Creative Coherence: From Political Physics to Psychic Politics in Hypermodernity

The following is a broad ranging 50 page text.

This work sketches the physics, metaphysics, and hyperphysics of the future, a future where they are one. It renders some of the most cutting edge ideas in metaphysics and alternative science down into an accessible and intuitive vision of things; yet it still requires some effort to read, to look at fundamental concepts of physicality, motion, and especially light in a new way. Any view of things is an abstraction from the unity of light. In the alternative physics framework that under-girds this essay, light speed is the unit standard from which all motion is measured. One could say light is not really moving, that everything else is moving in relation to it; but really change and non-change, time and space are both abstractions from the proportional equality of light’s fabric of harmonic connections. The perception of expansion is just a reflection of the contracted abstraction of the centripetal motion of low speed systems (what we mystifyingly call gravity).

At the heart of the universe there is its beat, and upon that beating heart rides a breath, but its in-breath and out-breath are simultaneous, reciprocal motions, perfectly balanced within the unity of light. And we would see things in this light if we ignorant beings weren’t caught up in our in-breath of consumption producing the out-breath of waste and entropy. This weighs us down into the in-breath of gravity wells and incoherent matter, giving the impression that everything outside the well is expanding away from us. This isn’t “the universe expanding” as much as it is a reflection of our falling away from the unity of light. The whole game is to make matter more like light and reach escape velocity from the downward spiral of matter and entropy. The game has different sides and this essay explores these sides through the concept of “power”.

Here is an academia site pdf link:

and a link to the drive file

as part of the upcoming book:

Philosophy in the Multiverse:

Layer II:

“At first was only an etheric Space:

Its huge vibrations circled round and round

Housing some unconceived initiative:

Upheld by a supreme original Breath

Expansion and contraction’s mystic act

Created touch and friction in the void,

Into abstract emptiness brought clash and clasp:

Parent of an expanding universe

In a matrix of disintegrating force,

By spending it conserved an endless sum.

On the hearth of Space it kindled a viewless Fire

That, scattering worlds as one might scatter seeds,

Whirled out the luminous order of the stars.

An ocean of electric Energy

Formlessly formed its strange wave-particles

Constructing by their dance this solid scheme,

Its mightiness in the atom shut to rest;

Masses were forged or feigned and visible shapes;

Light flung the photon’s swift revealing spark

And showed, in the minuteness of its flash

Imaged, this cosmos of apparent things.

Thus has been made this real impossible world,

An obvious miracle or convincing show.

Or so it seems to man’s audacious mind

Who seats his thought as the arbiter of truth,

His personal vision as impersonal fact,

As witnesses of an objective world

His erring sense and his instruments’ artifice.

…But now we strain to reach an unknown goal:

There is no end of seeking and of birth,

There is no end of dying and return;

The life that wins its aims asks greater aims,

The life that fails and dies must live again;

Till it has found itself it cannot cease.

All must be done for which life and death were made.

But who shall say that even then is rest?

Or there repose and action are the same

In the deep breast of God’s supreme delight.”

-Sri Aurobindo in “Savitri”(pg. 155, 200, emphases added)

 

 

Creative Coherence:

From Political Physics to Psychic Politics in Hypermodernity

“Is the syntax that requires beginnings, developments and ends as statements of fact, the only syntax that exists? That’s the real question. There are other syntaxes. There is one, for example, which demands that varieties of intensity be taken as facts. In that syntax, nothing begins and nothing ends.” ¹

-Carlos Castaneda

“Power changes its appearance, but not its reality.” ²

-Bertrand de Jouvenal

“Arms that chain us, Eyes that lie, Break on through to the other side” ³

–Jim Morrison

Part One

The Age of Materialism is over. Or did it ever really begin? Was modernity always just a fantasy? A vigorous but naive attempt to ground reality in the visible light of a universal sense? An attempt to break free from the insular dream of medieval consciousness into unlimited possibility?⁴ One which was, perhaps, bound to stumble, striving towards an impossible new beginning, but with every attempt to break with the past, only obfuscating the continuity and context upon which all reason depends? 

Has it now, with the arrival of technocracy, achieved its wish for an authority and ground of truth free from the arbitrary conventions of culture and history, only to find greater constraint in the dogma of a brute factual existence, with no ground at all save the quantification and management of random events, without significant cause or history, with no reasons or meaningful context for anything? Has the attempt to liberate humanity from the power of obvious material constraints and the caprice of individual humans, only paved the way towards our subjection to something immaterial and inhuman?

However you frame it, the lucid dream of modernity is wearing thin, as all lucid dreams do when they go no deeper than solipsistic projection—when they merely turn a strong ego against the depths, receiving, in return, only a subjective liberty lost in shallow reflections, precluding any clear path through time’s prism. 

As the depths are now striking back, and pulling us deeper, humanity may not be waking up anytime soon (whatever that means), but our relative lucidity is now making one thing more apparent: that we are indeed “dreamers” navigating a reality far stranger and more fantastical than we had supposed. Like it or not, we are all “New Agers” now.⁵ Not because we have reached some kind of lofty spiritual transcendence, but because the ground has dropped away; not because humanity has transcended “materialism”, but because “matter” is losing its meaning and interest.

Materialism—that is, the reduction of much of the world’s social value to the production and consumption of material goods and services, as well as the political conflict over the means of their production—has seemingly given way to a power struggle over attention on, access to, and control over the main product of this era of vigorous material production: the digital medium. 

This ever-mutating medium is now uniformly organizing and quantifying most contemporary values according to an ever-present logic of power long obfuscated by derivative concerns over material utility. However much we may deplore the colonizing momentum of this evolving ecology of disembodied and decontextualized information, we cannot help but entrain to its logic or rhythm—that is, not without digging deeper, not without finding and embedding in the rhythms of longer-wave cycles moving through the centuries, and joining the play of that deeper, longer game. 

As long as we continue to think of power in material terms, operating according to the designs and desires of discrete embodied entities struggling for temporary control over fleeting material conditions, we cannot hope to resist the movement of that which seems to have no definite edges, no origin or goal of movement, nor even any particular need of things to do the moving. 

In fact, the word resistance implies too much the game of force and counterforce, rather than power’s process of fluidly organizing and redirecting any field of forces. For though power has effects that distribute throughout the game of forces and material relations, it is not essentially a control of, or over, people or things, or their apparent movement at all, but rather, over their possibilities.⁶ 

Forces clash in the material trenches, at the front of a bottomless war stretching from every heart and soul backwards and forwards in time, into and over the bases and barricades of possibility. Power works through its command centers, weaving together the threads of what could be and is, with what has always been but never fully realized in its endless potential. To the extent that power is concerned with what actually happens, it is most importantly a “meta”physical concern with how what happens can change what can happen, with how every event alters the structure of existence and the endless games played upon it—a structure that is power’s essentially eternal, but eternally changing spiritual domain.

The forces we see acting on or initiating events, or the ones physics postulates as ruling what is possible, do not emerge like magic from some sovereign realm of mysterious eternal laws. Nor are they merely wielded by wholly autonomous beings from the whims of their will. Wills obey power; they emerge from a coherence created by power and seek increased territory for that coherence. 

All force, likewise emerges from power; more properly understood, force is not primary but merely a shear strain between motions always already in progress, and which power has brought together; and it is power which forces will serve no matter what the apparent effects. The shear strains and lines of force define the limits and horizon of power, but power does not grow its coherence through direct force upon an obdurate substance. It builds its empire by exploiting the leveling chaos and equalizing character of conflict, or through the creative coherence of harmonizing forces.

