The Theater of Persistence: Human Confusion and the Play Behind the Mask (Lecture 10/5/26)

I think this lecture will be about human confusion. I’ll work from what may be one of my most important documents: the detailed translation of the ontological operator, the persistence-against-constraint operator, into magnitude, in terms of measurable performance. I did some of that with baseball, which was actually really fun. I’ll also draw on one of my books, which I called The Human Derivations. It builds a downstream characterological analysis of how the persistence operator works in being in time, specifically in relation to the human being and humanity.

As I’ve told you, I started out very interested in political economy, cultural theory, and critical theory. I wanted to understand the political, social, economic, and civilizational developments of history. I started at a very local level, through my readings and writings on Céline, Artaud, Rimbaud, and Dostoevsky, the European literary existentialists, so to speak.

The problem for me has always been this. We are returning science to its rightful place, whether we’re talking about astrophysics, cosmology, biology, cellular biology, chemistry, the building blocks of life, or stellar physics. This information has to be returned to the most pressing existential question: being itself in time, the embodied experience of being. In my context, which may not be our shared context if you’re listening to or reading this, that means being itself in a human, species-level way or form.

The confusion is what we see manifest in and as human history. That history is entirely confused and deluded: ideologically generated, dictated, manipulated, and coerced. It is the creation of a symbolic order, linguistic, cultural, and imagistic, a representation of things. I talked about this in my work on image theory, and I’ve done substantial work on photography, early cave painting, the history of art, and so on, because all of it unfolds into the architecture we’re discussing. That architecture is entirely delusional at the level of representation, and utterly unable to lie at the level of presentation.

So we talked about the lockstep of humanity, and breaking the lockstep, which is critical. I covered this in my “Jailbreaking Being” lectures, from a year or two ago. The problem is the programming. I love the term “neuro-linguistic programming,” because it totally bypasses the fundamental situation, which is biochemical, genomic, and cosmodynamic. What I mean is that the being is programmed by being itself long before any of these downstream effects. Those effects are just predictable outcomes proceeding from fundamental persistence against constraint, behind whose mask is the Aeon, a child at play with colored balls.

So we are trying to get behind the mask of persistence. Our inability to do so is what we witness when we look at humanity, at the world, at nature. Nature is trying to solve an insoluble problem, the problem through which all reproduction flows and all animal, chemical, and floral behavior flows: the problem of solving for disappearance. That is absence and negation at the level of the entropic universe, the death, dissolution, or configurational dissolution of form, even in geological structures.

This is primarily why the literary epic I was constructing, and did construct, is based on disappearance and the preservation of memory. The archival impulse is itself the impulse of the universe: to preserve, sustain, and prolong organisms, systems, and functions within a constraint-based universe. In a human sense, we see this in the eternally shifting immortality project, from the fountain of youth to the statue of the dictator. These are all the same thing playing over and over on a loop, whether in the privacy of a working-class home in Russia or on the headlines of a Roman newspaper, so to speak.

This is what I really want to get to: the profound homogeneity of human experience, and the ludicrousness of the cultural and civilizational outcry against perceived diversity. That diversity consists of different ideological, cultural, and civilizational background constructs. They are like wallpaper over the fundamental existential human condition. All of them function as justifications or private dialogues, and they are fundamentally the construct of the characterological self, the local self, within cosmological persistence against constraint.

You could think of persistence as the cosmic microwave background. It’s a good analogical term for how this functions, because it is ever-present. It is primary, primordial. From it emerge forms out of the mist: the historical recombination of genomes, chemicals, biomes, and stellar habitats, which is energy interacting, discoursing, transmuting, and transforming over, through, and in space and time. This ongoing process is, quite simply, what we can call time and space itself.

So, returning to the farce of history, which is very hard for me not to get stuck on because it is so ever-present: again, there is really nothing going on. I think this is the horror behind the pages of Dostoevsky, Rimbaud, or Céline. It is the realization of the glacial concreteness of the human condition. The human being is a persistence-based organism locked in a long-time-scale transformation of the architecture of being. It takes hundreds of thousands and millions of years of transformative experience to acquire a new technological, or prosthetic, attribute.

This is why digital, industrial, technological modernity looks like pressure applied from without. These metallic, digital, or mineral constructs are being born out of the mad dash of scientific revolution and the forebrain. That is a historical-time-scale unlocking of the possibility of changing world-system architectures, whether a fusion machine or civilizations, in order to alter the human being’s engagement with and relationship to its own experience.

So when you interface with artificial intelligence, or with the city of Moscow, or with another human being, this is technological recursion: an interlocking of devices that have been brought forth out of nature. I’ve distinguished this as channel one and channel two. Channel one is genomic, what we might call organic, or pseudo-organic. Channel two is cultural and civilizational: the devices and prosthetics born of the genomic architectural revolution that was fundamentally instantiated by the forebrain.

