The Thrownness of Being: The Perennial Revelation of Timeless Spirit in Historical Time

00:01

This is going to be a little complex. I want to talk to you about the thrownness of history. The thrown… as in the Heideggerian concept of history and being and time. As in being — which is what we would call spirit, or the universal soul, or the existence of all things, the essence… is thrown into time and thrown into history and as such is within coordinates and has to coordinate itself.

The historical sport of baseball is a fantastic way to work with this because as you can see in this photo, there’s a multiplicity of different phenomena that are occurring physically, culturally… physically and culturally primarily. You can see here the dynamics of the laws of physics in terms of force, in terms of gravity — which again is a cosmological phenomenon which encompasses the entire planet and the individual being’s relationship to the planet and existence in the solar system and the universe at large in terms of relativity.

01:19

You have in the background the advertisements — the cultural and historical signifiers of the way in which existence is consumed and consummated at the individual level. The culture of humanity, which is somewhere between the animal and divine spiritual realization. Again, as Nietzsche says, the tightrope between animal and God, man walks that tightrope as a consciousness evolutionary process of the realization of the innate status and stature — being itself as spirit moving through and in time.

And obviously the phenomenon of baseball, which combines the two, right? This is a cultural historical phenomenon of the advent of a physical, embodied ritual which reveals spirit in the essence of striving and will and the inner creative faculty of being beneath the mask of humanity in space and in time relatively.

02:15

As you can see, the New York Giants uniform; the use of the laws of physics as a way of creative play with the inner stratum and faculty of existence itself, as well as the biological and chemical and hormonal makeup and constitution of the human being as an activation of the force of will through literal physical constitution.

So that force of will is the spirit within being and again the spirit within history. And what is so important here in the Heideggerian sense is that being is thrown into history and thus sort of falls into and through history as a complex combination of the literal entropy of the human form as a thermodynamic principle of the universe; an anthropology of the human form as in a cultural and behavioral history of humanity… which in many ways, in my opinion, culminates in the very aesthetically and philosophically advanced form of baseball as a practice, as a spiritual practice and a ritual of self-realization and the realization of the essence of spirit in space and in time through culture, through human participatory active embodied culture. Through the disinterested, detached aesthetic striving of the will proper toward creative fulfillment as acrobatic revelation of the self in relation to the technological object. We will explore that more in a moment.

03:35

And it also really gets us to the crux of the idea of spirit and time and spirit and history — and how spirit emerges through time and through history as a psychedelic reconceptualization of the foundations of humanity, right? We’re looking to access and understand and come to terms with the foundational essence of existence itself, which we would call being.

But we have a complex relationship to being because it exists in a dialectical tension between the eternal kind of formless nature and state of spirit, which you could call the psyche, and its compound, profound, complex, complexifying state as in the arc of becoming, which you can trace teleologically through space and through time historically as in evolution — as in the state of change and the rate of change that occurs historically through time as phenomenology of the body, of form; of the form of existence as it manifests in space and time as a sensate or sensational architecture of that which we would call historical or material ‘reality’.

This is the appearance of reality — wherein, beneath that appearance, lies the eternal whole; the wholeness of the architecture of being itself, its metaphysical form — to which we seek realization as in return; total adoption of that formless identity of the spirit in space and in time as a unity of the poles; the unity of being and becoming in the eternal unified with and within the ephemeral as in the primordial identity of the whole and wholly energetics of the cosmos proper. We access this, historically, as a civilizational cultural body of humanity — through rite and presence unto revelation.

04:31

Again — through relationship mediated between object form and body form. A channeling, a meditation. A mediation of the cosmic powers in the body. And this itself is revelation. This itself, again, is a constant, consistent, persistent teleology of revelation that occurs through relation. We are the experience; we are in the experience of the universal powers revelating themselves unto us, through us, as us, within us. Without separation. This is an a priori metaphysical wholeness which is existential beneath and before conceptualization. Again, between subject, object, self, other, self, world, cosmos, individual, above, below, psyche, universe.