The process of “emergence”⁷, where something seems to rise to the status of a higher order or power, may seem to be determined by the play of forces in which it manifests, but its becoming depends on prior becomings, on some alignment of what is to come with what has been—though not necessarily in the world we know. It is both revolutionary, as its growth depends on novel mixings of forces; as well as conservative, as it needs a base of power from which to grow, even as it feeds on the breakdown of other powers pulled down into the circle of conflict.⁸ 

To maintain its status as a power relative to a given field and not a mere struggling force, it must maintain a confidence in obedience to the structure of a will or vision always bound, more or less, to some prior power. Therefore power is not really a possession of any force or thing, but is rather, that which animates and connects everything, and possesses everyone, more or less. It is the consistency and coherence of wills with no source or terminus, only nodes with more or less density, more or less participation in the pattern that connects one line of things to others—that is, that which includes and recycles what has been previously made possible into endless extrapolation, consolidation, and reformulation.

Power, in any decent account, is mysterious and elusive, with no beginning and no end. But because it has no edges, it is never arbitrary or absolute, never without dependence and connection, never without reason. To human beings, doomed to die in a matter of decades, especially ones who believe their existence is neatly confined to the brief period of their short lives, their quest for power and influence can sometimes seem a bit odd. 

It is true that being doomed to die can drive us to seek a feeling of lasting power by “making our mark” on the world in some way. And while fame is more or less fleeting, the draw of its power makes sense as something resembling a legacy transcending death. Any attention or sign that suggests to us that our actions are having some kind of effect on the world, and especially on people, plays on that primordial impulse of life towards power, which is not only its vital will to expand its being in space, but the egoic need to prolong one’s self through time.

Yet to the modern ego bereft of belief in anything beyond a more or less doomed humanity fated to succumb to the material forces of entropy⁹ and eventual disorder, the vital will of expansion usually contributes more to the power seeker, than does any reasoned will for a legacy. In fact, as most ideologies, whether religious or humanistic, increasingly ring hollow in terms of purpose, the vital expansionary drive comes more to the fore, shorn of any tie to human values, beyond those, often unknowingly, which can be made to serve power, and, perhaps, a power beyond the merely human. 

It can even seem as if much of modern humanity’s apparent progress is little more than the progress and expansion of this strange inhuman power, masked as potentially beneficial things like social justice and technological advancement, which, ironically, have mostly just increased power’s reach by bringing more into its fold.  

This more or less continuous progress of power in the modern world is obvious when one recognizes this growth of its machinery into every corner of the globe, but it becomes obfuscated when one focuses on the relative power of individuals within the system and the uneven and fluctuating levels of equality and access to the power of the system. 

In modern power’s apotheosis in technocracy, no matter what level of power within the machine an individual has, they can seem to have little agency outside the logic and momentum of this monolithic bloc. So when the standards for social justice are judged relative to individual inclusion and equality within this bloc, rather than in the possibility for alternative ways of thinking and living—and not just styles of living (true difference, not skin-deep diversity)—an escalating increase in subjugation can easily persuade us that the opposite is happening.

Yet an inclusion in power does seem to benefit people, and so included, one would think they could shift power’s nature from within. It is true that to imply power is some wholly external, repressive, and inhuman corruption of some essentially human or subjugated liberty, is to go too far. What is at stake is not a threat of contamination by a novel or alien force, nor is it the possibility of freedom from power of any kind. 

Power exists in all things, but it also certainly grows, or rather, becomes more intensely concentrated in a particular space, as it does within and through the complex structures built by societies. These structures allow power to build and circulate, but also adapt and grow, allowing us to access what was previously beyond us. 

Consequently, power is naturally sought, and it grows through the desires and actions of the very beings which it seems to only partly determine. It can extend into and become predominantly something quite monstrous and otherworldly, but its growth into these extremes does not necessitate people explicitly seeking or wielding extreme or capricious power. Power grows through its potential to seduce and inspire us all to expand ourselves and extend the reach of our wills in various ways. 

As humans come in contact, struggle, and build on structures to mediate that struggle, power of some sort, and the potential for mechanisms of power for all sorts, will necessarily grow as the structure of knowledge and society grows. And the question is always the same, becoming even more important as the mechanisms of power grow: what is the character of power playing through any given field? Is it guided and checked by the values it professes, or does it merely use them?

More often than not the nature of power is determined by its own vital impulse—an impulse that thrives on heterogeneous forces and their values fighting and consuming each other, ultimately serving a homogenous common denominator of a will to power; as opposed to, or rather, contrasted by a coherence always being created anew across heterogeneous impulses, characters, and forms. 

The latter is not wholly separate or in opposition to the former. In fact, the homogenous will to power is distinguished precisely by its ultimately contradictory task of creating and maintaining what is ultimately only an illusion: absolute, sovereign powers and distinctions. It feeds on the gradients of difference inherent to a controlled or statistically predictable chaos, reaping and consuming, but dependent on maintaining a separation of its order from this chaos, ascending and growing through the fall of others, always needing to avoid contamination, avoid falling into the other side of this dependent arrangement, needing ever-more external difference to avoid the slide into degradation and sterility.

Ultimately, the differences it exploits become too small, and to grow any further, the titanic will to conquer becomes no different than the divine will to grow the power of all. To oppose this traditionally “demonic” power as some kind of separatable substance of darkness or force of evil or error, rather than moderating it as an extreme, is to fall into the field of forces, a game more easily co-opted by a power regime that cares not which values win, likely finding new territory through the power vacuum opened up by the chaos of conflict.¹⁰

Still, any ethically characterized dualism, even one based on moderating an extreme can be problematic. But this stems mostly from treating some values as good or well-proportioned and others as evil or extreme in some absolute context, when it is precisely how they are used that is important. And that use cannot help but be, like everything else, tied up with contexts of contrasting character, making even the value of a single instance of use necessarily mixed.

So even without the notion of some absolute good opposing some pure evil, too trenchant a moral distinction between modes can be misleading. However, some dichotomy is unavoidable in any evaluation, for decisions inevitably have a degree of polarity in them, even if the yes and no of any act are always tied to a multiplicity of other frames and alternative choices. A creative and contextual evaluation will always tap that multiplicity in some way, rather than be reduced to the dualism of pre-structured decisions. By contrast, moralistic schemes are, ironically, the easiest prey for exploitation and cooptation, due to the narrowness of their contextual imagination and the weakness of their power to enact alternative frames. 

Decisions of any kind made without a vital understanding and power that can co-determine the forces and powers at work in any situation, remain imprisoned within prefigured dualities—the convinced/ unconvinced, good/evil dichotomy of generic representations served up by a covert host of hidden contexts. In contrast, a mode of decision that does not judge so much as assigns an order of value to the layers of context and unique possibilities in a situation, may still be motivated purely by power, but it is more likely to lead to a malleable creativity and improvisation than it would to an exclusive and irreversible conquest.

Of course, in humanity and most human situations, any value or philosophy is inevitably bound up with a power drive that simulates them for its own sake. It still would be a mistake, however, to think that the power and dynamically-shifting polarity of a creative-coherence cannot be provisionally differentiated from the basic power drive towards obedience, especially if the context and trajectory of the evaluation is kept in mind.

It can be easy to confuse the two modes, or be seduced into thinking we have separated one from the other when we have not. But this is most likely to happen if we naively imagine that they can be definitively separated, that the good and bad are essentially separate forces, or something like moralistic or epistemological essences (the good/bad or true/false representation), rather than what they are: mixing but divergent trajectories building different power blocs.

As we approach the frontier of some kind of global coherence, everything hinges on the spiritual character of the integrating power, mediating or controlling all differences in the planetary system. And while a global culture and integrated consciousness can take many forms, there will likely come a point where the planet will be consolidated under one kind of power or another, reflecting one side or the other of the polarity of collective consciousness. 

