The Death of Empedocles: Ontological Self Realization in Cosmological History — Lecture (10/31/26)

So I would now like to conduct another lecture, which we can simply title The Death of Empedocles, and his realization therein being intimately tied to Albert Camus’ dictum regarding the only true philosophical question, as in the question of suicide.

What I want to take apart here is that this is very deeply intertwined with the history of mysticism, both Eastern and Western, and it’s part of the reason why we have two quotes from Joseph Campbell which I think will be useful.

“The mystic swims where the madman drowns,” and, these are rough quotes off the top of my head, that life is riding on the back of the energetic force of the leopard.

It’s a Dionysian allusion to riding the wave of cosmic energy, so to speak.

And this is, to me, the point at which I think we see it most clearly in an Eastern theological context in relation to ancient Hinduism, Kashmir Shaivism, the manifestations of this tradition.

And I will never forget reading Siddharameshwar’s Bird’s Way. That was perhaps the most influential text of the entry into this second phase of my life, which primarily became cosmological, starting about six years ago.

That Empedocles dives into the volcano because the substance of existence to him has become transparent.

When he says, “I’ve been a bird, a fish, and a woman,” he’s saying his perception, I’ll almost say his ethnographic perception in a cosmological sense, has lost distinguishability.

And this is understood, both in terms of Eastern and Western historical mysticism, as self-realization, effectively.

This is understood as Brahman, or achieving the universality of existence, or perceiving Vishvarupa beneath samsara, or Maya in everyday life.

And there was a period of time for me where the idiom of the snake and the rope, which is a question fundamentally of perception, a man sees a coiled rope upon the ground and he perceives it to be a snake, which is really a Blakean question, a question of seeing.

Do we see through the narrow chinks in our cavern, or do we perceive the infinite itself?

This is the question that permeates Vedantic inquiry, thinkers like Ramana Maharshi, et cetera.

So there is a clear trajectory of realization which is fundamentally perceptual.

We spoke of stripping the Inannaic garments of the world and descending into the underworld of transformation, the Hadean or Plutonic realm, to grasp, which I would say fundamentally in this new technological age, is the cosmological vision of the universal self, just as it was thousands of years ago.

Grasping the cosmic force of creation or existence, so to speak.

This is the history of ontology.

This is Abhinavagupta. This is Heraclitus. This is Shankara. This is Lao Tzu.

We’re talking about a world cosmological tradition of self-realization.

And the world ritual traditions, such as Eleusis, the Egyptian Book of the Dead, the Tibetan Book of the Dead, these are methodologies instantiated in certain technological, historical, and scientific epochs to bring mankind closer to this cosmological realization by method of stripping away, like paint thinner, the perceptual apparatuses which were blocking this fundamental perception of being.

And what I’m suggesting here, and this is just to advance the previous lectures, this lecture is obviously indistinguishable from the entirety of my oeuvre and my archive, and even the lecture prior, is that we want to understand this ontological process as necessary exposure.

It is the only place which human beings can truly go and truly grow.

That this is the fundamental aspect which was long understood by world-historical ancient civilizations, tribal cultures, et cetera.

It was not the capitalist modernity that we experience today with its distractions, its pleasures, its chemical drivers, the illusions of cinema or pop culture or gambling markets, stock markets, et cetera.

That these themselves are tapestries of confusion which have been thrown over the fundamental problem of human existence and creation as the technological age has surged forward and left behind the application of technology to the fundamental ontological problems, which were long, in a world-historical sense, understood as the absolute question of existence, being itself, and were taken with the utmost seriousness.

This is, again, Nietzsche’s death of God at the turn of the nineteenth century into the twentieth.

And to look at this problem is to understand, again, the technological acceleration which abandoned ontology, which Heidegger is desperately going back towards and attempting to suture decades of time from his place in the 1930s and ‘40s in Germany, looking back towards Hölderlin and a premodern Germanic tradition.

And this is what is implicitly, and when I say implicitly, I say unconsciously, understood in modernity when there is a gesturing back towards a historical Edenic time in any one of the current civilizations undergoing the very real political, geographical, ecological, economic, and cultural catastrophe of modernity.