05:01

There’s many different ways of conceptualizing this. Maybe one of the most profound ones is history and spirit. And so when we look at the game of baseball, we’re looking at a profound way of aesthetically managing that existential tension, which again, is just the existential tension of being human, being in a ephemeral cast of form, a bronze.. in a eternal status or eternal status of self, which is the eternal spiritual or the eternal spirit which moves through all things and is a process of energetic transference and transformation, as in the transformation of literal forms through energetic transfer, right… whether that’s heat or metabolism or recombination of elements or chemicals. This is, in alchemical terms, the base metal which we seek to transmute to return to infinity or the presence of eternal time from our kairos of present action. We are in this moment; are momentous of infinity. It is through revelation of perception that the ephemeral becomes returned to the infinite; the infinite is revealed through the ephemeral.

Which again — this occurs at all scales throughout the universe as the foundational cosmological identity. It is already there; the latent realization of the powers of the universal whole. The latent essential status and apparatus which is dormant only in a revelatory sense, but unfolding in the cloth and garments of the immediate sense — disguised in the hormonal, elemental processes of seemingly separate and separative form and forms.

It’s the process of energetic transformation, which occurs in stars, it occurs in the birth of the universe, it occurs in the different galactic systems, solar systems, and down through scales into the metabolic, entropic, thermodynamic states of matter. Which — really — if you were going to even describe sentience of beings, right, whether that’s through genetics, whether that’s through a nervous system, whether that’s through a multicellular architecture — it’s almost an arbitrary construct because when you drill it down deeply enough at a scientific, biochemical, or elemental level, the building blocks of life themselves either must be entirely sentient or entirely not. The distinction of life in terms of a cellular and chemical analysis of life is an arbitration of the awakening of self and selves in an organismic form by way of and through the elemental building blocks and linguistics of consciousness itself as a perennial natural form. At what point in recombination does separative life begin or end? This is a semantic dilemma that materialistic science seeks to resolve through superficial delineation and determination as in a constructed break in the universal identity and energetic, cosmological powers with ‘living form’ and ‘living life’ as a bio-chemical synthesis as in the organism itself.

There can’t be a break in sentience because when you deconstruct an organism and you see its composite parts and understand those parts… you understand those to be native to the universe at a universal level. They’re, again, elemental building blocks which have been experimentally recombinated through time and space and interaction in time and space progressively. This is the deep time evolution of the architecture of the cosmos — wherein human life is no different or separate from the life of the universe itself energetically but at scale of transfer and transform.

07:18

So you’re looking at an advanced construction, which is to say the human being, which is marching on a teleological arc through the genetic ladder of the continual formulation and reformulation of a species, which is occurring through sexual reproduction or asexual reproduction… if you’re looking at different... organisms and cellular structures. Which is — it’s moving towards the ability to metabolize a greater conception of self through additive complexity in the genome. This is the scaling of life as revelation disguised or masked as ‘survival’, which is really understanding or revelation of the essence of life within life; as such, the sequence which is perpetuating the unfolding of revelation in space-time.

07:33

So I hope that makes sense and that’s clear — because it’s an important distinction. Is that in a Darwinian sense, we cannot separate the evolution of the organism from a Hegelian sense, which is the evolution of spirit in time, through time, through history, right? We need to be able to access the metaphysical architecture, which itself informs the physical architecture and is the guiding light and the movement of the physical architecture through space and time, and actually… in a kind of predictive sense.

Because you can understand that consciousness is necessarily adding, subtracting, adding, subtracting, experimenting with different formulations of being and of consciousness to create and construct a better possibility of and for life itself. For life to emerge as life itself from within the mask of formation and formulation as a necessary architectonic unfolding to perpetuate the evolutionary progression and progress — to thrust forth the materials proper requisite of and for revelation proper. The architecture necessary.