One mode finds a deeper continuity cutting across diversity, encouraging and coordinating improvisation and divergent experimentation, the other encourages an atomized diversity so that it may consume it to shore up and expand an entrenched occult regime of control into new territory.

The seduction by this vitally dominated form of power is not just a reduction to a destructive or instinctual drive, or an evil confined to the sociopath bereft of human compassion. It is the nature of our will to seek power and to seek it for what we think are good reasons. Consequently, distinguishing between the vital will in service of a creative continuity and evolution, and that in service of merely a larger vital will to power can be difficult, since both can justify themselves with reasons and an intuitive appeal appearing as some kind of progress or a higher purpose. 

For even the most self-absorbed power player does so not solely out of base pleasure-seeking selfishness. Power inherently transcends the cultural-ego and the merely sensual, rooted as it is in an occult libidinal economy. For hidden within even sex or fame’s fleeting pleasures, and propping up any doubts the power-seeker has concerning the stability or extent of their cultural legacy, there is a kind of occult sense in the feeling of power that reassures them that the game is worth playing—that even if they are forgotten, even if their accomplishments are lost, the expansion of self they feel is more real and lasting than the world itself. 

Without such a sense, the attention-seeker would never become the seeker of the power of real social control, overcoming any desire to be known, as such things rarely coincide with stable lasting control. Even power for the sake of self-determination seems mostly incompatible with the kind of power wielded by even the most independently-wealthy modern capitalist, for the most obvious and cliched of reasons: great power implies great responsibility—uneasy lies the head that wears the crown. This is true, even if one uses it to selfish ends; the power the selfish person wields extracts a heavy toll.

It often seems as if humans will endure all kinds of hardship and forgo all kinds of ease and pleasure for a kind of power that seems at first to have no real rewards, or in some cases appears to give no material sign that the particular self of the power wielder is expanding its range. Even if rulers are able to impose their own character on history, and not just be a node in the power nexus, lasting effects are rarely colored by traits unique to one individual, and history is rarely kind to the legacy of those imposing their eccentricity. 

But, one might ask, is the motivation for seeking a part in directing or drastically affecting people and history, beyond temporary pleasures, and the not much more lasting promise of a legacy, really so mysterious? Is it not still just an exaggerated form of mundane seeking for self-importance, and the propping up of a normally fragile sense of mortality? One might say there is nothing to power-seeking beyond human psychological needs, which indeed include not only basic drives and deluded ambitions, but the legitimate desire to excel and prove one’s self only to one’s self.

Indeed, the simple pleasure of accomplishment could be seen as reward and explanation enough for power’s motivation. One need not have any delusions of immortality to feel motivated to achieve, even the rather dubious achievements of control over people. Yet the pleasures of power and accomplishment derive from something deeper which would be better recognized in a culture with some sense of the impersonal physics at work within all forms of power. 

Even within our atomized culture’s fragmented landscape of narrowly personal and material motivations, the deeper nature of power can be sensed, whispering from its depersonalizing founts, undermining any lasting pleasure we take in the ownership of our talent and accomplishments. Pride eventually falls flat, especially for the intelligent ego, as it comes to confront its inevitable mortality, and the limited fate of all its worldly concerns. 

Even to the most death-denying believer, any purpose to life, or potential feeling of accomplishment in its fulfillment, is haunted by the specter of an impersonal ground. If we are only fulfilling some fated, inherited, or predetermined potential, or merely filling a role that could have been filled by anyone with a similar set of skills or talents, what is the point? 

No, the game of life and the many kinds of power that are its reward, inspire and seduce our souls, not primarily because we want to perform ourselves well, and not essentially because we don’t want to die, for to be forever ourselves or achieve the believing ego’s dream of salvation is always sensed on some level as a trap. Even if we fear death and change, and on one level want to avoid them, more than that, underneath it all, we want to become more than we are, we want power.

The desires for accomplishment, or to make some kind of mark or difference are really just culturally-coded versions of the pre-personal impulse to enter into the larger development and growth of the universe, however this growth is conceived—even if it is purely an instinctual feel for the occult economy of power and value playing out in all human drama, present even in the life and mind of a dogged materialist. What matters is the feeling of becoming, of the individual’s insertion into an open system of increased capacity and significance that whispers some assurance of their being’s continued existence within another’s.

Part Two

“Time is the mind of Space”¹¹ 

– Samuel Alexander

“The universe seen from within is light; seen from without, by spiritual perception, it is thought.”¹² 

– Rudolf Steiner

 “…the One is not the transcendent that might contain immanence but the immanent contained within a transcendental field. One is always the index of a multiplicity: an event, a singularity, a life.”¹³ – Gilles Deleuze

Whether or not we can make some kind of special mark on the world, the desire to be at least a part of something that is making a difference, appeals to an instinct that persists even without the illusion that the difference has something to do with an essential quality unique to one’s self. The draw of power goes deeper than any appeal to vanity, pulling directly on the fibers of our precariously sustained mortality. It offers our mortality more than just bulwark against death. It teases us with the possibility of an escape route from limitation, from a closed system of increasing entropy and incapacity, into a cosmic river of impersonal vitality. 

But without a consciousness of the trajectory and character of whatever power is drawing us in, that escape route tends to be more of a reduction than an expansion, especially as power sacrifices any creative expansion to the brute, reductive logic of accumulation. As the intensity and ubiquity of a uniform power increases with the progress of our civilization, and time and history become reduced to a mimetic shadow of a hyperreal virtual-media landscape, the human itself risks effacement under its advance, unchecked and unhinged from any value or culture that could variegate it.

As a power bloc consolidates and extends its reach to saturate every corner of a space, it must find new territory beyond it. As power increasingly learns to grow not only through its animal instinct to spatial expansion, but inwardly into increased intensity—as has happened especially over the course of modernity—its impersonal, occult, and even alien nature becomes even more pronounced and obvious. 

While analysis may see in the higher-order features that “emerge” from the actions of men, nothing but impersonal forces and structures driven by the contingencies of material struggle, the trajectory of society has become in recent years so obviously driven by a momentum robust to any attempt at altering its course, that saying it has a kind of life of its own, and even a nature that is starting to seem quite alien to this planet, is no simple science-fiction metaphor.

In fact, the momentum and autonomy of the modern machine has gotten so intense that the academic term “hypermodern” hardly does it justice. But if the “hypermodern” is not taken as another movement or stylistic shift in culture, nor just an excess of speed within the same old substance of modern material mechanisms, but as a recognition of a new way of understanding knowledge and reality, it can be useful. 

The excess and speed implied by the term “hypermodern” could be used to indicate or instigate a shift in the framework of knowledge to one no longer based on fundamental things but on varieties of speed or intensity—on the overlapping gradients of change between all things, gradients that emerge from a kind of metaphysical, or perhaps, hyperphysical relational excess of continuous change prior to all specific objects and mechanisms. 

Changes in the intensity of relevant relations tend to be connected through their rates of change, so intensity is easily translated into the concept of speed, or a ratio of aspects like that of space to time (the basic formula for speed like meters per second, but which can be thought of abstractly as a speed of change, without reference to objects in motion).

The term “hypermodern” also does capture some of the common sense people have that the machine is accelerating to a dangerously extreme level of intensity. However, given the linear time-sense so characteristic of the modern mind, the acceleration cannot help but be commonly thought as barrelling towards some kind of transcendent singularity; or even if stripped of all mythic, utopian or dystopian value, still culminating in the crash against the limits of materiality—or simply, the limits of capitalism. 

