The Occurrence of Being: A Continuation of The Cosmological Problem of Subjectivity -- Lecture 11/7/26

A Continuation of The Cosmological Problem of Subjectivity

So what I’d like to say here, to continue the last piece, is that we are no longer looking at the structural history of the cosmos. We are now looking at interiority to its fullest extent.

That interiority, or the experiencing being, reveals the cosmos itself in a transparent way.

That it is not, rather, Rimbaud speaking, but a certain neurosynaptic, regulational structure of the unbroken cosmos itself interrogating itself.

Disclosure for Rimbaud is no longer simply at the surface of the informational technological experience of being human, at the level of pure sensation or historical epoch. Vis-à-vis his seerdom, or his practiced derangement of the senses, he has opened up the gates to the prism of the body, or the technological architecture; peered down into Dante’s Inferno, or simply speaking, the cosmological history of the formal body. He has entered the space of dissembly.

And by dissembly here, I mean the breaking apart, or the fracturing, of the components which formerly and formally constitute subjective experience at the top level of any given organismic body or persistence architecture. The survive-reproduce programming and the cultural layer of the biographical history of human consciousness proper. Hieroglyphs, canals, ethnographies.

A Season in Hell is a document of this process of derangement, or Rimbaud’s entry into the unbroken field of the cosmological self.

This is to say, beneath the socialized and programmatic biological self, there is the totality of information transformation, which is thermonuclear. The at-large cosmological force of creation, which in a non-local sense is indistinguishable. But locally, it’s the body technological. The solution space of Rimbaud’s flesh, blood, organs, synapses.

And thus, A Season in Hell is a record of Rimbaud’s experiment. His scientific procedure of breaking open, experimentally and experientially, the vessel of the body to perceive more, to hold more experience, to widen the aperture of the lens of subjectivity.

Beyond just the organismic body. His attempt to begin to hold the depth of the container. The ancient geology of the genome and the energetic form which constitutes the linguistic of the body proper. The seed which unfolds the neurology and character of being locally therein.

This is precisely the depth opportunity of existentialist literature.

The dissembly of the self as a scientific process to penetrate that which materialistic science can only describe from the outside. The body-consciousness emergent in the technological transformation of the vessel proper, which can itself be dissected or examined anatomically, or studied phenomenologically in movements and cell processes. But it can only be inhabited existentially and experienced as such.

And therein, literature, or the long-form confessional statement of the perceiving “I” in this process, is the method for articulating it and raising it to the surface for examination, reflection, and critical interrogation.

This “I” is the cosmos experiencing itself technologically through the body. It is not Rimbaud, or a Frenchman, et cetera. At the deepest level of substrate identity, it is the recursion of creation itself.

And the ontological metaphysician undergoes this stripping of the worldly forms of identity, including biology, in and upon the path toward union and reunion with this primordial subjectivity.

Rimbaud approaches this systematically, as do and did the world-historical mystical traditions from Eleusis to Egypt.

Long before this informational technological scaffolding was understood through Western materialistic scientific terminology, it was understood Vedantically, as in the sheaths of the body and consciousness toward Brahman, or the “I am” principle proper.

This stripping away is the practice of the human being revealing the cosmic identity behind millions of years of conditioning.

And it was this conditioning which was fundamentally necessary, in an evolutionary sense, for the human being to emerge proper. To survive and reproduce through genomic passage and the cultivation of neural networks and instinct, to pass through the ages of transformation and time. To acquire forebrain mutation and fold into recursive consciousness.

Rimbaud, in many ways, is the callsign of modern forebrain consciousness after religious and tribal death. Undergoing this descent as a true individual, shedding, too, his cultural cosmology in an act of absolute negation.

This was understood in the Russian superfluous man tradition—Turgenev, Lermontov. Additionally, in a Hegelian sense, as a necessary step into the new age of man: to totally throw off the clothes of the past in order to step into a new realization of the possibilities therein of man and of creation.

This was understood in relation to, we could say, Schelling and some of the natural scientists at the time.

But these clothes cannot be thrown off without descending totally into them. Down through the prehistoric and single-celled substrates.

And even then, the body remains upon return.

This is the critical innovation of modern Western science, from Darwin to Prigogine.

The experience of this inward travel and transformation is, in, at, and to degrees, the very existential literature we are speaking of.

This is rather not “art,” but a process undergone within the alembic—the creator or the human being themselves—then transcribed accordingly in the ledger which we then know as the novel, the play, the poem, et cetera.

Understand Goncharov or Dostoevsky or Lispector this way, and we begin to understand the true importance of existentialist literature as a process of excavating the history of consciousness as a visceral, experimental, and experiential meditation on and within the body, through self-reflection, perception, and the inquiry, as in peering into the vessel and eyes which are perceiving existence.

As much in the way you could conceive of Oblomov as a principle of the conservation of energy.

This process is mirrored from Kashmir Shaivism to the Vedic, to the aforementioned Egyptian and Greek traditions.

Underworld narration, across world-historical time, precisely sums this work. The descent into the realms of transformation, birth, and death.

And the stultification of the modern Western world is due almost entirely to the loss of this most inward scientific process of transformative understanding of the self embodied as cosmological awakening.

The Death of the Sacred is the materialist science of the modern West utterly losing the entire reason for this project to begin with: to clarify the existentialist project.

This was not lost on Newton, the alchemist, or Goethe, the morphologist. Or Kepler, for that matter.

By nature, this terrain is inexhaustible, because it only deepens in and with the passage of time and the ripening and unfoldment of coordinates of access, or beings and consciousnesses in space and time with different configurations of genomic and neurological register in relation to being proper, which can then attune, deepen, and hone those traits toward inquiry.

This is including the linguistic craft, and the attention to being itself existentially, experimentally, and experientially in the presence and present therein.

It is the place of fruitful life and being proper.

The occurrence of being.

This is the center of this inquiry.