And this is where humanity is evolution of different technologies and prosthetic devices such as the opposable thumb or the forebrain, which allows for rational and logical consciousness and reflection… which is also in my opinion where we get philosophy the advent and birth of philosophy. When you look at it… because that’s what allows you to inquire into the construction and architecture of reality and existence itself.

08:55

So when you look when you look at this teleological march through this grand deep space, deep time architecture of the creative construction of the universe through this perpetual recombination of energy… which is at an organism level, it’s consumption, reproduction, excretion. And then those energetic dynamics are transformed within the organism, they’re transformed within the organism’s environment, ecologically and ecosystemically. And they’re again being transformed at a cosmological level in terms of the transference of heat.

So you’re looking at a profound kind of metastructural energetic ecosystem which humanity is intimately participating in as in existence itself. A nesting theatrical figure or mask or form of costume or guise wherein is the essence — phenomenologically, perhaps, veiled from itself from and with all of these signifiers and drives and impulses which are expressions of the impulses and expulses of evolutionary consciousness proper.

So when you look at a sport like baseball — and again this image is very profound — it expresses that dialectical tension between this kind of aesthetic cosmological reality and the embodied lived experience of being thrown into existence.

Being thrown into being in a sense that the organism is an incarnate experience with various levels of profundity and access to reflection upon this fundamental metaphysical universal archetypal structure of reality itself, which is energetic transformation and the profusion and excretion and digestion and consumption of energy, which is a universal process. And this organism is becoming increasingly progressively enlightened to this fundamental condition, circumstance of existence, as in the essence itself proper, which is spirit.

10:51

So when you think about spirit evolving through time or consciousness evolving through time, what we’re talking about is revelation. I’m talking about revelation through architecture in the same way that you would construct historically maybe a Gothic cathedral over the span of decades. This is a progressive architecture which is culminating in real time in increasingly advanced levels of perception and apperception into that fundamental architecture and structure of reality itself.

This is mirrored in all of our sciences, all of our arts, all of our crafts, so to speak, because these are all different ways of accessing — through an essential mirror of symbol or of abstraction — the fundamental course and recourse of existence itself.

11:18

In art, we’re attempting to mirror psychic status, and in psychic status, we’re attempting to understand how the mind and the neurological architecture of the human being is constructed in an embodied experiential sense. In the same way that science is attempting to mirror, through abstraction or through projection in terms of symbolization — of the grand cosmological architecture of the physics or the quantum mechanics — which inform our existence at various different levels of perception and perceptibility.

So all our arts, our crafts, our cultures, our intellectualizations, these are all different ways of engaging with this fundamental principle of existence and attempting to discover it, recover it, and uncover it in terms of the fundamental ontology of our being itself, the fundamental truth and reality, the essence of our being.

So we’re attempting to excavate that which is our humanity, that which is already deeper than our humanity itself — the revelation of the universal truth, the wholeness of being, the wholeness of existence. So with baseball, the advance and the advancement here is a profound state of direct experience through aesthetic practice. The being itself and the organism is entirely ensconced in the experience and practice of this physical transmutation and transfusion of energy as in a flow. And it is aesthetically dedicated and motivated — which is to say, ‘away’ from the concerns of the human being as a bio-cosmically constructed entity and as such, an identity construct with certain specie-al characteristics and consults into the fabric and nature of reality. To scavenge, forage, hunt, reproduce, et cetera. Baseball is a wild misnomer; something entirely other of humanity and yet uses humanity to breach the veil of the other and become cosmos innately and entirely through participatory movement in aesthetic creation in the unity of the body.

This again is termed in the Tao as the Wu Wei or the athletic flow, total immersion. Beyond conceptualization is what we’re looking at in the architecture we’re looking into. This is the ultimate barrier that even the most sophisticated unified field philosophy or theorem will ultimately bump up against unless it’s actively incorporated and embodied and digested and metabolized — is that the necessity of the experience of being itself is a process that is intimately and ineffably unfolding in real time and as such is always advancing to a higher stratum of perception and self-realization as in incarnate embodiment… is progressive revelation.

