The Consequences of Ontology: Persistence, Cosmological Being, and Radical Play (Lecture 10/21/26)
Video
The Consequences of Ontology: Persistence, Cosmological Being, and Radical Play (Lecture 10/21/26)
The Consequences of Ontology: Persistence, Cosmological Being, and Radical Play
I want to give a lecture here about the consequences of my ontological work. This is less a cosmology than an implementation of the cosmology.
I had some writings initially in which I was going to discuss the larger epochal movements of consciousness in space and time, and the technologies that are created to connect spirit and form in a deeper way. I was going to go into the origins of astrology and astronomy and discuss stellar physics, the physics of the cosmos, Newtonian gravity, as the rules of play at large, phenomenologically—which is to say, the material paradigm within which spiritual processes unfold.
Creation and time are themselves processes of revelation: processes of revelation through being in form, and the awakening of forms to being itself.
This process is a perennial unfolding of births and deaths based on phenomenologically apparent circumstances, which are not so apparent beneath phenomenology. And this is the historical disconnect between science and mysticism or religion.
I think there is a persistent sense in world history that there is a meaning, reason, or purpose behind phenomenology which is veiled to human beings. I would suggest, at least historically, in a world-historical sense, that this was most clearly or concretely explicated through the world’s astrological traditions, and, of course, things like the Tibetan or Egyptian Book of the Dead : this emphasis or focus on transformation as the space between birth and death, in which there is a larger spiritual-cosmological process unfolding.
This process creates the manifestation of certain forms, certain technological beings, at certain places, spaces, and moments in time, which are enacting and engaging certain purposes. These purposes unfold historically through larger material events, such as the French Revolution, or more private spiritual events, such as the placement or removal of a certain road sign in front of a certain location at a certain moment in time, or the revelation of a certain space—a park, at night, at a certain moment—which transforms a being’s perception of experience.
This is a sort of scripted theatrical turn, which I have already spoken of deeply in terms of Menippean farce, Gogol, and so forth. It is also something explored extensively by the existentialists, including Dostoevsky in The Crocodile.
It is this persistent sense of what Jung terms synchronicity : that space and time, as an unfolding or unfoldment, themselves have a meaning, purpose, or way of orienting the being toward an unfolding. And that unfolding is, of course, past, present, and future.
The being, or the form itself, is historically situated in a cosmological sense, and thus is simultaneously becoming available to experience and making experience available through the technological instantiation of the being itself.
This is the backdrop of the discussion we have been having in terms of the operator of persistence , which is to say that being in form, or being in time, is persistence against constraint: the maintenance of the pseudo-closed structure in an entropic universe.
And beneath that, or behind it, is the aeon at play with colored balls—which is to say, the experimentation of the universal, or the cosmological, as an unfolding process of developing technological architectures of being.
This architectural process is a play of consciousness, or a play of the universal cosmological sphere. Whatever name we give to it is effectively irrelevant. It is traceable historically, materially, and phenomenologically through the creation and unfolding of the universe.
Everything from cosmic microwave backgrounds to different galactic, stellar, and geological formations, right down to the cell, belongs to a scientifically, technologically, and historically available history at this moment in time, which is to say 2026. It is effectively transparent, at least materially.
The issue, of course, is understanding the meaning behind being, if there is any. And this is the problem of the existentialists in the mid-twentieth century.
It recalls intimately everything from Babylon to Sumer to Egypt to Greece, and the importance of the astrological or cosmological in the Lakota, Aztec, and Mayan traditions: the tracing of the movement of forms in space and time in an attempt to discern the meaning of the action which occurs in space and time, to unify cosmos and psyche, so to speak.
This is, of course, not transparent to beings, because beings are that which is at play within being itself. They are the actors upon the stage of being, fulfilling at a local level certain purposes which are discernible in the immediate environment and ecosystem itself—let us say, in terms of Earth, within the geosystem of Earth.
