphere.

So there has been… you can see how this has been in Abrahamic traditions, been constructed as a fear of death and denial of death in terms of a fear of hell, which is a fear of the descent into form, the imprisonment within form and the imprisonment within structure of the existence and the essence of the spirit, which has been cast down from God… and really all that this is is to say that in a scalar way the universal source of energetic creation which is the essential character as described by Heraclitus has been… over over space and over time, transmuted into the energetic form of the human being with its necessary limitations and it’s visionary ceiling or ceiling of vision. A closed aperture, a narrow chink in the caverns — once more to evoke Blake.

Which has, again, forgotten God, which is that separation between this essential character of playfulness and this current status of the human being… fraught with war and evolutionary power and status and consumption and programmed will unto organismic animalistic territory and self preservation, fear of death… et cetera. The fear of this descent is quite simply the fear of the true descent into the embodiment of the incarnation, the descent into the hell of the density of the form wherein the powers are revelated directly through us. This descent into hell is ultimately the embodiment of the play of the discovery of that which we are absolutely; is also the digging through the catacombs of our ancestral, evolutionary heritage which has constructed the rapture and the cachetism of the emergence of our vision of these powers and the emergence, slowly, glacially, of what is possible in us and through us and unto us by these universal powers as in the incarnate Godhead.

21:26

And so you can think of this in many ways in so far as we know… the known universe… that the human being itself is isolated or stranded in this existential predicament of the revelation of this creative playful character of being and the true return to that, which is represented most clearly again in childhood, as Heraclitus uses in his symbolization of the essential character of creation. As a vanguard unto this moment, a seeker on the edge on this planet; seemingly isolated or alone in our solar system in this pursuit of the revelation of the powers of being proper.

This is a moment, the moment of the child at creative, experimental play which is native to the early stages… in which the human being itself is almost not aware of life and death as principles or possible realities, or thermodynamic potentialities that… the child itself is unaware of the status of the human being itself whatsoever and is experiencing primarily the creative powers which have not yet been reduced to object drives in terms of sexuality… which is to say the drive or the will of the organism has not yet been fundamentally directed towards a sexual object, which is to say the reproductive mode of existence that most human adults as animals understand as their primary drives, drivers and impulses — or the drive towards social or political power as constructs, which again exist between animals as methods of creating primordial accumulation, creating status symbols and organizing their known universe within a cultural pocket as a structure of social rank or hierarchy or power.

22:22

So when we’re talking about experiencing this primary creative energy and living within this primary creative energy, that’s what’s… to bring this back to the Metal Universe cards with Kobe Bryant and Ken Griffey Jr. playing among the solar system and playing among the stars — is that when we look at the ancient Greek mythology, the concept of the hero, the essential teleological arc of heroism ends with the hero being placed up in and among the stars. And what this represents beyond a sort of deification into the godship or the god realm, which would be called Mount Olympus, is a reunion with these most powerful and primordial forms of elucidation of cosmic existence — which is stellar nucleosynthesis; which, in terms of the ancients, when they gaze up at the stars, there is this simultaneous, experiential, intuitive, native understanding… of the impelling and compelling powers of the sun as a form of nutritive radiation for the human being which which creates and constructs and reaps and sows the harvests — which are the cycles that preserve and sustain the human being.

It’s… the essential metabolic powers of human existence are emerging from this star — but also, furthermore, that the stars themselves above are the representations and manifestations of the Godhead and the various different constellations of them are and form our symbolic architecture for understanding the Godhead in various different archetypal dimensions. Whether that’s Perseus or Hercules or Aries, right — to understand the creative powers that are emergent from the Godhead, which themselves, much like the different species that populate the planet Earth, have different energetic principles depending on their wavelength formation or wave formation.

24:36

And this is where we get so much deeper… into psychology and the psyche and the foundation of consciousness and the importance of the metaphysical project — in terms of identifying and essentially identifying with… as in terms of being incarnate, the metaphysical character of creation itself as articulated by Heraclitus, the child at play with colored balls.