The severance which is being lived and felt in each waking day and moment, which is the severance from meaning, ontological connection.

And the process which is actively and actually undergone, I’ll gesture to Eliade and shamanism at large as a global tradition, but also to Rimbaud.

This process of stripping away is a caustic process of the death of the being which we perceive to be through the technological programming and apparatus of the body of the human being itself, which is the vessel incarnate of this cosmological energy.

This force that we experience moving through us, which is hundreds of thousands, millions, and even billions of years old, but has undergone such substantial transformation and reconfiguration, transfiguration through genomic evolution, elemental recombination down through scales of space and time.

We have to understand the leagues to which we can gesture outward.

The concentric circles of existence which extend far beyond human history and culture, even just in terms of modernity, gesturing back through entire epochs and ages of the Earth where conditions were fundamentally materially different, then furthermore in the solar system, in the interstellar sense, and of course the universal.

Understanding these timescales is critical for understanding the problem of the human condition, and effectively the technological cage or prison in which man operates unconsciously.

And Gurdjieff would say this is the sleepwalking condition of humanity.

And this is, I think, a predominant theme in The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, the great German Expressionist film, Murnau and Lang being some of the greatest filmmakers during this period of time of cultural and civilizational upheaval in Germany.

This chaos of nation-state transformation which leads to the atrocities of World War II and Nazi Germany.

This period is very much so a stripping away of the cultural mores, the religious mores, the ideological mores which underpinned the everyday of Germany, just as it did in Mayakovsky’s Russia.

This is a regime change.

It’s a change in the structure of the political reality, religiously, in terms of monarchs and the literal structure of the political configuration of the country.

In these periods, we have the bottom drop out of the predictable structures which held this technological artifact in a period of maintenance and suspension, and it throws it into an energetic chaos of uncertainty.

And this energetic chaos is metabolic.

Understand this as the conditions necessary to persist against constraint.

This is to maintain the body temperature, the organ systems, et cetera.

And the philosophical suicide of Camus is intimately connected to Empedocles and what we’ve just spoken about here.

Because the effect of Empedocles’ action, against the documented realization, which of course we only have in fragments due to the nature of the passage of time between the contemporary moment and Empedocles’ age, is the realization of this transcendental subjectivity.

And this has been approached in a variety of different ways by a variety of different realized practitioners, so to speak.

Ramana Maharshi effectively sat on a couch or a bed and befriended a cow and lived his life in a state of effectively repose or relaxation, in a sense.

And he would be visited by aspirants who would ask him questions, and many of these questions themselves became books that were assisted by others.

And then, of course, we have Empedocles’ action, which is to throw himself into a volcano.

What we are talking about here is the real technological revolution, and the realization that awaits all beings in all life at a certain terminal point.

Which is to say the terminal point of bounded subjectivity, which reaches a necessary recursive altitude to reflect upon being and existence itself, and come to, in whatever resolution, whatever degree, the realization of this cosmological self.

And when I say degree of resolution, I’m referring to the technological, historical, and scientific epoch in which that realization is occurring.

The Heraclitean realization, or the Empedoclean realization, is effectively in scope and ontological gravity no less important or relevant or severe than it is in the modern world.

But the modern world provides a degree of high-contrast perspective due to scientific resources, digital technological resources, that historically was not possible.

It was not present.

So this is the question at the bottom of our ontological and cosmological journey.

It is the existential question of being in time and how to be in time.

The realization of cosmological being is, of course, a lot of what we have depicted here in terms of painting, with a very, very broad brush, the entire scope and transitional movement of energetic force through spacetime over vast swaths of history, cosmological history, to the point at which the human being comes into technological being.

And has this recursive Kierkegaardian experience of turning back upon its maker, so to speak, or turning back upon being in the Jobian fashion, dialectical redoubling.

And through the forebrain, again, achieves this self-reflection or self-recognition or self-realization, which of course is transcendental.

And this realization is cataclysmic.