But at a larger cosmological level, these purposes are not immediately discernible, because these actions are occurring, as it would be said historically or mystically, within the mind of God, or within the cosmological mind of being itself: the unfolding of this expedition of play down into constraint, into persistence-based architectures.
This stripping away, as we have been discussing, is a sort of caustic or acidic phenomenon of revealing the larger superstructural condition.
And we, being at the level of this play in 2026, within the human technological ecosystem of forms, exist in a sort of space between awakening—which is to say, authentic being as in creation itself—and the manufactured disguise of technological culture, the technological biosystem, and all of these different things which are the masks of being.
I have described this in terms of Channel One and Channel Two architecture : Channel One being genomic, the hardware of the human being, and Channel Two being the softwares of culture, the prosthetics which are scaffolded on top of the genomic.
We can understand prosthetics at the level of the genome and at the level of the forebrain or the opposable thumb itself as well. These are technological eras, and that transmission, I would say, really firmly begins in terms of the movement from Channel One to Channel Two with cave painting, early stone tools, and so forth.
This is an externalization of the cosmological process of genomic technology, or the transformation of nuclear stellar energy down through spheres.
This is information transformation. Information technology is the condition of the universe itself.
The issue is becoming available to being itself.
And this is the radical freedom which Sartre describes in existential thought in the mid-twentieth century. But we must elucidate how to bring about this radical freedom, because it is not something transparent to the human condition at all.
The human itself is something that must be stripped away, and furthermore, the technological, cultural, and social disguises and masks which must be worn, or are being worn, in the process of being human, as opposed to being cosmological.
The Cosmological and the Existential
This is the purpose of the cosmology and ontology I have been elucidating, because it has two parts: it is scientific, and it is existential.
At a certain point, the behavior of the universe is consolidated by way of compression—informational, technological compression—of the supernova, or the star-based, stellar energetic. We are talking about nuclear fusion being compressed structurally down to the level of metabolism, of the cell or the organism.
This technological compression down through scales, which is again persistence against constraint, is the issue of translation, which produces the schizophrenic split of the identity of the being surviving in the world.
The self-and-world conjecture is one manufactured at the level of technology: the human being, hormonal and sexual technology, the bisexual nature of the human being, which is to say male-female architecture, and furthermore, the architecture of the organ or organ-system body, the neural-system body, which is an entropic technology.
It is an entropic architecture attempting to persist against constraint, simply to hold the body together, and at the species level, in terms of the species mind which we have already articulated, to persist across space and time.
Which is to say, to transmit the informational-technological architecture of the being forward, incrementally and exponentially across time, so that the human being as a technological conjecture survives into the future.
This is, again, a genetic transmission of the past. The human being itself contains, to a certain extent, the entire history of humanity intimately within the somatic body itself.
I have gone deeply into this as well. Jung’s Red Book is a great example of how archetypal transmission, symbolic transmission, occurs through intimate somatic memory of experience.
And I wrote a substantial philosophical-poetic epic on this, Measures of Fire : the actual experience of being cosmologically.
This is the place to which we must come. Being cosmologically is actually the evolutionary leap required at this stage of humanity and human history, made possible in large part by technological, scientific, historical, and even mythological revolutions of consciousness in the forebrain epoch itself.
This is the possibility of becoming cosmological, or being cosmological, which is to say recursion at the level of the universal.
We are no longer simply organisms occurring within a ground of which we know effectively nothing, but organisms occurring within the stratum of a cosmological ground of which we have become increasingly conscious.
Thus, the identity of being itself is inextricably altered in coming into relationship with the groundswell of being itself, cosmologically.
This is really the purpose of ontology, and it is the purpose of all human historical explication, exploration, exegesis, and knowledge itself: everything from mysticism and mythology to science, philosophy, and literature, especially existentialist literature.
All of these fields are themselves attempts to accomplish this.
Historically, in the early modern period, we have figures like Spinoza or Leibniz, who undertake the work of radical consolidation of entire historical paradigms and epochs: painting the picture of being itself through the available historical, scientific, and cosmological lenses.