And this revelation is inherently intensively expansive. It’s massively expansive to the point of which there is no necessary reach that is necessarily reached, if that makes sense there. The conceptual foundation of the form is obliterated in the name of the truth. This is why Nietzsche says man is temporary. It’s not that, let’s say… I love the image of Willie Mays’ ‘The Catch’, right? It’s a very profound image in the sense that there’s this sense of the physical bounds being stretched and being captured in real time in this incredibly artful aesthetic movement of the achievement of the physical body.

The achievement of this seemingly impossible acrobatic, again — when Nietzsche says the tightrope between animal and God, it’s a very important distinction because the tightrope suggests an acrobatic movement. Right? It’s a tightrope above an abyss or over an abyss and that’s precisely what human evolution is. It’s consciousness that’s being informed at the local subatomic level through particulate relationships, right? Chemical and elemental dynamics which are forming a genetic code, which is actually enlightening consciousness and creating an aperture and a vessel and a veil for experience — which is sight, sense, taste, touch, smell, all these different ways… in terms of the neurological aperture of the being, that experience is digested and ingested and comes into revelation.

15:03

Because in itself, sight and experience on a human level in terms of the creation of the self-world relationship is a revelation that exists and occurs through the sensate organism, through the neurologically sensate organism, through the complex architecture and continuum of feedback which is occurring within that organism. The elemental architecture which is the construction of the organs, the blood vessels, the synapses, the forebrain, the hindbrain. This is a complex evolutionary device, which is a vessel of and for being and consciousness itself, which is an evolution of spirit, a change of spirit in time towards progressive revelation of that which it is.

So when we’re looking at a photograph like this, it’s very powerful because in an imagistic sense, it shows in real time what self-realization is and looks like. It’s a sort of silent embodied achievement of the whole complexity of the being human experience in motion and yet entirely unified in the primordial stillness of its essential activation — which is… in reality, this is what is so sophisticated about Heidegger’s conception of being is that it’s the experience of thrownness itself in real time, again, without abstraction, without representation — into deep and profound embodiment, which necessitates a full presence of being in the experience of the incarnation of being human. To be thrown into being. This is a movement of consciousness into form. A juttering, shuttering, shuddering. A movement into the aperture, or the neurological lens of experience itself. And this is the grounds at which revelation is.. in the most embodied sense of the word — of reality itself; the full powers of existence itself. In the being experience itself.

16:36

And as such… experience of the full powers, the full powers, the elemental evolutionary powers of being itself in real time. Baseball is a language-less act. And this is what’s so important — that amidst the fervor and the din of the cultural apparatus, as you can see in the background with the advertisements — the cultural historical apparatus of the consumption and the noise and the distraction… as T.S. Eliot would say… of modernity. Amidst that, which is a growing din of images, perceptions, information — that combined with the reality of the elemental chemical hormonal experience of being human, right, which is a continual progressive redirection of these different signals that are occurring in the body based on the hormonal and metabolic status of the human being, which is to say sexual reproduction, food, sleep… these different symbols which are themselves the animal architecture, right, the animal maintenance of the biome itself.

You have all of these different competing signals and signs, which themselves are this grand sweep and flow of time and history, which is this march of crumbling architecture and ruin and revelation, which is attempting to achieve this profound self-realization of the universal whole within the experience and aperture of the organism or the body or the form — which is itself the formless essence of being.

The realization of that truth in a profound way of understanding, not just in abstract knowing, but being and living in that, right? Seeding and seating in that identity. That wholeness of knowing, that revelation. There’s this unity of being and becoming, which is the singularity of the revelation of being itself in time and history and form and experience.

18:54

And so with uh baseball in particular, this is again an aesthetic devotional practice, which is all around this repetitive ritual of the harnessing and focus and attention of that experience, that metabolic experience, that cosmic thermal experience, the thermonuclear experience of being human — all of which is an ingestion of the various powers of the sun, which are filtered down in a scalar sense into different forms, which have different energetic attributes, which you could just call nutrients… in terms of the consumption of the universe and the consumption of the body and the energetic production and reproduction.