Because to assume this status of creation, to assume the status of consciousness, which is essentially nothing more, nothing less than the total return to childhood and a total return to the expression of the inherent primordial creative energy through the aperture of the human being as itself… first and foremost creation and creational energy… is to suggest, let’s see how I can articulate this…

Is to suggest that transcendental reunion and being among the stars, which is itself a liberation, which is accomplished at the end of the Herculean trials, the 12 tasks and the 12 labors which are symbolized by the zodiac, the zodiacal wheel — which again is common to most, if not really all of the ancient civilizational architectures of humanity as we are aware of the, going back to the Babylonians — it is a return, in terms of the task of being human, to the revelation of the essential primordial energy of the will that resides beneath the human impulses or genetic language which seats that will and directs that will and translates that will upon and among the earth as in that which we know as the everyday circumstance and condition of the human being which is articulating unconscious energies through itself.

And again, this is where we go back to consciousness — is to understand that primordial identity is to have that reunion among the stars, which is, as it is understood in the ancient Greek, the reunion of the cosmic primordial heroism. This is what’s so powerful about having Ken Griffey Jr. or Kobe Bryant on these Metal Universe cards, playing among these solar systems and these stars — is that there’s this implicit, again, implicit metaphysical cultural literacy inherent within American civilization, which is a deeply unconscious resonance at the root of Western civilization.

We gesture toward the Greeks and the Egyptians and the ancient Indians by way of that nature and lineage… but we we’re not going to go all the way into that. And it — this primordial, deep resonance that exists historically and culturally here between America and Greece in this understanding that… much as maybe we have the athletic and heroic feats of Hercules, or even someone like Plato as the wrestler, right? Plato is actually embodying in his philosophical life, this fundamental architecture of the harnessing of the metabolic will toward the aesthetic object of play — wrestling much less without the colored balls, which are very integrated into American cultural history and the cultural legacy of sports and American civilization.

27:28

But to see Kobe Bryant, right, in this participatory act with the basketball, rising towards the net — or Ken Griffey Jr. leaping to catch the baseball among the stars, we’re understanding that there is actually a profound event that has happened here in American history and American civilization, which is happening, right — which is actually a great deal of, if not all of, modern American civilizational culture when we think about SLAM Magazine or AND1.

This was a huge part of the millennial culture in American history and American civilization, which was in large part the explosion of the intersection of black history and black culture with the athletic history of basketball and the immersion of the history of basketball with hip hop culture. And the aesthetics that were produced from them is a entire realm of aesthetic creative play and possibility as you see in NBA Street, which is actually a, kind of a profound artifact of black futurism in America in terms of the radical and dynamic extension of the body and movement of the will in space and time accompanied by the aesthetics and soundtracks which populated both of its releases — and extended and were extending far into the realm of basketball itself as a cultural and political practice at the time as well. Bending the socio-political, economic, and even physical-material circumstances of humanity and blackness in America through athletic greatness and the pursuit of athletic greatness. The life and story of Ben Wallace, maybe my favorite player of the era… is a profound example of the profound possibilities of political overcoming, physical overcoming, economic overcoming, and self-overcoming in basketball culture and history in many different ways.

28:45

Just as you would see with these Metal Universe cards, there’s a profound understanding that’s emerging through American history, unconsciously through the history of sport — which is a cultural artifact, which in itself creates this entire aesthetic dimension of participation, including video games, sneakers, cards, clothes, different brands, magazines with their cultural voices — even music. The movie Like Mike is a great summation of this total level of impact and presence as cultural influence and power of sway of perception, consciousness, possibility, and striving.

And one of the most important things, and I’ll see if I can work this in here… and I think I will.

Is that the Shaq shoes, as well as the Starbury shoes — these were shoes that could be purchased for $15 at the Walmart, the Kohls, the big box stores in America — which served those in need, those who experienced various different socioeconomic status; particularly the impoverished political classes.

And what was so powerful about these shoes is their profound act of social and political consciousness, which we’ve discussed a lot with baseball, but we’re also tying basketball into it a little bit now. With Stephon Marbury and Shaquille O’Neal creating these brands — superstar players of their era and time — where parents who had children, let’s say in an inner city environment or were highly impoverished in a rural environment… could not afford the shoes, specifically basketball shoes to go and play this sport to participate in this metaphysical legacy which is felt so viscerally not only nationally but worldwide at this point in time in history… a metaphysical legacy, which, consciously or unconsciously — is unfolding at this point as a primary artifact of civilization across baseball, basketball, and football as the sort of ‘big three’ Abrahamic religions of American civilizational cultural history, so to speak, in terms of the aesthetic theater of the elucidation of the Heraclitean axiom.