Lacking any sense of how patterns connect across discrete lines of material effect and rational influence, our linear time-sense is part of a larger problem concerning modern thought’s inability to plug the two ends of any conceived line back into the overlapping cyclical patterns every development is traversing. The vitally motivated person senses the ideal, or a new line of flight at the horizon; the rationalist, an inescapable limit, or a culminating collapse of concatenated collisions. Yet both the vitalist religion of energy, flowing blindly to its lascivious end, and its mirror, the rationalist faith in originary causes, contacts, and forces, both long to be saved by transcendent abstractions, both contributing to the new broad scientistic church of “information”. 

The potential of everything to be cloned or simulated seems to offer a way out of bare sense-reality’s finite line of brute beginnings and disappointing ends, by offering a fabricated substitution of time’s smooth curvilinear transformations that link each with all, with the square wave of digital abstraction—castrating time’s fertile harmonies into a cold eternal equality.

But coupled to the cold calculus of technocracy is the hot passion of power-drives and new religious enthusiasm, which are combined most notably in the faith people have in the collective machine and its fact-checking fervor. Being increasingly subjected to the rhythms of a digital mode, we have a difficult time finding the music in the math, and the context in the data that could coordinate the chaos of life’s analog mode; so we naturally become more dependent on various technical prosthetics and generically rationalized scripts. 

Consequently, with the rational devitalized, and the vital unhinged, it is becoming rare for one to be capable of fully engaging the vital current without being swept up in its primal flow towards exclusive extremes, or even more rarely, of harmonizing life and mind to reveal the cycles and patterns from which these flowing gradients are themselves abstracted. Lacking a feeling for how every line traces a path through overlapping cycles, we are easily deluded by the limited momentum of discrete developments, and consequently fall for the trap of techno-solutions based on generic abstractions, which seem to offer an extended life, or an eternal form, for our devitalized developments.

Critics are correct to question dogmatic technophobia, or the inflated importance of categories like “artificial intelligence”, or the myths of looming “singularities”, dramatizing the merger of machines and humans. Indeed these lines of thought ignore the entangled origins of the organic and machinic, or don’t account for the already long history of humanity’s dominance by a kind of “abstract machine”, or “machine intelligence”—what we commonly call “systems”—which everywhere ensconce life in limits, and indeed have always had quite the life of their own.¹⁴ 

Nonetheless, there are important “points” of transition in the relations between life and the machines or systems it constructs, and with which it organizes its societies.¹⁵ Clearly we are becoming surrounded by such points in civilization’s emerging possibility-space. 

The concept of a singularity, it should be noted, can easily be misunderstood as a literal point, or an inescapable opening to a dramatic transcendence. But like the concept of transcendence itself, thinking of singularities is very helpful when sufficiently relativized—that is, when conceived not as an absolute or discrete point, nor any position on or break from an absolute line, but rather as a shift in the distribution of lines, or of the one line that is reality, without end or beginning, and with no essential direction (in space or time). 

In other words, the concept of a singularity is a way of vitally distinguishing the structure of connectivity within and between all things, through unique transformations in that or any structure. Singularities determine and mark the transition points of relative divergence and convergence between things, and so give us a way of thinking of things themselves as these very structures of relations to every other thing. 

Thinking of singularities allows us to conceive each thing as more or less continuous with everything else, but by marking transitions within contexts they can help characterize things as irreducibly singular, as unique in their connections and capacities for transformation. This can build an understanding of the complex interplay between the discrete and continuous aspects of reality without making any line or collection of points—any change or things changed— fundamental.

The concept of a singularity has a broad intuitive appeal because, beyond its technical connotations marking a break between levels and orders of an infinite and thoroughly contextualized continuity, it also has popular and even visceral connotations that aid in the understanding of that continuity. 

It reinforces the intuition that the structure of relations is not one of discrete lines between things, but one of continuity and intensity, since all things are formatively and essentially related, but not in equal intensities in any given context. Particularly when we not only conceive of singularities, but feel their intensity, we tend to not only think or sense them as limits, but as vital transitions. 

For instance, everyone has felt a point or limit approaching during the experience of “physical” acceleration. Within the common experience of falling—or any accelerating speed—we sense the danger of collision against the limits of materiality, since all matter, in a sense, is “falling”. In acceleration, even when we seem to be accelerating “upwards”, even when we pick up enough speed to escape from a local gravitational gradient, we are at most only changing the direction of our fall, perhaps delaying the inevitable reckoning with our physical limits, but in any case, (if continuing to accelerate), viscerally aware that another limit will be quickly approaching. 

This sense of material limits that we experience in changes of speed may even reveal the deeper significance of all acceleration, even what is commonly misunderstood as magnetic or gravitational “attraction”. For what we experience in all these phenomena is the same kind of singularity, the transition point between the limited continuity of space, matter, and the distribution of its falling motion, and another continuity that cuts through everything, pulling us beyond all spatial limits and the framework that determines them.¹⁶

There is even something of this same kind of singularity in the experience of hearing escalating pitch, or the crescendos of dramatic music, which excite and annoy us with reminders of how little of the scales of intensity our limited senses can handle. While it is easy for the rationalist to scoff at the enthusiasm of the vitalist, by reducing the appeal of acceleration and intensity to some psychological quirk, we obfuscate an instinctive intuition of the continuous patterns connecting everything, patterns which are invisible within the borders of rationally regimented systems.

When forces are not vitally felt or embodied, envisioned and extrapolated, but only rationally observed in their effects, any hope of entering into them, any chance of making the invisible visible or understandable, is barred through a lack of participation and a poverty of the requisite intensity necessary for novel emergence. 

The frequent reduction of the dynamics of intensity and other vital or “intensive” phenomena to mere properties of spatially extended or “extensive” systems, is reinforced by the division of knowledge into rigidly discrete fields, fragmented niches ruled over by concepts that are little more than ad-hoc generalizations from some observed effect, like explaining gravity by a “gravitational force” or life by some overarching field, force, or mechanism. 

Materialists and vitalists alike misunderstand the nature of forces, fields, and mechanisms, not knowing how to explain anything without imparting arbitrary causal power to some supposedly unique abstraction, or to some fundamental cut in the fabric of continuous creation. We obfuscate the mysteries of power and the endless conditions of any agency when we simply attribute events to an agent with whatever qualities and power is needed for explanation.

Consequently, power is not understood or explained, and therefore not used with or determined by true understanding; it is only sought as solution or scapegoated as the single source of a problem. Power is indeed a problem, indeed a mystery, but one to unfold, determine, and condition within and across the varied contexts of life and knowledge, not eliminate through devitalized theories and bureaucratic politics—which do not eliminate the problem or mystery at all, only obfuscate it through a distribution across a convoluted tangle of arbitrary agents.

Differences and distinctions in power exist, of course, and can be shifted into better arrangements, but they need to be understood as relative to the frame. Essentially everything is power. So in a sense, everything causes everything else, just in unequal ways from within any determinate context. It does help to think in terms of substantive agents when distinguishing the relative intensity of activity in a situation; we just need to be aware of what we are doing when we impart substance or power to something, since everything is always more essentially some relation or pattern of relations. 

The scientific concept of a “field”, for example, is often discussed as a substantive reality. But more so than with most concrete agents, its continuity and complexity of relations is more explicit and less difficult to forget, since this is more or less what a field is understood to be. The concept of a “field” or of some more abstract space, can be helpfully used to highlight the forces or dynamic relations between a set of things, but being more abstract than the things it determines or explains, it is also often conceived as some kind of reified synthesis or deified ruler of those important relations. 

Modern physics certainly acknowledges the problems with a total synthesis, often conceiving of fields statistically, or as composed of complementary context-dependent factors that cannot be totalized into one framework. But since what we call a field is usually not just some discrete or concrete space, but a synthesizing generalization of the possibilities (or future actualities) of some space, it is really a way of modeling and determining time, a way of reducing time’s complexity to just another space.