Which all of that is information, right, which is in real time changing the form itself, that is ingesting that information or digesting that information or expelling that information as a process in that universal churn of energetic form.

Baseball itself is this grounding and stabilizing ritual through which the embodied experience and realization of the being can emerge.

19:52

Through movement, through practice, through a grounded physical architecture, a grounded physical structure with a predicted and predictable guideline of rules, laws, and regulations through which that energetic truth or essence can be expressed in a full body sense, which again to me is the primary differentiation here between music and art and any of these other cultural forms, is we’re looking at a highly advanced form of aesthetic athletic sport, which is a total integration of the human being. Strategy, implementation, movement, stillness. We’re looking at the entrance into a theater or a temple of flow — which is precisely the revelatory importance of the expression of baseball as a modern phenomenon or a way of implicitly conceptualizing being in a way that, again, it is a Greek theater of consciousness in the modern American sense or the modern Western sense.

This is its profound silence in a way that baseball is not related to other human beings.

The relationship with the batter, being mediated through the pitcher, is the ball. There’s no contact. The relationship with the runner... is the bag. The relationship with the fielder is the glove and the ball. We’ve discussed this a little bit already in prior lectures.

So this is kind of just the outline I wanted to present about thrownness and the thrownness of being. Because when you look at baseball as a revolutionary culture, we’re looking at — through the detritus and the ruins, the charnel house of history, so to speak... a lot of which really is just about survival, right? It’s about the maintenance of the aperture of being itself. The perpetuation of it. Not to look up, or to look in upon being and reveal that which is hid… the secret, or the sacral essence of being which is really transcendent of and a priori before the form it is carrying into this field or mode of progressive revelation. Production and reproduction unto awakening of this sort of seed of divine essence within. Which is its own self revelation as something entirely whole; former, prior; even extra-terrestrial in the sense of that it is the true spiritual identity ‘beyond and before the body’, even as it is the whole incarnate truth of the body, strictly speaking.

22:28

In regards to the survival mode of the organism toward and unto itself as a closed field, a private field of vital organs unto death or de-materialization or de-coupling of the vital relations between its complex, compound, synthetic cellular functions… it’s not about the revelation of what is beneath the maintenance of the aperture of the being itself.

So when we say we’re consumed with sexual culture or we’re consumed with even intellectual culture or we’re consumed with... say food culture or consumer culture. These are all just different ways of seeing we are consumed with something that is not us in the essential, elemental, universal sense — the grand truth of the state of nature of who that which we are proper, but is being mediated through the grounds of that which we perceive to be us.

So let’s say for instance I’m consumed with sexual culture, I’m consumed with the sexual instinct or impulse or the hormonal impulse of sexuality as being perceived through the body as me.

Or if I’m consumed with food culture, I’m also consumed by the pleasure impulse of the ingestion of food in the body, which I am again perceiving as me. The same thing with consumer culture. I’m consumed with objects which represent the value or status which then I adorn myself with, which then I am perceiving myself as me. So these are all different constructs that we create as representational devices

23:20

Again, let’s say to be obsessed with mathematics or science or language, I’m perceiving this symbolic, imagistic representation of reality and I’m becoming ensconced in that mythic, idealistic, imagistic dimension of reality and I project myself into that vacuum or that unreality and I perceive myself as myself there. So this is a profound spiritual loss that occurs in the cultural apparatus; the apparatuses that we perceive as the most advanced historically, especially through science and math, even in art, because there’s always this projection into this ideal symbolization… even in music, right? There’s an attachment to the wave of sound, which then we are perceiving. We’re imbuing that with a locus of meaning. And then in that site of meaning itself, that’s where we are perceiving reality or truth or existence. This is a hinge of meaning as a projection into a center that is not direct embodiment and totalizing presence of being as a unified field of nature which is immediate.