This is itself the entire human species-level process and project of knowledge.
And this is all very existentially grounded.
My problem at large with science, mathematics, philosophy, literature, and so forth, is that the vast majority of these existing systems, or disciplinary substructures, do not really make themselves available to the existential condition of being human at all.
They are knowledge devices divorced entirely from the essential process of integration, which is what all knowledge fundamentally requires if it is truly knowledge, and not just nonsense or abstraction.
Knowledge requires that we integrate it at the deepest level of our being. Which is to say that it is an existential revelation. This is the mark of true knowledge.
At least, in my opinion, my perception of it.
And this brings me back to the historical split and schism between astronomy and astrology, as well as alchemy and chemistry.
These are very important historical schisms if we understand them at the level of epistemology. Knowledge becomes a power relation, or a way of being in the world, which is increasingly materialistic and effectively phenomenological in the sense that it is divorced from meaning.
Which is to say, divorced from the revelation of being in time and the understanding of being as a characterological condition.
The depth of ontology which Heraclitus offers, which is again the child at play, is a characterological revelation of that which is being: the fundamental which manifests itself in all forms, all places, and all times.
This is deeply Vedantic. Heraclitus and the Vedantic philosophers and sages are intimately related in this sense.
And this is what figures like Spinoza or Leibniz are perennially attempting to restore in Western civilizational and global consciousness: the realization that technological knowledge, if not adequately incorporated into a cosmological background, is schizophrenic.
It is divorced from the meaning of being in time.
And thus, without meaning of being in time, we have the really productive condition of modernity, which is simply an input-and-output, machinic system of consumption and production, which we know as labor or capitalism.
It has no background and no ground within the universal character of being, and is not united by a real vision of that force which is working through all things.
And this, of course, becomes an ethical responsibility.
Quite simply, understanding the nature of being itself as indivisible. It cannot be divided or compartmentalized into acts of violence or acts of sanity or salvation, which is, of course, the typical Western philosophical-religious mode of thought and being in the world.
The Character of Being
What really needs to be tackled here is that we do not necessarily understand the cosmological mind.
This is not a philosophy of history. It is an implementation of history, or creation of history, which we could say is a scripting or directing of historical phenomena.
This all emerges naturally through thermodynamic and entropic universality, and can be traced phenomenologically and scientifically across the history of the cosmos.
You can understand the French Revolution by way of thermodynamics at a cosmological-historical level. We are not going into that now. I have already gone into it multiple times.
But we can understand the phenomenological rules and regulations, which are the laws of physics, as the field of play.
Can we understand the mind behind the field of play?
And this is the ontology of the character of being.
This is knowledge at the level of the thing itself which is creating the visible process, the phenomenological.
Again, Heraclitus’s child at play with colored balls is the theoretical architecture within which I am gathering these things. And I think this is still a scientifically viable axiom to work with dynamically in terms of being in time.
Not even just at the level of the atomic, but at the level of play itself as the structure of creation beneath and behind persistence against constraint.
This reveals itself technologically through beings as survival architecture: survive, reproduce.
And that thermodynamically manifests itself through metabolism, through the sex organs, through the technological architecture of the species itself, and the evolution of the neurology of the human being and spinal organisms.
This is the real question, because when we reveal this ontological background, what it requires and what it makes available is characterological authenticity.
Which is simply to be oneself.
To be oneself, obviously, one must know oneself. And this is the commandment of any real ontological or ontologically philosophical project, which is to say, a project actually in relationship to being.
And this has real consequences.
It has the consequence of making available the lived life of the individual, the organism itself, in relationship to its beingness.
That characterological difference at the level of organisms is obviously in intimate relationship to how, when, and why they are constructed.
We can know when, perhaps. We cannot necessarily know why. We can, to a certain degree, know how, in terms of the technological architecture and how it manifests in time.
But to discover the character of the being is, of course, the quest and the question of life itself, existentially.