30:38

So these these sneakers were created as this profound act of socioeconomic responsibility and understanding and consciousness as to what basketball… and specifically Shaquille O’Neal and Stephon Marbury — and basketball shoes themselves as vehicles for the sport represent in black culture and black history; proletarian, working class culture and American civilizational history… in terms of the possibility of participation — much as we’ve talked about in terms of racial exclusion in baseball and Jackie Robinson and Satchel Paige, the possibility of the participation in what American civilization has created…

Which extends far beyond the intellectual legacy of much of European philosophical history, Western philosophical and intellectual history itself… and even Eastern philosophical history itself, which again, I would put this toward perhaps — maybe the most clear and profound elucidations would be the Bhagavad Gita or the Tao in the sense that we are looking at a participatory universe of flow and revelation — where America itself has created the cultural scaffolding in these three distinctly American cultural forms (alongside the world form of soccer, or football), all of which are founded in and find their world historical epicenters in American civilization; have gone on to make significant impact globally… particularly basketball and baseball.

32:09

Baseball, basketball, football, these ball sports — which to varying degrees again are high aesthetic sports of the dedication of the assertion of the will towards an aesthetic object, which is to say the ball. Football itself being the most Roman, so to speak, which is to say the most high contact and violent… which itself resonates with a sphere of American culture and American political and social consciousness. Basketball being one of the most powerful and physical, yet the one of the most entirely dedicated to the ball itself — as in aesthetic object of and toward the revelation of the will itself — with very, very minimal physical contact.

And then I would say… culminating in baseball — as the most difficult physical act crossed with the most aesthetically concentrated act of movement in space… in terms of hitting a baseball — in American cultural and civilizational history, which represents a profound embodied unity. Which… we are no longer discussing and attempting to elucidate the fine mathematically gradated formulae of phenomenal space and phenomenal time and to deduce the impacts of consciousness on existence, but rather — we are participating. And this is the real purpose of metaphysics. To integrate the whole existentially and thus incarnate the powers truthfully… beneath all things; the veil of Isis and what was hid or veiled by programmatic form or chinks in the cavern of representational, phenomenological perception — hid, the essence of the will beneath the clothes and garments of apparent form and genetic formulation and aperture.

33:48

And this is a participatory cultural revelation and artifact — which is the cultivation of an understanding in American civilizational history of what really matters and what really is important. And I think what we see in American civilization, which is so profound and so particular… is that there is a extreme dedication toward these three ball sports and an extreme dissociation and almost irrelevance of American history toward American politics, or the sphere that which we would term as everyday life. It has been desired to be sloughed off like a tired burden.

I mean, we do, of course… we do see political participation and moments of profound social revolution such as Occupy Wall Street or the Black Panthers or the protests against the Vietnam War. Moments and movements of high political and social consciousness, just as we see the predictable political nihilism of consumption and self aggrandizement and materialistic grandeur, status, and wealth unto power.

We do see a high level of political involvement in certain pockets and moments in American history… but I think for the most part, a lot of the existential vacuum that is experienced in modernity itself is the most clearly incarnated in the political situation in America in terms of political apathy. A revolutionary fatigue. A lack of care or desire for the human life which constitutes a profound nihilism — a nihilism which the culture itself is perhaps scared to truly broach or admit to itself. And these cultural artifacts of ball sport act as a critical edge and ledge to this form and this existential anxiety. It has abandoned humanity and entered unconscious metaphysical space and increasing consumption with the true metaphysical terrain of incarnate eternity. It is seeking to evolve out of itself imminently… this American political humanity. The everyday as a survival march has been largely abandoned. And this has left a vacuum both of fantasy and metaphysical revelation… entwined and intertwined to the point of utter confusion and angry, desperate apathy.

And I don’t think this is political abandonment is necessarily a coincidence. It is a coordinate movement. I think this is directly tied to the implicit metaphysical cultural literacy of American civilization and its orientation progressively and increasingly toward these sports. It is an emergent hyperspace beneath the apparent banality of the real. These sports themselves, if understood on the terms we have elucidated above, acquire a radically different depth of meaning when we discuss the American civilizational ontology and relevance not only to modernity but to the wider aperture of the evolution of humanity and the consciousness of humanity proper as a full spectrum, deep historical unfolding.