We are, in effect, simplifying and directing the effects impinging on a given space, effects that are really a selection of the influences coming from the entire rest of the universe, basically all of time. So the process is better understood not by averaging out this complexity, or resting on a couple of incompatible contexts that adequately domesticate time’s novelty, but by cohering the contexts that best intensify the power of the path desired. 

Compatible contexts are more likely found when the relation between space and time, between any space or set of things and its field of relations and trajectories, is understood as a reciprocal relation between power and its conditions, an understanding and a power that grow through a sensitivity to and amplification of precisely what is lost when time’s differences are averaged out of the equation, or reduced to a field of predictable changes.

Whether it is the fields of forces theorized in physics, or the fields of knowledge and meaningful experience, the field concept at its worst can be just a way of conceptually storing, securing, or fusing all the dead-ends of knowledge. It can become just a reified realm to hold all the conjured causes we need to explain what we don’t understand. They are an admittedly handy way of interpreting change by reducing it to a “field” of phenomenon impinging on a primary space, ostensibly from some deeper, transcendent, or “emergent” realm of arbitrarily connected laws, agents, or forces with overlapping causal power.

But since any space is always a selection from an infinitely-related ground into a context, into a sieve which makes some kinds of relations more intense than others, any field or plane of change acting on this space, cannot help but also be a selection or construction which reflects and determines what is considered relevant factors. For this to be anything more than a generalization from assumptions, from the collapsing contexts and spent gradients of previous selections, this construction cannot be merely a reconstruction, rationally deduced from spatialized extensive experience. 

Rather, it must be vitally forged from the productive differences in intensity that emerge when we assume no privileged space, when we extrapolate and experiment with every framing of field and ground, reversing and replaying in different registers the connections we have made, cutting across the hierarchically entrenched fields of experience and knowledge, with an eye always to what is made and lost in every act and conception of action.

Because whether it’s the forces and laws of physics, or the forces and agents assumed by biology and psychology, when conceived narrowly as acting upon the stage set by physics and with a ground in extensive space, even seemingly complicated explanations become merely disguised descriptions of entrenched assumptions, biases baked into observation, and projected onto an abstract plane. 

True explanations and understanding cannot hinge on discrete abstractions—on arbitrary power—for it is precisely the abstractions as conditions and selections, as an exaltation of value or power, which must be explained and justified—must be connected back to their background as a change in the relative intensity of relations—to make them a vital move in the game.

Otherwise the process of abstraction falls short of its power to uniquely determine the singularity of a situation, and any proposed field of higher causes or underlying conditions can become little more than a theoretical convolution, a conflated collection of the most common creaturely conditions of passive observation within some banal island of passive experience. 

It should be no wonder in such cases, that what is found is what is presumed: determinacy. If one is insisting on passive observation, on basically being passively determined from without, one will find only those things or aspects of things so determined, and the true powers determining things will only be covered over, made invisible through a restrictive lens which sees only that which has been bracketed out of play.

Under these conditions, even formative forces are not understood in their proper light, that is, they are not experienced vitally from within as signs of a continuity and power moving through every determination, every selection and striation of struggling forces. In terms of physics, that proper light of continuity is light itself, not just as the phenomenon of objectified energy, but as a power of linking and harmonizing proportions; not just as a medium of information, or the collapse of abstract possibility into determinate actuality or vision, but as the creative connective tissue that unites each selected sign or objective condition with its background context, ramifications, and alternative possibilities. 

In other words, light is power—is the meaning and link between the abstractions of space and time, objects and otherness. Light, power, metaphysical meaning—or by whatever names one designates the transcendent—is not the overarching cause or controlling conditions of things, but what things are, not in the sense of their exclusive essence, but their inclusive one. 

The seemingly transcendent dimensions of things are their crucial aspects of connection to everything else, what is running through them in a never-ending process of being continually specified and conditioned, ramifying through the incompressible infinity of ratios in the varying intensities possible in each thing’s relation to and overlapping coherence with every other.

The visible world as it appears without some of the sustained light of vital intuition is then simply what is set apart, divided even in itself, only illuminated by the reflections and interactions along the gradient of intensity traversed as the more or less isolated material system falls down the entropic slope of sloughed-off stagnation, like a burnt fuel spent in light’s liberation from matter. 

What we conceive of as visible matter, motion, and information may seem to arise from fields of forces, but there is no origin to a line of force, no initial push, no arbitrary agent pushing. Every line is also a circle, made from the sheer-strains and overlapping resonance of other circles. Every push is also a pull, every relation between two things, also a relation of those things to others, to an open system of differences that is fundamental, that constitutes every “thing”. 

The lines of force are a friction and interference between converging and diverging relations of intensity inherent to the structure of every selection—every assumed frame, its background, and its alternatives. And every selection, every possible beginning or point of focus, is a unique singularity, determined by and related to everything, and so always open to changing relations and alternative determinations, because it is always already such an alternative and change in relations.

In any approach to any distinct thing, it is already as a kind of modulation through the medium of some stabilized frame of reference, like our habitual frame of vector motion in space and time, which incarnates differences of intensity as extensive speeds, framed by the speed of light as the ostensive limit of intensity, cutting through and defining all localized motion.

This frame, this primordial nest of material vision, allows us to see the circulating and gradually converging centripetal systems of material reality by way of the diverging rays of a light we do not see—or only see in its effects, in its impingement on matter as it appears to bounce around and through our material medium on its way to the horizons of our spatial frame. 

Yet looking deeper, it seems as if matter and its concomitant spatial frame, are just the vortices of light’s most circuitous journey, since what we see as material systems and their wells of gravitational capture outside our local tangle of nests, are themselves just rushing away to the margins from our point of view, just like light. In the right vital context, one could say then that all speeds are localized fractions of light “speed”, which is not really a speed at all, or any measure, but a unity whose trace within measure connects all things, and standardizes all measure. 

Consequently, all matter is just localized light—light “frozen” or condensed into a frame.¹⁷ Light  is made to appear as matter, as motion at different relative speeds, through the translation of its unity into the naturally asymmetrical distribution of paired complementary aspects, like space and time, which render relations in inverse or reciprocal ways—thus creating an infinite gradient of possible changes moving to bring everything back to the one. 

The unity of light, in order to express varying speeds must be made to appear distributed across some domain of differences, in some singular or selected way, like an infinite plane folded or cavitating in on itself, forming some boundary of relation between an inside and outside, between two reciprocal and complementary, but not essentially incompatible or discretely separated aspects—not only space and time, but also between our space/time frame and others.¹⁸ 

Being two sides created by a fold, they are really the same plane of infinitely continuous relations, but with one side turned around—or turning around, always turning, making possible some repetition and redundancy to orient, stabilize, and frame the infinite horizon of difference created between them.¹⁹ 

Light gets rendered in frames as reciprocal ratios, nested in various ways between levels of whatever localized context is foregrounded and its non-local background. But this nonlocal background is not completely invisible; again, its reciprocal relation with the foreground makes its formative role understandable and even amplifiable, especially as the traces of the background, or temporal aspect, are noticed and modeled as a complex repetition of differences that forms the basis of all sameness, rather than as a field of laws or generalities. 

Mystical and metaphysical systems, while certainly beholden more or less to the language of laws and general archetypes, nonetheless often recognize and model, and in the case of the certain occult practices, even actively amplify the otherwise subtle temporal differences that are covered over by materialist reductions of time to just a uniform change or an additional dimension of space. 