And this is possible, I think, in large part through the advancement and enlargement of the brain, the forebrain advancement and the epoch therein, to know being at a level beyond pure survival and pure reproduction.
This is the crisis of human history, which has been unfolding for tens and hundreds of thousands of years at this point.
This terrain has now been made available, and humanity itself—and I would say really all of written human history—is simply the struggle between this survival architecture, which is to say the hindbrain, and the emergence of this epoch of the forebrain and the philosophical, literary, existential, and artistic developments it makes possible.
Which is making available the being to itself.
And I would simply describe this as authenticity.
In order to become authentic, one must know oneself to such a degree that one can express authentically in space and time.
This is, of course, the existential literary project, bar none.
It is essentially that this beingness can be expressed, and is expressed, in space and time through not only knowledge of oneself, but sufficient craft: the vessel which can hold the being.
This is an integration, if you think about it in terms of language, of the somatic body, such that one can express oneself through the technological architecture of the being.
This is really the primary symbolic model and mode of language itself: the speaking being, the thinking being, that the thinking can be spoken.
Heidegger speaks about this, as does Terence McKenna. Both, I think, very well on this topic.
The Gogolian Farce of Civilization
To integrate this is to come into relationship with the Gogolian.
I have discussed Gogol in terms of modernity. I have discussed Gogol in terms of the farce of culture, the farce of civilization, and the dance or theatrical play which is conducted: the survival architecture of the organism in relationship to life itself, or to worlds.
And the schism which is created between the characterological foundation of each being intimately and the possibility of expressing said character without putting survivability at risk.
This is the condition of humanity at large, as we have already discussed.
The coercion of economic systems such as capitalism, or the larger political sphere, which has been in existence for as long as we have known human history, constitutes negotiations of energetic circumstances.
They themselves have really very little to do with ontology and exist at the level of survivability.
And this is the vast majority of, if not really all of, human culture and human civilization.
They are negotiations of energetic circumstances.
Which is to say, again, simply, survivability.
And this is the crux of the revolutions of modernity: the American Revolution, the French Revolution, the Haitian Revolution, the Russian Revolution.
And within the Russian Revolution slips Mayakovsky, the poet of the cosmos, or the poet of the integration of the human species, and the possibility of implementing radical play within everyday life.
Mayakovsky intuits—and this is the nature, I think, of all great poets—that there is a greater creational force behind the smokescreen of human history and civilization.
What we ordinarily see is the swirling of matrices of power, dynamics of discipline, which change and influence how the aqueducts of information and energy flow through geographical territory.
Which is to say, where economic and material power are consolidated, and why.
What is the justification or rationale for that?
Whether it is the divine right of kings, the myth of empire, racial myths, religious myths, and so forth, these all serve purposes historically to consolidate and distribute power in certain ways and functions, to prop up or propagate a certain vision of life.
And these visions of life, as ontologically empty, are just transformations and transmissions of energy.
They are a physical process.
This historical paradigm of pure materialism is in intimate relationship to the failure to instigate adequate ontological inquiry at the level of civilization, and at the level of the individual ultimately as well.
To free the being in a Promethean sense, or perhaps even a Shelleyan sense, is to reveal the energetic conditions at play behind the technological, civilizational, theatrical architecture of these disciplinary transformations of energy to serve purposes of survivability.
Again, behind the persistence architecture—persistence against constraint as the law of being, so to speak—behind that law is itself a creational force in a state of radical play.
Which is to say, experimentation with the foundations of architectures themselves.
This is a level of engagement with the self, really, which I am describing. And this is a very Vedantic concept.
We are taking science and scaling it to the Vedanta.
This play of forms, this play of technologies, is itself only a vessel and vehicle unto the ultimate revelation of that which is being.
Being manifest in time is increasingly, and exponentially, the possibility of revealing being itself.
We see this simply in terms of the development of the technology of the human being. Historically, that has been true. It is not to say that it always will be or always has to be.