We have to understand that the entirety of the history of the human being or the human organism, the hundreds of thousands, really millions of years, of the development of this technology was itself to assure survival and reproduction.

Which is to say, to persist against constraint, to obey the primordial law of the universe in relation to beings, of and for beings.

And that is at the root of the technological programming of the human organism.

But again, with sufficient scope, with sufficient prosthetic device, which through iterative evolution and transformation acquired the possibility of insight into nature and into being, it is a profound explosion of this internal programming at its rooted mechanism.

Because what it does is it is redefining the scope of the identity of the organism.

And that identity is, in many ways, I won’t say incompatible, but I will say in excess of the operating system of beings themselves.

And this recognition is a sort of peering behind the veil or behind the curtain of the play of being and to grasp the operator or to grasp the creator.

To grasp, again, the essence of the child at play with colored balls, just as much as it is to grasp the operator, which I have previously described: persistence against constraint across scales from star to cell.

And when we have the historical situation of Empedocles, or we have Camus articulate that the fundamental philosophical problem is the question of suicide, and have him articulate the philosophical concept of the absurd amidst playwrights such as Albee or Beckett or Pinter or Ionesco.

In this period of time of World War II, which is in many ways the world realization of the death of these regionalized or localized tribal value systems into a global modernity which revolves primarily around capital.

Which is to say around the circulation, distribution, and production of energy, which is deeply quantum mechanical age, if you consider it from that lens.

That beneath all of the material substrates of exchange, the container ships and the trains which are transporting these goods, throwing leftover T-shirts upon the shores of the African continent, beneath and between all of that is the energetic substrate of currencies.

Flows of information and energy moving at excessive and exceeding speeds across space and time.

Ultimately into a sort of, we call it the AI age, singularity of Bitcoin and digital currency, and effectively alternate reality that exists in the digital sphere of information and data which travels at the speed of light through these ever-sophisticating data stations.

So all of this is to say that the realization that all of humanity always already stands on the doorstep of is the realization of something that is in excess of what the technological apparatus of the being itself will allow.

And this is the crisis.

This is the perennial crisis through which civilization and culture gains its seemingly eternal import.

We have to understand civilization and culture as a coping mechanism and a response to the depth of the call of this inquiry, or the depth of the necessity of the five-alarm fire which exists and permeates beneath the thinly plasticized-over cover of the psyche, the human psyche.

That what lies beneath this mask of the being is this abyss of utterly ununderstood history, time, and cosmos.

And the imperative to unify this is the imperative of the health of the organism in relation to its grand totality.

And yet what awaits at the end of that journey, just as it awaits at the end of each organism’s time, is a profound death and transformation.

And the question is to turn towards that path or whittle life away in the circus or the carnival of distractions.

And of course, we see the predictable path.

And this is only what civilization and culture allow.

But as the material substrate and underpinning of the possibility of these energetic illusions, these energetic screens which civilization creates through the systems and structures which are able to transport and transform information, that gift us our cinema, or our dream fictions which are projected across social media, or the internet, or billboards, or magazines.

That when these are stripped away, what we are returned to is the bare, brute survival and the existential encounter.

And so to conduct this journey, in a lot of ways, is what I’m saying in this kind of advanced sense, is that at the end of that journey there is very much so the Empedoclean imperative of a profound form of philosophical suicide.

Which is very much so, it’s a similar behavior to what occurs in Ramana Maharshi in realization.

Is that there is an abeyance from human life, that the technological subsystem or substation of the human life is no longer functional.

It is no longer powered by the desires, drives, and the programmatic mechanism of the information technology of that architecture, because the larger superstructural architecture has been realized from within itself.

The cage or the prison has been opened or jailbroken, as I’ve previously described in another one of my lectures.

That the technological implement itself has become so advanced, and the prosthetic devices available to it have become so advanced.

This is the forebrain and the internet in coalition.

That the lockstep or the trance state of this survive-and-reproduce architecture has been broken open in a deep-time historical sense to reveal the primordial cosmological being that is hidden beneath the mask of the technological architecture of the human being.

And this is a way to understand species themselves, from ants to birds to jaguars.

