Species Mind on the Highway 9/19/26 Lecture

Species Mind on the Highway

A lecture recorded on the road

Sep 19, 2026

I. The mind no one is having

I want to give a little species-level lecture from the highway. I’m listening to Jim Morrison, one of the demo takes of “L.A. Woman,” and it’s fascinating. I’ve always had this intuition on the road, because out here you witness so much technology at work. I want to talk about species-level intelligence.

The idea is that there is no one individual at work. No single thing is at play. What you’re looking at is a massive mind making incremental leaps depending on what it discovers. When we look at the car, the 18-wheeler, the convenience store, we’re looking at technologies that distribute, process, and move information and energy with increasing acuity and frequency. That’s a measurable proficiency we can observe in the ecosystem. We could even measure it as the discharge of energy from oil barrels into the atmosphere.

What intrigues me most about this species mind is how atomized it is in the experience of the subject, and how collective, how coagulated, it is at the level of the transpersonal.

There’s some strange substance on my fingers right now from the marker on my coffee cup. That’s a perfect example: the transmission of information. And that is what I mean when I talk about the Monad, the universal force of persistence against constraint, bearer of the entire history of creation. We have emerged downstream of it, cosmologically, from the birth of the universe into the expanding cone of increasingly complex organisms, life forms, and terrariums. You can see it at the scale of galactic organization, in the most sophisticated maps our cartographers of the stars have made.

And when we map the cosmos, what we are actually mapping is the past. Because of the speed of light, we’re mapping something that no longer exists. That, to me, is the great archaeology: the process I think of myself as doing when we do this work of excavating existence itself, ontologically. What is being? What is humanity? What is being in time? How do we trace the character of the cosmos?

II. Thermodynamic character

Witnessing these technologies, you’re seeing persistence at a very atomized, local level, carried by nervous systems that have become sophisticated enough to recurse upon themselves. This is the forebrain epoch we’ve been discussing, and it is what creates modernity.

I think I’ve given modernity a bit of a bad rap, because it really is so strange and interesting. There’s a truck in front of me with a toucan on it, blue and white, with wings, wearing a scarf: the logo for Schaefer Trucking. There’s a KFC billboard next to a shed in the deep backwoods of southern Georgia. This strangeness is what I want to pinpoint, and it should be celebrated, because it is fantastical. It’s the mystical realm of human experience that we’re not quite conscious of living in, even though we live it every day with such normalcy, a kind of lack of suspicion. I stand in a kitchen working a digital stove, listening to a baseball game on my phone over Bluetooth through noise-canceling headphones that cancel noise digitally, not physically. Measured against histories of hundreds of thousands or millions of years, which is the scale I like to use, this extended medium of existence is unprecedented, grandiose, and deeply functional.

Here is where fossil fuels come in, and the existential crisis of the human ecosystem. We’re discharging massive amounts of energy into the biosphere, producing vast and swift changes to how ecosystems function: to plant and animal life, and to the atmosphere itself. And this is my crystal-ball moment: it’s going to continue. It will keep continuing, because the human experience is attempting to maximize itself.

Persistence carries a cosmological grandeur. I’ve satirized and fictionalized this in several of my works: the character of the star is petulant and excessive, an almost egoic, boasting state of being. Leonine. That’s due to thermodynamics. Pseudo-closed systems must obtain, retain, and maintain heat in order to persist, whether we’re talking about the metabolism of a cell or the thermonuclear furnace of a star. These heat structures are consistently seeking to maximize themselves.

So when I look at a car, I see through it: a skeletal dinosaur fossil lurching across the road, propelled by a sophisticated iteration of the steam engine. That is really what our experience is. We build technologies that locally maximize energetic production, consumption, and expression, and expression comes through production and consumption, which is just the input and output, the excretion, of a technological machine. Human shit, or diesel exhaust. Nature’s technological processes all run on the thermodynamic transformation of energy into new products: a tree exchanging carbon dioxide and oxygen with us, though the way we conduct that relationship is hardly symbiotic.

That is because of what Heidegger calls Gestell , enframing, in which nature becomes standing-reserve, instrumentalized through fossil fuels, quantum mechanics, the atom bomb, fusion. We crack the code of nature’s physical processes, Newtonian, materialist nature, even though Newton himself was no materialist but an esoteric philosopher and, at the root of his work, an alchemist. We strip nature down to its energetic dimensions and use it. And the critical point is what we use it for: to build our secondary structures, our channel-two technological architecture, the symbolic recursions made possible by the atomized forebrain of an ape that has expanded into a new terrarium of the psyche, inhabiting space and time in a radically different way.

We’ve entered a sphere of existence where the cell tower is possible. Not only possible, but weaving a network of relationships between digital nodes, running on lithium dug from mines on other continents, in Africa for instance. This is the high strangeness we take for granted.