But we see the scaffolding, evolutionarily in a Darwinian sense, of the human being in space and time to the level of forebrain recursive architecture, sophisticated neurological structures, which make available profound differences, diversities, and ultimately revelations of experience.
Which is to say, existential being itself.
The cosmos is perceiving itself through the eyes of the being.
It is very Jobian. Perhaps the eyes of the angels, so to speak, as well, in a monotheistic sense.
The Radical Integration of the Cosmological Subject
What we are moving toward is this radical integration of the subject into the cosmological mode, which is, in so many ways, the death of the delusion or the vision of being human into the vision of radical play.
And the total openness, which is really almost a suiciding of the subject.
This requires, I would say, a profound characterological impulse to unfold the nature of being, to unfold the nature and mystery of the self.
This is, of course, the only ground which humans fear to tread.
They will explore stellar phenomena, attempt to go to other planets or objects in the solar system, and dive to the depths of the oceans.
But this, phenomenologically, is only a representational method.
The unification of the cosmos and the psyche within the existential condition of being human is really the only journey to be undertaken.
Because it is entirely beyond space and time.
There is no reach in space and time that could be explicated to prevent or avoid this fundamental confrontation, which is ultimately a consolidation of all history, all time, all being, into the architecture and technology of the being itself.
This is the real existential confrontation, which I would say is fundamentally Jobian.
Therein, of course, the only real recourse is to go within.
And so we have Artaud, we have Rimbaud, we have Dostoevsky in Notes from Underground.
These are the individual—and I would say specifically, again, because of world-civilizational conditions, European-modern—manifestations of this new ground opening up in human history.
Which is to say, really, the death of religious context, the death of cultural context, the unwiring of the individual from these predictable ritual containers—ethnic, geographical, cultural groupthink—into the free fall of the existential individual confronting itself.
Notes from Underground and A Season in Hell are the same document.
They are the existential individual’s confrontation with the self being put to language, being spoken aloud.
This is the historical technology, bar none, which I say is really the highest level of innovation on the frontier of human history at this moment in time, 2026.
Because it is the revelation of the ground which must be traversed by each individual, which then makes available the condition of existential-cosmological beingness.
It is breaking through the ground of this historical, sedimentary calcification of cultural and social identity, the vision of the human, into the cosmological ground of being itself.
Which then makes available a way of being in time.
This is the nature of identity: that with sufficient recursion into the cosmological ground itself, the true self, the universal, this then makes available a way of being in time from that base, that baseline of identification with the cosmological ground.
This is a transformation of the human being technology.
By way of reflection, interrogation, inquiry into the literal somatic architecture of the being, the architectonics of the being themselves are revealed.
This is immanent. This is somatic.
And it does not require knowledge of anything, but rather the experience of being.
But I bring to you here both that experience of being and the sufficient scientific, technological, and cosmological knowledge to understand why this is so important, and why it ultimately must happen.
It is the stripping away of the world in an Inannaic sense, in terms of the myth of Sumer, to come into contact with the transformative force of being itself.
And thus to emerge, or reemerge, with that existential realization at the sufficient level of depth to be and become oneself, not only in terms of the individual architecture, with the necessary level of freedom, but the cosmological ground of being itself, which resides behind that architectonically.
So now we can understand persistence against constraint as the rule or law of being, but that is simply the phenomenological ground.
The jumping-off point for the richness which is beyond that.
Which is to say, the emergence into the cosmological subject, or the cosmological identity: the radical play of being in space and time, across space and time, really in a boundless sense.
This play temporarily takes on bounded organismic technological systems and substructures, which scale themselves through reproduction, transformation of stellar energy across scales, and so forth.
And this is the necessary revelation.
A large part of the issue, I would say, existentially, in terms of being human on the ground of this technological unfolding—everything from Gothic architecture to the human being walking a dog in a tree-lined park—is the difficulty of actually understanding why.
I can elucidate this process to you, but there is not necessarily a realization as to why.
And this is, of course, the backdrop against which the entire religious history of humanity unfolds: the necessity of discerning the why.