35:13

These sports are… not as Juvenal says in ancient Rome — not as a bread or a circus, not as a way of distracting the populace while the political sphere of elites plunder and attempts to ideologically consume the labor and the social systems that could support the welfare of that populace. I think rather this is a populist orientation towards the truth; a rocket ship or engine which is breaking from the pre-existing historical terrain of a radical and meaningful absence of real metaphysical cultural images of humanistic power. This is to say that the former method was absolute vacuum of history… and a total violence of power. With the rise of ball sports with a industrial-cultural machine of image making and metaphor in the form of clothing and aesthetic spheres of representation and reproduction… video games, fields, youth culture and stadiums… you have a real participation in something far more meaningful than history; the dirge and useless preoccupations of war and power and struggle for the existential field of nothing… political power unto the anxiety to retain plunder — you have a metaphysical reunion in incarnate form (again, conscious or not) with the real universal powers and character and characteristics of cosmic creation itself. And this power is lived… on the oil fields of Texas football to the courts of Rucker Park and the great baseball stadiums of old… Yankee Stadium, Ebbets Field… and the fields and parks that adorn the polis and demos of America’s field proper.

35:42

Meanwhile, you have an insignificant portion of the population which is dedicated toward pushing forward this force of will into pursuits of instituting political power, social control, allocation of resources. This is already the old guard, and the oblivion of false premises grounded in a animal aperture turned sideways into a culture of futility. Fear of death, primordial accumulation, scarcity and struggle.

This is all a, it’s a misconstruing — which again, resides between… I would say, Stephon Marbury’s shoes, as well as Shaquille O’Neal’s shoes — they stand right in the middle.

This is the heroic act of the athletic will toward reunion with the universal whole… as the heroic act of Hercules and the return to the stars, so to speak. And this is not a literal return to the stars as in flying a spaceship and sitting next to one. This would be the uncreative, politically conquering old guard way of thinking about reality. The misconstrued and lost history of the failure to reach metaphysical hyperspace.

This is a return to the stars in terms of reunion of the creative essence of the universe itself toward the higher metaphysical object of creation symbolized by the star system.

36:11

So we’re looking at basically a political reality which is a tragedy disguised as a vanity… and a vanity disguised as a tragedy… which again is this meaningless consumption and this metabolic vampirism — and the blown out attempt to sustain life and preserve it and protect it and remain it safe, which is the pull down toward the animal instinctual consciousness and the unconscious nature. And all the while, as our existentialist revolution in philosophy so clearly reveals and demarcates, this life has absolutely no meaning or value. It is emptied of contents and exacerbated as a wound toward meaningless drives of self perpetuation without cosmological function or universal meaning or system.

And then the rise up through American civilization of these three major ball sport artifacts, which rise up and unify in mass cultural presence at precisely this time of the Existentialist call… which themselves are the metaphysical ontological thrust of creation itself towards its own self revelation — explicitly or implicitly — through participation in these artifacts, right?

Because in participation with these artifacts, what we’re doing fundamentally is reuniting the metabolic architecture of the human being and the human organism, which is cloaked in all of these different genetic constructs and desires and systems of processing information; are the perceptual aperture of the human being — we’re reuniting that source energetic, again, as we discussed in the last episode, code breaking that source energetic and reuniting it existentially and essentially with the primordial will, the primordial will system itself, which creates and produces it at it’s fundament — as elucidated by Heraclitus in his axiom.

37:34

And so one of the few things that we can take historically as truth is this Heraclitean axiom, because it is an axiom that can be approached from any dimension. And as such, precisely, it is not history. It is eternity elucidated in historical time, through the historical form of Heraclitus himself. If you want to approach it culturally, if you want to approach it historically, if you want to approach it scientifically through any of the different scientific disciplines, including genetics, including astrophysics, including cell biology… there’s various different ways — even if we wanted to approach it via the study of oceans.