III. Distance, the sublime, and the veil

That strangeness is only available to us with sufficient distance. And that brings me back to the transpersonal, the shamanic mode. We have to be able to get out of ourselves. This is the problem of subjectivity that every human or animal faces, and what answers it is a kind of double consciousness available to certain nervous systems, though I think everyone experiences it to a degree.

It’s the uncanny, or the sublime. English Gothic literature serialized it; Poe, and maybe Baudelaire, carried it into horror. I want to take it higher. It is the sublime, uncanny sensation of being a bounded organism obeying specific codes (survive, reproduce) and everything that descends downstream from them: the fall into culture and civilization, and the delusions and illusions a group maintains to keep this species mind running locally, somatically, in the organism itself. Food, water, shelter. This play of delusions and masks is what I’ve called the Menippean farce of humanity. The Gogolian farce.

Then there is a higher cognition, which I think is available to everyone. It’s understood in mystical experience and institutionalized in religious texts: different access points to the transcendental, which here simply means the transpersonal or the cosmological, the identity of ontological being at large. Even regionally, it is this same species mind that is active in the Buc-ee’s billboard and in the war over oil.

Which returns me to the essential character of being: persistence against constraint. Its downstream effects (grandiosity, delusion, illusion) are all necessary. They are local veiling architectures of being, which allow persistence against constraint to perform.

This interests me in an almost Gnostic sense, but also in a deeply scientific one. Don’t mistake me: everything here has a scientific context. Being must veil itself in the world. Hölderlin understands this well, and Heidegger becomes obsessed with it: being’s concealment, nature’s concealing as her higher revealing. That is what’s so strange about nature, this game of hide-and-seek, which traditions from ancient Hinduism to esoteric Christianity and Judaism have understood as the divine feminine, the eternal feminine. It’s Goethe’s Nature, as I discussed in the last lecture: she loves to hide, she does all, and yet she is without flaw. The archetypal, Jungian Sophia: divine nature itself, always already in disguise.

IV. The vanity of the political project

Now look at human experience, so vastly hyper-accelerated. Sandlots and visitor museums in the Lowcountry (I’m just listing what I see). Audi making strange, sleek silver machines, marketed as whatever will fulfill your life. This rapidly sophisticating local system is where morality and interpretation come into play, and at the same time where they become irrelevant.

The idea that anyone could pass judgment on the affair of humanity and steer it: that is the vanity of the political project at large. Manipulating people through ideology, trying to steer history in this direction or that. It’s the hubris of technocracy, of plutocracy. And it all goes back to false wealth, which I’ve discussed in the lectures on ontology. Ontological, characterological observation and communion is the highest wealth available to a human being. Money and status aren’t irrelevant to human experience, but this higher sphere is the highest possible human experience, and we should pursue it at all costs.

What we witness in political struggle I’ll call the Alexandrian struggle, after Alexander the Great: taught by Aristotle, yet gravely wounded in India in the vanity project of conquering the world. What we’re observing is the ontological breach I’ve described before, a breach in understanding what wealth is, what power is, what meaning is, what being is. Understanding those is what makes possible the life well lived: an intelligent life in relationship to what we are, instead of the vanity of the political project, which in so many ways is the world.

Here the paradox of revelation emerges: becoming aware of nature breaks nature’s spell. The spell of the beautiful young woman and her wiles, say, while all that’s actually happening is a reproductive process with no real self-consciousness. And what human experience reproduces is the same tragedy, over and over. What we call history is nothing more than the repetition of the same ill effects of what I’ll call unconscious ontocracy: the rule of being over beings.

That’s subtle, so let me be precise. I am describing nature’s veiling process holding dominion over the beings that operate within it, beings that are themselves veiled and veiling. This whole process, which I’ve called the theater of subjectivity, is unconscious nature thrusting itself forward through the ontological character of persistence, pressing on perpetually, ad infinitum. Becoming conscious of it doesn’t necessarily change it, even for a subject who has realized it. But becoming conscious of it is what allows us to exist meaningfully: to actually be present for our lives, and to make choices from awareness of what is occurring cosmologically.

V. Somatic time, outrun

Humanity is not new in a cosmological sense. It is an extension of cosmological persistence against constraint, which operates at every scale, in every dimension, at all times, across the entire rift of the universe, from star to cell.

What forebrain intelligence adds is a technological capacity built into the organism that opens a whole new plane of access. The opposable thumb did this in the physical terrarium; the forebrain does it psychologically, and then physically, because new states of mind change how we interact with nature organismically. These capacities simultaneously create the high strangeness of modernity and what I’d call the beauty of novelty. Instead of wandering an organic, ensconced forest, we have metropolises, strange architectures tied to religious belief systems, intricate symbolic codes that dictate a weird general conduct. That opens a profound level of experience, made possible by the harnessing of energy, and it is something I haven’t sufficiently recognized in these lectures.