Certain temporal differences are of course modeled in physics as various fields and forces to the extent that they impinge significantly on certain selected parameters. But this locks the structure of time into restrictive and disconnected contexts, effectively blocking disciplines like the social sciences—which are even more affected by temporal differences—from understanding some of their most important factors. 

With time fragmented into various fields and forces at some fundamental physical level, and all the complex systems and the fields of knowledge that study them dependent on this model, they cannot help but be framed as less rigorous. The further a discipline is from the “hard” reality of space and its fields, the less factual weight it is given, for unavoidable reasons in the current arrangement, where space and a neutered time are the base of all legitimate knowledge. 

The sciences with the most potential complexity—those that are most affected by time—are considered “soft”, or outright ridiculous in the case of that infamous occult “science” of time, astrology. Along with the more complex dimension of all fields and sciences, a rigorous development of astrology is difficult. Except where they can be given a reductive treatment, or at least the appearance of one, a deep consideration of the open and complex systems of nature is banished to the sometimes more coherent and accurate, but also vague and amateur realm of metaphysical abstractions and symbolism by our incoherent understandings of time. 

Complexity and time are right there, however, in our most fundamental objects of knowledge, and not necessarily in a confusing way, not when the key ratios and relations are revealed, that is, when they are no longer covered over by the historical sedimentation of various ad hoc theories. In our spatial system, the most seemingly fundamental ratio is what is represented as the ratio of space to time in the motion of an object, but even this simple linear motion is more than just a line of change in space and time. 

Every motion presumes a coupling of angular, rotational motions of time in space—the frequencies, orbits, and oscillations making material systems—to a linear motion of space in time, since all objects in space, even light and space itself appear to move linearly through time. 

But no object just moves purely through a line of time, which is just a normalized reduction of time’s complex interpenetration with space. Even objects appearing to move in a line through space, only appear to do so within a limited frame. Linear motion is always modified by the presence of structures of time in space perceived as cycles—whether it is the cyclical patterns observed in the “higher order” patterns of life and history, or the so-called fields of fundamental physics, like the cyclical or helical rotations that seem to fill or even warp the lines of the euclidean framework of space with the rotations we call “mass”. 

One “sees” light seeming to converge into matter’s spinning rotating systems, or diverge to the horizon in space-defining lines, depending on where one happens to be within the play of the diverging reflections and converging stable symmetries of some spatialized system’s striation of the infinite. 

The varying speeds within any spatial system could be helpfully conceived as representing a spectrum of intensity of displacement from or resistance to light’s unity, “falling” somewhere between an idealized zero point of seemingly stationary isolated matter (with no other objects around to compare or create the appearance of spatial motion), and an idealized point of unity, the line of flight of light speed. 

The absolute resistance to light that is isolated stationary matter, if it could exist, would seem to have all its motion in time, since an isolated object merely has its own internal motion in the spins or rotations that create matter. Or it is conceived as just moving though clock time, a perfect idealized contrary to the idea of light’s speed in relativity, where it appears to move through space but not time, with any internal motion apparently frozen, even if its apparent motion through our reference frame defines our clock time. 

These idealizations, however, make no sense on their own, so it is better to think of these limits of spatial and temporal motion as together defining all motion, rather than being different types. One would do better to think of light as the coherence of coordinated change beyond a fixed separation of space and time, a coherence out of which the solitary gravitating matter seems to be falling, distributing and separating its motion in space from its motion in time. 

That said, from an idealized perspective in sync with the isolated matter, it could be thought to convert its motion entirely to time—since on its own it seems to be not moving linearly, just sitting (though perhaps with internal motion) in space. And from the other side, from the perspective of an idealized ray of light, the matter would be only moving in space, falling away from it so fast it would appear like a timeless memory of light’s material existence, with all internal motion frozen.

The idea of course being that everything, even the seemingly stationary matter, is actually moving at the speed of light, given the right perspective. But what is this speed of light? Certainly not how it might appear from the outside, as a timeless frozen abstraction moving through space.

While it makes sense to say that everything is light in some sense, this doesn’t mean motion or change is a relative illusion. Rather, everything is a selection from the same reciprocity of change, appearing differently by distributing itself in various ways and perspectives across and between time and space, or light and matter, or any of the reciprocal pairs of physics, in any particular framework. 

But what we always see—no matter what the framework—is actually just some movement relative to some reference. And since no matter or motion is really isolated, and even if it was, even with the seemingly stationary matter, motion in time is always just inferred from the regular oscillations and other curves in the lines that compose and frame matter in space. 

In any actual case, matter and motion are always within some framework of relative motions. There is never just some pure resting position, some opposite or negation of light’s apparent motion through space, in some simple monotonous march through time. The distribution in reality between space and time is never quite so simple as a pairing of two things. Like the so-called “uncertainty” relations between position and momentum/energy, the reciprocity of space and time is at heart a relation between the discrete, localized thing or system (position) and the motion of the rest of the universe (the selected momentum and its energetic field of relations). 

This does not imply foundational ambiguity but continuity. What has been framed as quantum uncertainty really implies that an absolutely discrete position or identity like a point would require an infinite combination of interfering lines of change or difference; absolute space requires infinite time. But in reality, all we ever really have are the two sides of a deviation from unity which, together, amount to one, and separate, always imply that which would make them one again, never really reaching the zero point of absolute atomicity and stasis, which would require the infinity of absolute change—both unreal abstractions.

Change, time and its other synonyms, like energy and fields, depend on the context of their reciprocal: stability, space, objects, etc, as the latter depend on the former. But like the light that connects them, the former can never really be seen or measured directly—not on their own terms, only in their impingement on a foreground like matter, and their traces in a space of more or less stable things. To make the other side the foreground would just be to make another space and an abstraction from an infinite field; we can, however, make the background more visible by cohering greater context in the foreground.

We can see time everywhere in its signs and can change the intensity of its effects. 

Its traces in light and energy can be seen and its structure reconstructed, as the seemingly discrete becomes plugged into other contexts, cohering seemingly disconnected change.

In fact, only the illusory isolated bit of stationary matter would have a constant boring motion in time, a mere reflection of the lowest common denominator of normalized time (like the constant of the second in meters per second). As soon as more context is added to an isolated thing, as soon as something attains change, motion, definite speed in its connection to other speeds, it not only gains a structure of motion in space, it gains motion and structure in time.

Any real finite motion, as a kind of displacement from light in a particular space (and not just an abstract negation of light’s spatial motion in an isolated object at rest), is so through its relations in that space, and so implies a similarly complex displacement and pattern in time—a more or less prominent or more or less coherent field of effects impinging on other spaces with different sets of relations in the foreground. 

This would occur most prominently and coherently in a reciprocal space, cohered by or with that body’s reciprocal motion, its motion back to the one of light, mirroring its motion away from the one, but in a space of relations defined more by its coherence and energetic motion than by its “material” motion—than by its proximity to other bodies in a similar fall from the light.

There are always, then, two streams interacting on two sides of reality, what has been variously rendered in theories throughout the ages as something like heaven and earth, spirit and matter, etc., but which too often has been confused as a pure dualism of separate things. One side appears to be mostly falling away or flying apart, and one moving back towards the one, but both are within the same vast open and interconnected system, with both sides interpenetrating each other in complex ways. 

There is no pure clear physics with a vague misty metaphysics, but everywhere the same hyperphysics of organizing intensity out of infinite relations. Whatever one calls it, the reciprocal motion of space in time is not only some kind of equalizing energy-body, desiring unity, coupled to, animating, and pulling on physical bodies, or in some way affecting motion in whatever side is foregrounded as space, but more simply and broadly, is that space’s spirit, its changing connections to the one, to the traces of everything ever cohered into some transcendent horizon.