In this paradigm of gridlock, we have repetition. Some of you may know this concept from Nietzsche’s eternal recurrence of the same. I want to ground eternal recurrence in cosmology just as much as in revolutionary or evolutionary technology at the level of the human being. Perception, embodied experience, is the technological digestion or ingestion of process, the input of world, in relation to beings: hard-coded architectural systems, grids, interfaces of energy, the nervous system, organ systems, metabolism, circulation, and so on.

That experience is transformed architecturally only through recombination over long time scales. So it’s not just generational. It is supra-generational, in the sense of paradigm-shifting species evolution. Darwin’s contribution is still under-recognized in its full importance, because it is an ontological revolution of the first order once it is incorporated into this larger superstructural understanding: how persistence works, why it does what it does, and the nature of the play and creation behind it.

So this insoluble problem creates the local farce of tens of thousands of years of human history. And here is the deception, a phenomenological deception in how we perceive historical political revolutions and historical digital-industrial technologies. It is why humanity is so convinced that something is happening at this moment in human history. Surely, with the advent of the iPhone or agent-grade artificial intelligence, something has occurred: a transformative instance at the level of the human-being technology.

But the human-being technology does not observe itself as such, recursively. It does not have what Kierkegaard calls the dialectical redoubling, the capacity for reflection on its own internal reasoning. It simply perceives out from the aperture of its technological architecture.

So when we move through historical paradigms, what we witness is the development of prosthetics. They replicate the primary existential conditions of human beings themselves as technological apertures, at various degrees of scale. Modernity is the primal problem of this hardware: the hard-coded architecture of the human species and its civilization, outcropped from millions, and thus billions, of years of evolution, from the cosmological level down into genomic structures and energetic transformation.

As soon as this paradigm was instantiated, through a mode of difference equivalent to the forebrain or the opposable thumb, all that has occurred since is an exploration of the capacities and bounds within that architectural system. We know some of the furthest reaches that have been touched within that structure of capacity. This is where regulational and configurational persistence come in, as I’ve described in depth in my works. At the level of regulational persistence, neurologically, we have figures such as Da Vinci or Newton.

I would describe these figures primarily as ontologists. They are solving for being itself. They attempt to understand and synthesize world-historical knowledge and existential experience into a coherent vision of being: being as a grid, a sphere, or a plane of potential interrelationship or knowledge.

This is what’s fascinating about digital technological modernity, and it is also what is causing its destruction. With information technology, more of it is effectively meaningless. Higher-quality information technology, meaning both systems capable of processing information and higher-quality information itself, is mission-critical in terms of persistence.

Look at fast food or pop culture, which are historically endemic to Western civilization, specifically America. We can see what is happening to America in 2026 in terms of extreme political and economic polemics. What you are witnessing is the ancient, primordial survival technology of the human being mistaking quantity for quality.

That is the desperation which, at a larger, more cosmological level, is endemic to mankind. It is fundamental to the survival systems of primordial, unconscious nature: to persist and reproduce, carrying whatever limited information existed in the prior generational paradigm into the next, in hopes of an evolutionary, revolutionary technological paradigm shift. I think we have strong historical precedent for that. We see it replicated at the cultural and civilizational level, whether in the architecture of the pyramids, the digital grid, or the jet plane.

This is why I’m so serious about technology. Technology is a seamless conceptual elucidation that applies at all scales of cosmology. The universe is not necessarily teleological, but it applies the force of play, the force of recombination. In applying that force, it is a progressive learning: an architectural transformation in relation to space-time.

This is what’s critical. When you see the human being, or the primordial animal, wandering the jungle, it is genomically interfacing with other genomic architectures to produce new genomic signatures within the body. This is a literal technological and informational writing, a scripting in real time, which we could call the book of knowledge or the book of life.

I’m weaving a very esoteric concept into a fundamental scientific principle, and this is precisely where we need to be to understand ontology. It calls for the necessary biological-mystical state of being, which I would almost call shamanic: understanding the systems process of the universe, engaging, interfacing, and interlacing with it to such an extent that we become it, know it, and understand ourselves as it.

My work on Olmec cosmology is critical here, in terms of the were-jaguar. It is not a concept. It is a transformational state of being, and access to the primordial energetic architecture of creation itself. That access is phenomenologically manifest in the space between man, or mankind, and the jaguar: the primal life-force energy of the jungle.

That is fascinating. But at the same time, when we look at modernity, which is really the cultural trash of human history, its detritus, produced now with more speed and efficiency than ever before, we are looking at a grid of information. This is the great subversion of survivalism. It has occurred, over a fairly short time scale, which is to say human history, because of the necessities of the human species’ architecture.