There are various different ways to understand this essential Heraclitean axiom and filter it and interpret it through these various different scales and spheres of existence. But what is most important in a human being sense is that this Heraclitean axiom is subsumed and incorporated in the very architecture of the human being experience itself in the way that the will is purged or purgated or transformed through this ritual cultural play, which reproduces the deeply pure and essential childlike form of the eternal playing with colored balls in space and in time. This is also a guide or a way of being in the world.

And to understand this metaphysical playfulness is not merely metaphor, not simply metaphor at all… but rather the essential characteristic reality of being and existence itself hid behind these various different phenomenological screens, which are these various metabolic forms (and molecular and atomic structures) attempting to achieve a level and space of evolutionary revolution of the self to and for which this essential creative energy and power can emerge safely and thus be revelated, right? This movement beneath them is, precisely, the Aeon… and is as such their emergent essential character beyond life and death; beyond form and apparance.

Because these, these phenomenological forms and these phenomenological beings are essentially shells. In the Hindu, they are sometimes called wax forms.

39:27

They’re shells that are carrying forward genetic architecture, DNA information — and passing this information forward. This is the rote circumstance replicated in human history as death in life. The long march of time without unity of purpose and metaphysical revelation unto the real enrichment of life and emergence of the transcendental unity in space and time as in revelation.

But the question is why? What is the teleology behind evolution? And the statement here, just essentially and foundationally; I think indisputably… is the revelation of the essential and the native creative energy itself, which is behind the structural formation of phenomenological reality.

That the process of reality is an articulation, but that articulation is becoming increasingly sophisticated. And realistically, when we look at the great and long span of evolution itself, this sophistication is occurring primordially and primarily unconsciously — which is why I say we don’t interpret history and we don’t interpret humanity. We allow... history and humanity to articulate themselves and actually listen to that articulation as opposed to attempting to establish constructs and rules upon reality or upon experience — or attempt to direct humanity, but rather to allow humanity to elucidate itself and in its own self elucidation. It’s performing the very metaphysical trajectory that evolution architectonically is gesticulating; articulating itself toward… which is this unity in the stars of the archetypal cosmic hero of Hercules performing his 12 labors or Perseus slaying Medusa using the mirror of the shield to avoid being turned to stone.

41:22

You have to understand these essential mythical and mythological architectures, much like the emergence of Heraclitus from ancient Greek history — are telling, through the symbolic dimension… which again is the dimension of the poetic. And why the poetic is so important in this intersection with the physical, the intersection with the phenomenological, is that when we’re talking about physics, we’re talking about poetry — in the sense that we’re looking at scalar dimensions of reality, much as we talk about chemistry or biology.

The importance is not to remain absorbed or turned to stone or stuck within these narrative systems and these narrative descriptors of reality, these domains, these constructs of interpretive crust or circles which themselves are spheres or substratum within the larger architectural reality of existence in the universe itself — but rather to grasp the essential and fundamental nature, the superstructural architecture, the metaphysics of each of these interdimensional systems… and to realize the essential character within all of them — which Heraclitus was able to do thousands of years ago, without any real knowledge of Newtonian physics, but rather by through observation, deduction, and translation of the movement and the patterns of the universe as he could observe through the relatively kind of latent and primal ancient Greek technology, which primarily had to do, fundamentally, with experience… through very limited and narrow technological and prosthetic apertures. All of this — the history of human knowledge, is always already returned to the possibilities of revelation in the incarnation of being human. Technological revolution is the march of prosthetic devices — which may or may not produce ontological clarity. They may in fact, as we have observed with modern science, simply serve to phenomenologically and experimentally through increasingly exacting procedures… the same revelations preserved in the script of the ancient Hindu sages and philosophers; in the works of Heraclitus himself.

43:12

So all of this is to say that this information is already an inherently native to the human being. We are simply providing more and more apertures in more realms and domains… more sophisticated apertures to perceive this via mind and intellect. To interpret it and become more granular with it across dimensional pathways of the interpretive dance of the cosmos itself. Bios, chemistry, ecologically.

And we see this, the Heraclitean revelation being reproduced in American civilization and cultural at large, primarily unconsciously. It’s being enacted by the domain of the body coming into consciousness through historical time, technological prosthetic revelation; intercommunication across bodies of water and branches of cultural, ethnic, and religious narrativization. But the act itself remains embodied nativity. It is a revelation through the ground of intuition as emergent — a principle and thesis that Einstein stood by.