The Reunion of Science and Meaning
I suggest something of a return to the unification of scientific realization, which is to say observation and experimentation, and the attempt to discern meaning from tracking cosmological, stellar, and existential processes.
I would say this is really ontology.
And it makes me think of Goethe and the Urpflanze : tracking phenomenologically movement in space and time, and then attempting to discern within a theory of history, in a Hegelian or Benjaminian sense, or a theory of forms, in a Goethean Urpflanze sense, the underlying character of that movement.
This is necessarily, again, the historical schism which occurs between astrology and astronomy as modernity slowly creeps into historical space.
What is lost there is not simply theoretical, in terms of astrology or astronomy, but structural.
What is lost is the attempt to marry science to interpretation, which is to simply marry science to the humanities.
This is conventionally understood as a separation of rigorous study, conceived of as science—the scientific method of observation and experimentation—from the interpretive dimension of that study.
Really, Newton’s project was an attempt to unify existential thought with modernizing science.
We can understand how profound that is at the level of the individual: Newton himself could not settle for gravity, but had to understand the existential meaning of gravity.
And this is why he continued to remain interested in alchemy, a historical phenomenon with real contemporary implications.
Alchemy is a marriage of chemistry, which is to say, the phenomenological transformation of forms and elements in space and time, with the interpretive dimension of that transformation.
This is something deeply cosmological and stellar.
We could say hormones as well reside within this terrain, or the energetic and electrical transformation of the ecosystem of the body, which is to say, the nervous system.
The marriage of these phenomenological occurrences, which is the rule or law of forms—simply, physics—and the interpretive requirement, which is to say, why is this occurring?
Rather than understanding it as simply a flat materialistic phenomenon, we must ask whether there is some sort of essential unfolding underlying this activity.
What is the superstructural activity occurring across scales, from stars to cells?
Let us say we are trying to reunite Prigogine and Cecilia Payne-Gaposchkin.
We are trying to understand why dissipative structures in a cellular sense occur within one sphere or structural dimension, one level of microscopy, and how that is in relationship to stellar physics at the level of macroscopy, structurally.
That is what my work is.
And once we are able to discern structurally—which is to say, to unite the substructural across scales with the superstructural—then we are interrogating the character of being.
Why does this one structural phenomenon of persistence against constraint manifest across all of these different dimensions in space and time?
What does it tell us technologically about the architectonics of being, creation itself, and time?
This is discernible.
And it is made possible, and enlarged, by the scientific revolutions of human history.
This discernibility is a way into the reunion of this long-lost union at the level of existential inquiry into being itself, across thousands and perhaps tens of thousands of years.
Which is the return of ontology.
The return of the Heraclitean, or the return of the premodern necessity of a unified science.
Not only can we discern and understand phenomenologically what is going on, but we can unite phenomenology across scales and begin to interrogate being itself.
Why this behavior?
And I suggest that is really what we have been on the cusp of ever since the early twentieth century.
This is a great deal of what Jungian thought represents fundamentally, even through the lens of the archetypal.
To understand superstructurally that being itself is a symbolic language.
When we understand the genome, or we understand stellar energy, that symbolic language is in a perennial state of transformation from the supernova to the iPhone.
These are energetic systems which have an intimate historical relationship.
If we are looking at lithium or the battery, the computer chip, these are all phenomenological constructs of innovation and transformation of energy through emergent intelligences.
Again, the forebrain.
And to be able to trace that is to begin to interrogate why it happens, what architectonically is doing that work, what kind of intelligence is behind it.
The revelation itself of the creator and creation of the sign is primarily, I would say, what information technology at a cosmological level looks like.
This is deeply necessary to understand ourselves and to understand the world in which we live and which we inhabit: how it changes, how it has changed, and how it will continue to change.
Because this is at the level of superstructural behavior.
Universal behavior.
The behavior of the cosmological self.
And we can see ourselves within that as a sort of microcosmic phenomenon.
I think I will conclude there.
I hope you enjoy.