Though we normally see the complex motion in time physically only through its effect on the medium of spatial motion itself, a bending of the lines of space by time’s equally rich lines, seen only in the vortices of their interpenetration, their cyclical spirals and repetitions, often attributed to a field of forces, or the rhythms and disturbances of light we call energy.

Instead of a pure one of light and its illusory negation in the zero of matter at rest, in normalized reality we have all the relative speeds of apparent motion within and between material systems in space, seemingly mediated by their mutual fields and energy. 

And the properties of matter itself can be better understood in these terms—thinking of combinations of motions in space and apparent motions in time, rather than as combinations of discrete material types that are simply ascribed whatever properties the theory needs them to have—again, contributing to a fragmented field, both in the sense of the field-theories within physics, and of the theories of separate knowledge-fields, like chemistry and physics, whose concepts and connections have become a jumbled mess²⁰.

In contrast, by thinking of the apparent motion between material systems as generally of the sub-light speeds between zero and one, but mediated by a reciprocal field of their compensating energies, there is not just a unified field of physics, grounding everything else as a mere product of its forces. Instead, we have a single field that transcends the boundaries of any one subfield, but is immanent to or within them all, as variations on the same process or event, and even is, in some sense, the very same process or event happening in every field, with only differences in the intensity of the relations emphasized in any singular or determinate field.

Unlike the usual context of concepts in physics, conceiving of concepts as more fundamentally derived from changing relations than some substantial entities makes their extrapolation into other areas of life much less questionable and abusable. Space and time, but especially concepts like “field”, or “energy”, are in desperate need of a more relational, and less bluntly substantial context of understanding. When concepts are understood as fundamentally referring to separate substances or just as names for substantial things, their inevitable extrapolation falls into the vacuity and ambiguity that looms within our culture’s trenchant divide between the literal and metaphorical.

For a better understanding of such a fundamental yet frequently abused concept like energy, then, it is important to see how its broad use derives from its ability to signify a basic kind of activity or presence of a changing relation, distinct from but very much related to the most basic visible activity, the motion of objects. Specifically, if visible motion is a certain amount of spatial change in a certain amount of time, then energy is the inverse, a certain amount of time per a certain amount of space.

Consequently, energy is tied up with our perceptual selections that take a certain amount of space as a reference. So while it naturally accompanies and even haunts all of our spatial conceptions, energy is a natural term for the intensity of certain activity within some thing or space, and just as necessary and natural as motion, which measures the activity outside and in relation to something or space. 

The former may seem like just the potential for the latter, as in “potential energy”, which would indeed make sense as the amount of time it takes to move something a certain amount of space, but the ability of visible motion and energy to be mutually converted should not allow them to be reduced to one another, even if energy can only be inferred from motion. They both always occur together, as inside and outside.

When using a fixed spatial frame, there will naturally be a kind of averaged-out background energy that reflects the averaging-out of time. Any increase in the amount of space per time as in objects in motion against a background space, is the same as a decrease in the amount of time per space. The appearance of an infinite background energy that can arise in certain calculations as space becomes reduced to zero, becomes a finite energy field associated with the change from the zero-speed of a so-called resting object to some finite speed.

Yet, again, when thinking relative to light, any deviation from its unity cannot help but be rendered as a change in the amount of and displacement into some space, this will naturally be a decrease in the amount of space relative to light’s speed, a shift from equal space and time to a slower speed per unit of time. This is the same as saying an increase in time per unit of space. Hence, something moving ½ the speed of light will be traversing one unit of space per every two units of time.

And since energy is the inverse of spatial motion, for any bit of matter in space, with its sub-light speed, and hence greater time traversed than space, once can say, in a sense, that it is a certain amount of time in space traversing a certain of space in time—a relativity that suggests that matter cannot only be converted to energy, it is energy, it is time, it is the inner motion that undergoes outward motion, that which is inwardly moving what moves. 

But of course, there is no separate time and space, each being relative to the frame. Within the unity of light, even if it can be rendered as an equal relation of space to time, there is no inherent division or fixed association of what side is space and what time. So the rendering of unity as the “speed” of light, with a ratio of two different aspects, also merely reflects the view from within a particular framework. 

Any particular space standardizes its measure of change through a fixing of a frame of reference, with the quantity of motion always given to the side distributed into the directions of the frame (in some kind of space), and the other side being a normalized constant (some uniformly changing measure as time). Prior to this spatialization and normalization, any change is merely a change in the intensity of some relations relative to others, so some relations have to be fixed. 

This need not be as extensively fixed or spatialized as our framework²¹, but there must at least be some order of iteration for anything to happen. While that order can be thought as grounded in or beginning at some zero point, the zero concept assumes a substantial bias (and its extension into the either/or logic of digitality—something either is or isn’t’) , and hides the fact that every beginning is an abstraction, a differentiation from some previously undifferentiated infinity of relations. 

The proper reference—the reference which emphasizes that all change is a change in the intensity of relations, not the presence or absence of things—is one, or unity, taken not as an absolute beginning but as a provisionally equality of difference, since everything is potentially related, and relations are about differences. In other words, there is no “zero” intensity of difference. By “no difference”, we really mean the difference or relation overlaps with our background standard, our relative measure of equality, or identity.

Any change is then rendered either as increasing or decreasing in intensity, moving away from a standardized one towards infinity, or in the other direction towards zero (but of course, never reaching either). But framed as motion, all intensities will be fixed between the interval spanning the zero point of a resting spatial frame and the one of the limit of light. But there is intensity at both ends. There is a polarity of power straddled between a limit of maximal resistance to motion, to unity, to the light of expansion, and a surrender to it. 

The limit of independent existence approaches the absolute zero of complete differentiation of correlated motion within a space, which is the same as approaching an infinite energy, an infinite amount of time in a single space. But this would just be approaching light speed if the other side of the ratio was normalized, just as approaching light speed is also like slowing down to zero when seen with the other side normalized. 

In truth, there is no zero, so the dream of absolute freedom and differentiated power becomes, at its limit, merely an endless approach to the infinity within the one, which can only proceed so far trapped in the framework of an entrenched spatial standard and its interval tied to the illusion of absolute negation or a trenchant separation from the one²².

Putting the far ranges of existence and extreme limits aside, however, what it usually comes down to is that intensity and polarity as well as coherence and unity can be increased and distributed in a variety of complex ways as different frameworks interact. 

In a simple framework, any normal moving object will be less than 1/1, say, as before, ½ the speed of light, or one unit of space for every 2 units of time relative to light. And coupled to that relative speed is its inversion in the potential leverage stored in the differences of relative motion that we call energy, with an intensity between one and infinity, but 2 in the case above, the reciprocal of ½ being 2—but again, only from a relative point of view that fixes all measures of intensity to a certain amount and section of space progressing constantly through time. 

Thus, in the idealized case of simple systems, there is an appearance of some amount of motion in space, and a standard motion in time. So one could say that all the apparent or divergent motion is in space, even if the amount of time per amount of space is greater. One could say that an object appears to be distinct from unity and moves slower than light because part of its motion is being viewed relative to other spatial objects, a kind of distribution or dispersion of the spatial side of its space/time unity, yet it retains its implied motion through time, its secret reality as light and its trace in its energy. 

Though one could also say that an object’s motion in time is increased relative to a space by slowing its motion through space, by differentiating from the spatial progression of light and forcing the unit standard amount of time progressing in everything into a more and more differentiated amount of space.

But no being or system is ever really isolated from other frameworks and systems. The approach to an infinity of energy suggested by the appearance of an absolute zero of arrested or completely independent coherent motion, or even just the multiples of light’s intensity hiding in the normal speed ranges of matter, are only so apparently, only so as links to the greater field of arrangements, in complex distributions and contexts of motion and energy.