It’s the same revelation, but America is putting the Heraclitean revelation into practice. And what American civilization is so much of... American history is focused on political movements and political moments and economic struggles, or the elucidation of industrialization or globalization filtered through the American lens. This is typically how we interpret human history. It’s a manner and matter of focus on the perceived problems or the perceived arc of history and what is occurring in regards to being in time. But with this essential axiom in hand and in tow, what instead we do and we see… and what American history reveals to us is that rather — American history is just this larger driving force of this deeper teleological ontology, this deeper drive through and toward this object at the end of history, which is the child playing with colored balls, the realization of this form politically in space and in time.

A reunion… in terms of the locking of this last piece into place of this jailbreaking of the genetic architecture of the human being as a revelation of the essential will — which is to say the child, again, the child at play with colored balls and the dedication of this will toward the aesthetic object, which is the revelation of this will itself into space and into time. A primordial replication and reproduction of the essential character of the universe fulfilled primarily in and through the human being and man which is the existential realization of all time and all being beyond and behind time as an appearance of change and forms. The character of the essence behind time.

And that all of history and existence — just the same as we talk about a leopard as a force of nature — these are, these are essential drives… which are all driving toward that same revelation, but are being filtered toward and through the current status of the organism’s genetic architecture and status of consciousness and awareness toward this essential and innate character of the universal self… and thus its ability to express and its expression in relation to that essential axiom, which is revelation.

44:59

And so when we see human history driving towards this in cultural movements, such as let’s say SLAM Magazine or NBA Street or Stephon Marbury with his shoes, we’re looking at these cultural articulations of a profound realization and recognition — that all of humanity and human history is headed towards this profound form of aesthetic play, right? There is no where else to head towards… because this is the metaphysical articulation of the nature of creation and existence itself proper. This play can become more sophisticated, aware, conscious, and aligned universally — but this play is beyond and outside of time… again, that it is time’s fundamental and essential character of being itself. This profound form of experimentative, experimentational aesthetic play.

And that when you have these moments, such as the early 2000s with AND1, and their colorful slogans, which were attached to this, the AND1 brand figure, which looked a little bit like a mannequin or a marionette — performing various different feats with the basketball, like dunking the ball or crossing over… we’re looking at just this deep unconscious, but deeply true…

And NBA Street again, as a great example — the animated players moving in space and performing these gravity defying feats of jumping and spinning and flipping and dunking. We’re looking at this kind of defiance of the will, which is so typical of this evolutionary history of the will, which is to say the revelation of the will out from under itself is always already a defiance of the existing form and architecture through which it is being articulated. And this is the purpose of higher revelation, which is understood in quantum mechanics, which is to say higher revelation is that which changes the form and the field of being.

It’s the revelation of the essential, the metaphysical axiom of Heraclitus — out from under the phenomenological appearance of the form, which is the genetic translation of what was hitherto possible. This is the revelation which actually spurs and stimulates as in fundamental, true recognition of the self. Which is to say, the universal, unified field of being proper. The true form and essential, innate character of all things… of existence itself. The embodied revelation of this metaphysical truth.

46:52

And thus evolutionarily… consciousness as a form and a force of recognition, which is primarily psychic. And you can relate this first and foremost to plasma as a field generator and circulator of consciousness. Plasma itself being the network through which information is being translated and moves — in that which… plasma is the entirety of the universe with the exception of under 1 % of all information that is circulating in existence.

We are looking at a fluid network of revelation, which is being translated down through limited phenomenological architecture, which is genetic transfusion of information through space and through time, through reproduction, which is being informed and... nurtured, nutritive through stellar radiation, which itself is a direct primordial reflection of the essential powers of the human being itself.

But the human being itself is phenomenologically translated down through scales. This is a rearrangement of scales.

47:49

So this is a… these are profound moments when we look at, again, particularly that early 2000s period that I’m discussing… as well as the exponential rise of the power of the ball sport in American civilizational history — where basketball and football at mid-century joined baseball in rapid, rapid, rapid acceleration into primary cultural artifact and theater.