It is the subversion of substantial informational technology. Consider maize, corn, grain, or wild buffalo and bison. Consider Lakota cosmology, Aztec cosmology, or ancient Hindu cosmology. What has happened is the subversion of quality by quantity: a McDonald’s at every intersection. At the most local, regulational level, the human species is optimizing for survival and reproduction.

So, looking across the entirety of human history, I would call the point of transformation industrial modernity, with Nietzsche screaming that God is dead and we have killed him. What happened is that the formerly local, agricultural, somatic mode of being was industrialized, quite literally. I don’t mean the factory. I mean factory consciousness. Speaking at the level of ontology, the human being itself has been industrialized into cattle.

So consider the birth of chattel slavery, the birth of the transatlantic slave trade in the early 1500s in Spain. This is the same era as Martin Luther’s 95 Theses. We are looking at a fundamental shift in the human being. It is a technological optimization, so to speak, from which fascism is fundamentally born.

We can trace this further back if you want, into serfdom, and including Egypt. I think the concept of slavery itself is extremely helpful here, in Greece as well: the transformation of human life and the human being into the production of energetic, resource-based outcomes. This has to be examined critically, because it leads to a whole discussion of labor, work, and so on. It is the transformation of the architecture of community, at the level of the tribe and at the level of civilization.

This is the horror of Heidegger’s realization, which I would argue came hundreds, if not thousands, of years too late. Humanity has been turned into a standing-reserve resource, just as the forest has become logs. The human being has become pure labor, emptied of all dream, hope, wish, and experience. This is the evacuation of the existential question in modernity. Its final death knell sounds, I would say, right around Heidegger’s time in Germany, and several decades prior with [unclear in the recording] this industrial transformation.

From there, we have only accelerated into the “I don’t care, do you?” phase. You could call it a form of extreme cultural nihilism: there is no meaning, belief, system, or reality outside the fulfillment of one’s own personal feelings. That is the true death of a paradigm, and that is where we have been left, in what Eliot would call the wasteland of modernity. A cataclysm.

That, I think, is the first-order issue at hand. When we talk about the early communities of human history, flawed as they sometimes, even often, were, there is a sense of true collectivity: mutual participation and engagement.

Then came the death of that, and the institution of individualism. I think we see it first and foremost in the birth of American civilization, or American empire, an experiment in individualism. It has left us with the results I would say we are now experiencing: profound alienation, self-centeredness, and the death of group-level persistence.

The question is what we do about that. I don’t know if there’s a clear answer.

The farce of history continues. And all the while, it is being generated from, by, and within the privacy of subjective personal experience.

And then there are the rare few who see through that. I bring up Gogol almost naturally when I talk about this subject. They are attempting to awaken or enlighten the human species to this condition. You have to wonder whether most people actually suffer from that condition in any visible, substantial, or conscious way. My answer, I think, is no. Perhaps only in moments of awareness of the horror, which is never fully seen and must be suppressed in order to conduct business. And that, I think, is the vast majority of human life and human lives.

That is just not something I can personally tolerate, or agree to.

This is the question: awakening from the rote repetition of this survival architecture, and from the delusion of a multiplicity of sensory, pseudo-sentient experiences. All of those experiences reproduce, primordially, the same phenomenon, because they emerge from the same source, the same technological predicament.

So when we look at technological ages within human prosthetics, whether digital or industrial, we are looking at perceptual architecture. I love studying photography because it is very revealing, both in terms of shutter speed and how the photograph is produced, whether silver gelatin in a darkroom or digital. We are looking at a problem of resolution: the translation, or resolution, of the cosmological into the existential aperture of the being, of the form.

The human being and the camera are effectively the same paradigm. Understanding this cosmologically unlocks an understanding of how technology functions at the level of existential cosmology and ontology. The camera has an evolutionary paradigm, but it remains effectively a camera until a new device is instantiated that manufactures a closer, more accurate, more adequate representation of reality, and that device is adopted.

This is the intellectual reproduction of genius, so to speak, as we see it throughout human history. Adoption does not always happen without a fight, and I think it rarely does. Copernicus is a fantastic example. Even truth is met with violence, with violent skepticism, because it rearranges world. It rearranges the being’s perception of reality at the fundamental ontological level. That is what real innovation is.

The lack, or dearth, of that is common to effectively all of human history. It is also the poverty of technological revolutions themselves as they occur in a natural, organic context over hundreds of thousands and millions of years. The period between these transformations is effectively waiting. It is exploration of what is possible within them, and potential destruction within the expansion of these grids of energetic possibility. That applies to everything from artificial intelligence to the human paradigm of the forebrain itself, and then the waiting for a new faculty, a new paradigm to emerge.