That these are iterations of superficial difference in a genomic and thermonuclear energetic sense, that are in a processual path towards realization through evolutionary systems technology, the genome.

Transformation of energy and information over time through reproduction and survival.

And that is, of course, the history of living beings on the Earth itself.

So we have this sort of advanced cosmological form of Empedocles or Ramana Maharshi, who leave the human species entirely.

And this is obviously done in a variety of different ways.

And this is what Nietzsche means, that man is on a tightrope between beast and God.

Is that this is an evolutionary stage of information transformation that has reached an unprecedented pitch, not only in a Channel Two technological sense, which is to say the technology of civilizations and cultures, but in a Channel One technological sense, which is to say the advent of the forebrain.

And of course, civilization and cultural technology are not possible without the forebrain.

This is the fever pitch at which humanity now stands.

And the imperative of realization is a recursive collapse of this dream, this deep, profound dream of cosmological history, which is beings and forms bound to their bodies, and the technological programmatic imperative of survive, reproduce, persist against constraint, which has long held as the rule of the cosmos.

And this is a lot of what is present in Gnostic theology.

And Percy Shelley’s magnum opus, Prometheus Unbound, is that beneath this technological programmatic architecture is the cosmological being.

And this quest for the realization of the cosmological being is the product of ontology, which is made possible by human evolution and revolution.

And this is not an ethical imperative.

It’s not a moral imperative.

It is a cosmological imperative, if it’s an imperative at all.

The question is, what is possible in life and what does life ask of me?

Who am I?

This is the great Vedantic question of inquiry, which of course leads down the roads which are expounded by the mystics and thinkers therein.

And for this question to truly be asked, we, as a species, a civilization, a culture, must turn away from the convenient distractions which we’ve produced and created to avoid the profound existential void or abyss which we have neglected.

This is the world’s midnight, as described by Heidegger.

This is the title that I needed to take for one of the first lecture series in this new station of my work.

And that is something that comes to us, whether it’s the realization of death, the destruction, decay, and corrosion of our civilizations, whether it is the transformative event which turns us back upon ourselves to reckon with our deeds and actions and lives.

It is the Jobian principle at work in existence.

This is not a thesis.

It is the essence of who and what we are and what being is.

And in a global sense, and for the species itself to turn towards this, it seems that, in effect, what is necessary is some sort of calamity, a transformative calamity.

Now I’ll gesture again back to the archetype of Hades or Pluto.

It is the realm of hell or the fires of transformation, which historically some will say Christ did or did not, or theologically they’ll say Christ did or did not go to hell.

But we have to understand the world-historical tradition of katabasis, if you want to place it in a larger historical mystical tradition.

That is fundamental to every world civilization, from the Hero Twins to the Egyptian Duat.

That it is this journey within.

I would refer to hell as the forge.

It is the site of the body, which has been long neglected and cursed by Western philosophy since Descartes, arguably earlier.

That the earthly body or the flesh has been condemned as a site of sin.

This is also the question of Lucifer, the fallen angel, is that the fallen star upon Earth is precisely the condition of man.

And this is why Christianity demonizes, humankind has fallen, but really what is there is the beginning of inquiry as to what is being.

That we ourselves, yes, are projected from being or thrown from being into beings, as a sort of shard of the divine, if you will.

And this is where life begins, this inquiry with integrity into who am I?

What is the source of the root of my being?

Who or what is seeing?

What is the consciousness which peers out from behind the eyes?

Is it this body?

What is the source of my impulses, my desires, et cetera?

What is calling me?

And what is calling me is calling me back through time, in a primordial sense.

And it is the imperative to journey back through time, as I articulated in Measures of Fire and several of my other texts.

Journey back through time.

What is this source of this heat or this energy or this force which moves through me and all beings?

This is very much so the ontological question itself proper, because it’s the question of existence.

To identify the essential within beings, or the formal, and to trace that essence back to its source or its origin.

And this source is ultimately much deeper than any civilization or culture would suppose.

It’s a cosmological source.

So that’s what I’ve got here.

Another one. I hope you enjoyed.

Thank you.