The reason I haven’t, in my opinion and experience, is the neurological onslaught it creates. It overwhelms the somatic organism. We’ve distinguished factory time from somatic time, and we’ve discussed digital time as a further stratum of speed, a further condensation of space and time. I want to gesture to McKenna again here, because he elucidates modernity so profoundly; I think he describes it as the ape achieving hyperspace. I’m not saying, as McKenna does, that we’re blasting off to the stars. I’m saying that somatic time has been vastly outrun by this new evolutionary stratum, the digital, which has compressed space and time to an imminence almost intolerable to an organism that evolved glacially, over hundreds of thousands and millions of years, in a natural rhythm. This plasticine layer of reality we now live in processes energy and information so fast that there is no foothold. It’s a free fall of unmoored somatic consciousness, and it drives the vast majority of the anxiety, mental illness, and breakdown we experience individually and collectively. This is what we know as late modernity.

So we have, simultaneously, a fascination with the strangeness of video games, television, artificial intelligence, strip malls, convenience stores (strange temples, religious and secular) and with all these symbolic orders: currency, submission, obedience to forms that don’t really exist. We’ve built such an intricate symbolic chain of information, and yet it is always already grounded in thermonuclearity and persistence against constraint, in pseudo-closed systems within an entropic universe, and in the character that must necessarily emerge through them, sentient and non-sentient alike: the character of being.

Being within this experience is profoundly strange, and beautiful in many ways, but also entirely unnatural in a genealogical sense. Nietzsche sounds the alarm on this at the end of the 1800s, and the span from then to 2026 is tiny, just a few generations. Navigating it somatically is the organism’s primary challenge.

The now-fashionable language of regulating the nervous system (fashionable because the information has only become widely available in the last fifteen or twenty years) is really about the conductivity of the organism: processing energy not only metabolically but neurologically, handling force and load. I talk about this a lot in terms of weightlifting, but it applies to experience too. When we talk about trauma, we’re talking less about how the mind processes experience than about how the body processes the load of violence.

That is the cycle humanity is caught in, politically and geographically: the trauma of nations, religions, tribes, and ethnicities, bound up in what I’d call fascist globalization. But I don’t want to leave it as a political term. Call it energetic harvesting: production and consumption at all costs, even at the cost of the character of the human being. This is our ontological-political problem, and the two can’t be divorced, because it is a problem of energy, of production and consumption. Downstream come all the illusory forms, status and currency and the rest, symbolic orders for generating energetic power, wealth, control, manipulation. That is the entire story of human history: the farce of thermodynamic ontology wearing political clothes. Wearing the clothes of the Tudors. And we play into it unless we’re aware of this higher, interdimensional, cosmological condition.

That awareness is also what lets us navigate modernity, precisely because modernity is so overwhelming and informationally dense. Most of the information is meaningless, status-driven, or patently untrue at the level of science, never mind ontology. To discern is to be able to selectively adjust, digest, and expose oneself to experience in a way that deepens one’s communion with, and understanding of, the ontological base: the base of existence, of creation itself. That communion is what I think we should strive for. I’m no final arbiter of that. We each do what we decide to do.

VI. Enjoy

(That’s only thirty minutes. Maybe I have something else to add.)

Being able to see the character of being beneath all this also lets us enjoy the strangeness of modernity. Isn’t that the Coke tagline? Enjoy. There is no Coke in the Paleolithic. No Coke in the single-celled tide pool of the pre-modern cosmos, or in the force of a star first emerging into form at the origins of the Milky Way. These are all novelties.

The human being can experience creation with a degree of sentience, an availability to nature and to being, that varies with our neurological and somatic sensitivity, our entrainment, our presence, our cognitive capacity to process information, our ability to be present without overwhelm. These are all constraint-level realities: energetic, electrical realities of the body.

Being available to this experience is essential. If we can’t enjoy a Coke, or old baseball radio from 1921 or 1930 streaming on the Internet Archive, if we can’t be present with these things, we’ve missed what the ontological base avails us of. I think of John Coltrane’s “My Favorite Things,” one of my absolute favorite songs, maybe his best (”Psalm,” from A Love Supreme , is great too). To be available to experience, to truly enjoy what is possible in the high strangeness of being human: the cosmological process that produced us is so massive and vast that simply being conscious as an organism is wildly improbable. To be available to that is to give ourselves the gift of being the cosmos experiencing itself.