48:13

And I described this towards the end of the 1950s, which I would kind of mark with the Brooklyn Dodgers and New York Giants leaving New York. Baseball ceases effectively to become America’s pastime because of the rise of popularity of basketball and football. Again, these are different atmospheres of the same experiential, experimentative mode of the child that play with colored balls. They are a diversification of America’s portfolio of metaphysical truth, so to speak.

And that this is the vast majority of what actually constructs early childhood experience in modern American culture and civilization at large.

And so what I’m saying here is very important — is that to look at American civilizational history, this is really primarily what we’re looking at. And what’s secondary is the political, economic, and social history, which colors that primary fundamental metaphysical realization, which might be taken as metaphor… but really is to be taken, in a grand evolutionary sense, which is to say a trans-human sense, or beyond the human into the larger cosmological architecture of all of the evolution of existence and the universe itself, down through scales — as a seeding of that revelation at the smallest scale, at the sort of atomic structure and level of creation in the universe itself, which is to say the culture of human play.

49:35

And this is a primordial reunification in terms of the embodied revelation of the Heraclitean Axiom, which goes beyond necessarily any sort of knowledge and must necessarily, again, whether or not this is implicit or explicit, conscious or unconscious, be grounded in the embodied experience — which is the existential experience of the human being — which is the vacuum elucidated by existentialism in Western philosophical history in the 1950s.

This is the moment of the existentialists, with Camus and Sartre… as well as in many ways, Heidegger — articulating this vacuum and this void, this night of history — in the precise moment that on American soil… again, right, Camus, Sartre and Heidegger are European intellectuals. They’re articulating this profound void at the seed and at the heart of the history of Western phenomenology and philosophy. And I would also argue at the heart of Eastern phenomenology, although they deal with it differently.

They deal with that revelation at the level of being, not at the level of participation. What is active, conscious participation? This is so much the realm of the Western mind. Exploration, discovery, action. The realm of becoming. How to be in the world is the question of Western philosophical history at this moment in time… as it is, arguably, since its instantiation; split in the transition from Greece to Rome… articulated quite clearly in practice by World War II. In modernity, this question is multiplied tenfold with the articulation of being in increasingly complex global space with competing mythological concepts of divine right and reason.

51:00

This question, while it is being elucidated on European soil, is being resolved in an embodied primal foundational elemental physical way on American soil through the culture of ball sports. And Heidegger’s obsession with Heraclitus is no coincidence — because he intuits, much like American modern civilization intuits — that Heraclitus is the solve to this issue of the dispersing or the breaking up or the fragmentation of the disciplines that the metaphysician… necessarily, in the deduction and the observation and the revelation of the metaphysical architecture of all of these different now-disparate systems of information and systematizing… which is to say biology, chemistry, math, astrophysics… that we’ve lost the true embodied singularity within history and within time, which is the eternal, the eternal embodied human experience. We’ve lost that if we’ve ever had it.

And the question is how to embody it, incarnate it through this true fundamental elemental knowledge, which is being in the world.

52:23

Being in practice, being in space, being in time — as a participatory revelation.

52:31

And this, again, this is what the Heraclitean fragments are about as axioms — is that they are revelatory deductions of the universal process itself as a metaphysical archetype, and then is translated down through the different symbolic dimensions or archetypal dimensions, which could be described as a form of universal poetics in that the essential nature and character is being translated through various different degrees of obfuscation and difficulty… as in articulation, down through these different scales and spheres — which we’ve described, the atomic structure, cell structure, the solar system, the human being.

This is the great question of the solve that’s inherent within humanity. And the difficulty is, again, that these biological hormonal chemical elemental constructs which compose the phenomenological architecture of the human being… which are the direction and articulation and elucidation of the will as it occurs in and through the human species — are being taken as truth.

And to take those as truth as opposed to orient them back through the aesthetic object and thus to purify and purgate them as a cultural practice and thus to understand the inherent essence and innate nature of the will itself, the willing nature through the organism… which is manifest through this language… to understand the energy, or as Samuel Beckett would say, the fire beneath that language — is to come into this reunion with the stars, which I think is so beautifully elucidated in these these Fleer Metal Universe cards with Ken Griffey Jr. and Kobe Bryant.

So this this is really the profound revelation that we’re talking about here and that is occurring. So I hope you enjoy this one. I’ll catch you on the next one.