24:46

And baseball itself is a sort of structural elemental cavern. It’s a existential cavern or a skeleton which is the platform or the formal possibility for that energy to emerge purely elementally in its total form. This is not being mediated by aggression as you would see in a sport like football, or you would see in the Coliseums of Rome. This is being mediated by aesthetic striving and the full utilization of the mind and body and compound, which again is strategy and technique being performed through object.

It’s an energetic force that’s being channeled through physical laws, which themselves are entirely divorced from a human hormonal goal, which is to say sex or violence or power. And these are really animal goals. And of course, winning a game in baseball is some sort of goal that is attempting to be achieved. But as you can see very clearly in the progressive pace and breath of a game of baseball… the attempt is to center and focus on one of the most profoundly difficult physical acts — to hit a moving baseball, right? This is a form of profound meditation. It’s not only moving towards you, but it’s moving horizontally and vertically on planes, depending on the strategy and speed and intelligence and skill of the pitcher — moving towards you very rapidly, very, very, very small object.

26:08

So this is a practice of the cultivation of attention. It’s a ritual of milliseconds, an understanding of these fragmentary moments, thus a perception of time which is incredibly, incredibly granular, minute, and detailed. This is a honing of the aperture and the perception of the human being, and a participation in the cosmic dance of the unfolding of the spirit of consciousness through time in a way that is profoundly dedicated to the presence of the moment. It is a mastery of perception in relation to the field of time which is a dissolution into the total presence of self as in a ritual of becoming which is unified in flow.

The presence of the aperture of the moment of being in which being is being in itself totally embodied, totally in practice with its most honed vision, with its most honed focus, but is also entirely away from, in many ways if not in all ways, the concerns that are twisting the incarnation of that vestibule of being from this kind of essential realization of this aesthetic totality of the essence of itself — which is inherently creative and detached, really. When you think about the creative powers of the universe itself, they’re detached from the concerns of what we perceive to be humanity.

27:30

It’s an evolutionary process of deep space and deep time — it is not human. It’s not animal. It’s not plant. But it’s all of those things as well, right? In a more drilled down elemental sense, of the different ways that it unfolds in space and in time as a progressive revelation. But when you have the practice of baseball — it’s divorced from the human, but is entirely embodied in the human. The human is the springboard of itself into revelatory essence of this deeper creative architecture of play… it is the experimentation of consciousness, through the elemental design and architecture of reality itself, which is formal.

But the formless is revealed in being in space and in time through the local architecture of baseball — precisely in its divorce from the human concerns which structure the cultural and historical architecture and aperture and churn of humanity itself, which is the repetition of the same, which again is sex, consumption, consumer culture, ingestion, digestion — the sort of ouroboratic wheel and reel, as in film reel — of the consumption, production, digestion, excretion, consumption… which is the wheel of birth and death in a karmic kind Buddhic sense or Tibetan sense.

So when you get baseball, it’s a taking of that energetic truth — which again you could say is the soul and form, or the spirit and form. The energetic truth, which is the essence of existence, which occurs across scales and transforms across space and time as consciousness. And it’s taking that and it’s aesthetically beholding it.

29:21

It’s aesthetically beholding this essence of being and creating a skeleton or a framework or an architecture or a stadium or a field in which that energy can most freely and liberatorily express itself.

29:39

So this is the high revelation in the high art of baseball as a cultural phenomenon, which again is a very sophisticated form of spiritual technology. Very present in this photo, especially in terms of the aesthetic beauty. You see that the hat flying off, and there’s this frozen moment of total immersion, total focus, total presence all around this architecture — but also, again, the idea of the uniform as a costume.

You put on the uniform of baseball, you step into the stadium of baseball, you become something more than human or other than human in the sense that the progressive revelation of the self in space and in time, the possibility of that is radically opened through this biochemical, supra ordinate biochemical architecture, which is opening itself up to you and availing itself to you — which is the aesthetic dimension of baseball.

30:36

So that’s what I got. I’ll catch you all on the next one.