I think this is an advance beyond the Jobian experience of existence. This process is who and what we are, and being available to it is how we realize ourselves in space and time. That’s what I mean by the sophistication of the subject: a higher subjectivity is being present in the body, somatically, experiencing nature. It’s why Hölderlin’s late poems are almost entirely about nature, and why they are so hyper-natural. His conception of being is wholly embodied, present in the presence of being. It’s why, for me, science and math on their own are too much abstraction. What I want is scientific poetry, scientific poetic philosophy, which is ontology. Heraclitus, Hölderlin, Goethe. Even Spinoza, or Pascal.

VII. Recombinative play

To be present to this is to be this recursive force, which is only now folding back over itself, insofar as we’re aware, after billions of years of process, in order to experience itself. That’s what is so profound about the technological unlocking of the forebrain, and I mean that cosmologically, not just anthropologically.

Consider the whole stellar, ecosystemic universe: this galactic web of veins of light, all pulsing, all generating radiant spheres of information. Even the Milky Way alone has built an astonishing scaffolding, from the single-celled organism to the antelope to the human being eating a hamburger and talking on the phone. This whole existential architecture of persistence against constraint, the character of being itself, has produced sufficiently ripe technology through iterative experimentation. Through play, like a child with colored balls, which is almost what the nucleotide is. Through recombinative play at a cosmological scale, it has generated organisms ripe enough to recognize and realize being.

To have that experience is a profound existential enlightenment: awe, beauty, joy. And I think that is precisely the point. Passion and play. Which brings me back to Coltrane, playing off a standard. To be in that space is to be in union with being: recombinative play, experimentation, drawing toward and communing with the passions of our existential nature.

Those passions are richly variable, and that’s the point too. The profusion of strangeness is the profusion of available experiences, down to genomic architecture. The general human template is nearly uniform across the species, and broadly shared even across species. Yet the neurosomatic roots and webs that spring up during gestation, from conception onward, open an immense diversity of possible character: of nervous systems experiencing reality, and so constructing how they engage it in space and time. Beings in time are at once deeply diverse and utterly the same at the level of persistence ontology. So we get Donald Trump and Baruch Spinoza. Tupac Shakur and Genghis Khan. Nikolai Gogol, Angela Davis, and Thurman Munson, the catcher for the Yankees.

This profusion, the theater of subjectivity I’ve discussed, is profound. It is a theatrical production of persistence against constraint, and it makes possible this technological modernity, with the human population surging from roughly two billion a century ago to over eight billion now. That exponential growth is profusion, creation, diversity: the Menippean multiplicity of experience.

VIII. The existential literary masterwork

Which makes me think of literary genius, of making words and making worlds. Shakespeare stays consistently pertinent because he creates whole universes populated by fully realized characters who obey something resembling ontological law. In Shakespeare, whether one person or several, we’re looking at a human being holding a mirror up to being through literary creation.

That is recursion at a further level. First recursion: being realizing itself through the experience of beings in time. Second: beings in time, having realized being, going on to create something as substantial as a Shakespearean masterwork. This is another level of the transcendental, the realization of the transpersonal, cosmological dimension of being, and it is what I’ve called the existential literary masterwork, documented in my operator manual and in my lectures.

This is why I’ve been so insistent on existential philosophical literature. Not as an endpoint, since we don’t know the true ends of anything, least of all universal expansion, but as what’s available to the human being now, with our current somatic and forebrain architectures, and maybe our technological ones too. Producing that masterwork requires two things. First, real communion with being, which is the ontological project itself. Second, the ability to graft that characterology superstructurally, to channel it, and to represent it so that it becomes transparent through language and symbol.

It is simultaneously a technological communion, through the symbolic order human beings have built, and a cosmological, characterological one. At the most foundational level of our being, we are reproducing not just forms but the character of our being, in a way that makes being more transparent to itself. I think of Rimbaud’s A Season in Hell. I don’t know if it gets better than that.

IX. Not the lamp, but the light

Exposure to the character of being is what we’re after. In ordinary life we’re possessed by trinkets and shiny objects, and we flit from one to the next like a moth from lamp to lamp. But what we’re seeking is not the lamp. It is the light within it.

That is the beauty of Hölderlin: someone who so fully mastered the necessity of transparency in the poetic, ontological, philosophical, scientific project. One of my favorite quotes comes from a Nobel Prize–winning scientist: in physics, what we are seeking is the poetry of nature. That is precisely it.

When Goethe searches for the Urpflanze , the archetypal plant, he is performing one of the most profound ontological inquiries available to humanity: trying to discern the foundational order, the substantial basis of creation, at least within the order of flora. We’ve expanded that inquiry here. In our cosmological process, we are looking for the cosmological Urpflanze , and it is the character of being: persistence against constraint. The same project as Spinoza, the same as Leibniz, and, I’d say, the same as Newton, though Newton is recognized only for the physical laws of nature. Those were part of it, of course, because the physical laws of nature reveal to us the character of being.

That’s what I’ve got. I appreciate you listening. I’m going to go listen to “L.A. Woman.” The demo version.