Historically, the fear of human technology is the fear of transformation and of death itself.

This is what we step into when I invoke Heraclitus again, as I like to, with the river of time. To step into the river of time is to step into this transformation. I suppose you hope to catch a whiff of what’s coming next, in the sense of an emergent possibility or capacity that pushes forward.

Think about the modern architecture of Washington, D.C., or New York. Had you been born a couple of million years earlier, it was a primordial hellscape. I’d say maybe not much has changed. But there is an element of novelty, surprise, and fascination within some minor, subcultural groundswells, where there is real interrogation of what it is to be, to think, to choose, and to live.

Those are the meaningful questions, the existential questions, to which the human being is subjected, or made open, or directed by the nature of the consciousness emerging within it. This cultural interrogation and inquiry is perhaps the only critical existential hope at the local level. Because at a larger, more universal time scale, existence is effectively sitting around waiting for transformation. It is trying to strike a chord within the genomic architecture to generate a new paradigm shift out of recombination, change, and transformation, which is the principle at hand.

So this is, for lack of a better word, evolutionary waiting for a train, which happens, analogically, at the level of the genome.

Within the existing paradigm, what is possible is exploration of its bounds, and those bounds are firmly, architecturally divided within siloed beings. That, of course, is our political problem at large, at the species level. It is less a problem of ideological conflict, or even cultural conflict, than of architectural difference. Down at the level of the genome, all life on Earth is effectively the same, almost indistinguishable. The genome is nearly homogeneous across these architectures, at least in an earthly sense.

But at the level of actual neurological architecture, the difference is profound, in so many places. This returns us to the existential aperture. These are effectively devices to be explored and experimented with, in order to understand what is possible within the technological paradigm. And that returns us to Heraclitean play as the ontological primary behind the mask of persistence against constraint.

That is precisely what we see in all times and all of history. It is a play of masks in a theater of consciousness, with real, substantial, and, unfortunately, fundamentally negative outcomes, except for the rare exceptions of profound creative and ontological innovation and exploration. That is because the play is performed poorly. It is a theatrical performance by a bunch of amateurs who have no understanding of the technological instrument they are using. So they use it to gratify their lowest and most basic urges, forms, and desires.

That replicates perhaps the slowest-moving aspect of glacial evolution and revolution, which I would argue is fundamentally toward consciousness, as we can observe evolutionarily at a cosmological scale. That evolutionary drag is what we observe as the everyday: the continual dirge and barrage of nonsense, trash, and cultural detritus, which keeps accumulating and piling up, and from which no nutrition or substance is possible. It is a form of mass starvation at the level of ontology. And of course, this is the current of all politics, all civilizations, and all cultures. That is what you witness at the scale of human experience.

So the retreat, or the advance (it is either-or, and both), happens at the level of ontological realization. That means observing nature and deducing the currents and flows of information, phenomena, and forms, down to the level of superstructure: what acts behind the appearance of all forms at all scales, again, from star to cell.

That realization, as I think we see with Gogol, perhaps on a different scale, is not necessarily liberation from the cosmological. But it reveals the farce behind configuration against persistence. And one acquires a certain freedom that would not otherwise be present: the freedom of realization.

As with all farce, all Menippean farce, there is a very thin line, I think, between comedy and tragedy. Let me renovate those terms. The tragic is persistence against constraint: the endless repetition of failure, the Sisyphean attempt to survive in an entropic universe. The comic is the Aeon, a child at play with colored balls: the ontological identity of being, beneath and behind the characterological method playing out unconsciously.

We already went into this with baseball. The unconscious method at play is bare, rote, brute survival, which dictates much of human and animal consciousness, and plant consciousness too, if you look at survival responses to leaves being cut.

But then there is this play occurring beneath the technological programming, or encoding, of these architectures. I’ll call them neuro-linguistic architectures, because that’s helpful. They are neurological, developed and developing in the case of the human species. And they are linguistic in the sense of languaging: as we discussed with the genome, being is written into being over, through, and in space and time, effectively as space and time. That is the sophisticated understanding of spirit and form, or being and beings.

This architecture can come into communion with what lies behind the theater of persistence: the ontological play of being itself. It can make that play conscious. That is a universal, cosmological act, not simply a political, cultural, or civilizational one. You can understand why, because it grasps the face behind the mask. It sees past the persistence-based, phenomenological character of historical, existential beings and forms, and into the cosmic play of those forms over time.

What lies beneath and behind this desperate play for survival is the play of being itself. We went into this in terms of lila.

I think I’ll call it there. It’s just a meditation I wanted to get out. I’m not entirely sure what it is or means yet, but I think it is a movement in a direction, perhaps.