Fastening one side of a ratio of intensity to space and one to time sets up the simple symmetry break of light’s unity into the light/matter, time/space, inward/outward distinction, which is further distributed and complexified with the presence of different bodies of matter in relative motion²³. 

Three dimensions become necessary for perspective, not only three spatial dimensions, but three dimensions of motion, three linked rates of change (implying three dimensions of both space and time in any fully segmented space)—not only the object and the light as reference, but a third mediating perspective or ratio, what we could call energy or fields (or more specifically the “phase” of such things, which imparts a definite rhythm to otherwise undecidable contexts)²⁴.

Energy, as the inverse of material motion’s displacement from light, accompanies all the variegated distributions of that motion, rendering any concept of motionless or moving matter or space as really a complex field full of motions of different relative speeds and energies of varying force.²⁵ 

In the relative motions between matter, light is always there as energy, field, and medium, mediating and serving as standard for matter’s mutual motion. The standardization and combination of intensities into and within matter’s downward spiral through the wells within wells of gravitating matter gives rise to endless combinations of shared falls and rises, shared gravity and a shared compensating energy that animate the actual universe by correlating apparent motion and change, and even the appearance of faster than light motion between diverging wells (relative galactic motion). 

But the most interesting things in the universe arise when aligned pressure gradients in aggregated matter turn gravity wells into wombs, whose foldings birth novel combinations and varieties of intensity. Straddled between the zero of space and the one of light, the myriad complex systems poised between the two extremes harness and correlate motions into a spectrum of inner intensities between the one and the infinite. 

Within these wombs of higher intensity, life and mind can grow, reconstituting light’s symmetries, adding to the one, other ones, gathering and synchronizing unities, converting the descending spiral of loosely-correlated matter’s motion into the light of time’s circulating energy, correlating systems into higher densities of time within a space, a conversion of entropy into information, into a growth of energy intense and coherent enough in its leveraging of linked rates of change that the motion/energy, space/time divide within an intensely organized material or organic body—or perhaps even technological vehicle—loses its ground in a material system and can even disappear from it.

As systems become correlated non-locally, they appear to “self-organize”—a misleading term, like “emergence”, which ignores the other side of existence of organized intensity. As seemingly new autonomous agents emerge, they become imprinted and possessed by the eternal powers and characters of the cosmos, joining their collective game for higher coherence and intensity, driven to greater power and capacity, to capture more light within their oscillations.

But unless the underlying relations of relative intensity are not only rationally deduced from visible speeds, but vitally circulated, replayed and intensely embodied within one’s own relations, none of this is understood. Any single reference system can only show distorted aspects and symbols of the changes moving through it, fragmented beings that only poorly reflect the being which sees, the being of light which everything is.

That which is both seer and seen cannot be seen separately, only inferred from the reflection we get from our intensity. But as that intensity increases, as the apparent cycles of light become correlated, an inner life and vision comes into view. As one enters more deeply into the folds of existence, especially as an embodied field of creative extrapolation is vitally constructed and intensified, the intensity of this inner life becomes more than what can be contained or reflected in the low-speed frame of our physical embodiment. A brilliant inner light dawns as one breaches the threshold  between the spatial reference system, which can only reflect or fragment the nature of light, and another, which can build through harmonic combinations higher intensities than the standard unit of physical light as it is reflected in space.

What we see as visible and measurable light within our spatial reference system is, in a sense, a trace or reminder of unity, a fragment, only confusedly conceived as a particle (photon), or as some discrete wave with different frequencies and wavelengths, and a constant speed. Any bit of light is really all light, all frequencies—though in different proportions, but always a unity of proportion, or a unifying relation connecting each quantity of space to an equal amount of time—or each discrete bit of anything to everything else. This is because discreteness in space and time can only be approached by approaching an infinity of continuous frequencies, whose combined product is always one²⁶. 

Light is our most essential reference measure, whether as intensive energy, or its inverse, extensive motion. In its motion, light shows us the same amount of space traversed in equal times, no matter what the relative motion or reference system (relativity). As energy, that is, as the internal intensity taken as the amount of time or coherent oscillations in any amount of space (also relative), light shows us equal amounts of time in equal amounts of space (quantum physics). Of course, this aspect of physics is seldom recognized because of the confused idea of the photon and its related arbitrary constants (always a sign of ad hoc abstraction). 

Reframing the unit of light not as a particle of space traversing time, but as the reference unit of relation between space and time, its vital significance as the standard physical reference for intensity becomes clear. Higher intensity, higher energy, is not about higher frequencies, but more of them, or rather more explicitly included, more waves upon waves, more density of time within space, more light. The more internally differentiated something is, the more singularities it overlaps, the more connections, the more differences and gradients it contains, the greater the intensity that light can unify.

There are not, then, simply discrete photons with different frequencies, or really discrete anything in an absolute sense. All matter and particles are more aptly considered as interfering oscillations, more or less incompatible orders of time and intensity represented in space, which in the case of light is always in equal proportions (a higher energy, higher frequency photon is still just the same amount of energy per oscillation, the same amount of time per the amount of space, just concentrated in a smaller space)²⁷. 

A greater significance of light, however, is its status as boundary between inner and outer, the connecting link between sides of physical reality, between extensive and intensive, speed and energy, and from matter’s point of view: the gateway to and medium of higher intensity. We cannot travel faster than “light speed”, but we can, with enough energy, that is, with enough intensity of time or correlated oscillations, create a unity that transcends the limits defined by fragmented material motion and its speed limit. Light weaves through everything its proportional ratios, whose correlated intensities know no limit.

Yet even in the early stages of life’s correlated intensities, depending on its degree of concentration of the lines of force in the fields of possibility, it can ascend enough back up the gradient of intensity to have some sense of the light and power within things. To whatever extent we participate in the molding of the rhythms of life into the fold of a metaphysical power, we can come to see from within just how that power defers but also distributes the unity of light into the myriad proportions and scales of vibration that animate the cosmos. 

Yet while we can experience and replay the inherent unity of light in various degrees of intensity—with all the different opportunities life may bring to feel coherence in some small collapse of diverse differences into singularities—the obsession of all life and higher intelligence is to reach a more dynamic and sustainable state of difference in unity. Many people and cultures have sensed and sometimes understood this as the optimization of life’s desire for immortality, its evolving will to create systems coherent enough within their context to bring the heavens down to Earth, to balance mind and life, to temper the chaos and uncertainty of nature through a ritual ordering of the community and its structures.  

This often goes just as far as an increase of “life force”—procreative, regenerative vitality and a continuity of culture—but can become an increasing mastery over creative power itself, that is, the power to determine which dream becomes reality. This can happen in more or less ethical forms. But when the form of a culture makes broad knowledge of this power difficult, the form of  power directing them is more likely to be occulted and deformed, or otherwise hijacked by narrow or external interests.

Within the context of modern knowledge, all the possible novelty of experience is routinely, if not always completely, captured by the machinery of habitual awareness, so that all that is left out is more or less ephemeral and anomalous, and easily ignored or ridiculed as vague mysticism, or immaterial spiritualism. With a discordant and fragmented understanding of the everyday forces of modern physical life, and a reduction of any sense of the formative play of creative powers driving existence down to the struggle of already formed forces, most of the activity and awareness of the seemingly invisible half of existence, cannot help but be pushed into its most opaque and indeed pathological reflections.

In contrast, when what we call material existence and its physical forces are properly contextualized by a metaphysically embodied ground in intensive relations, they become a frontier of revealing signs in power’s play rather than the grounding limit of its static structure. Following these signs with vital comprehension—sensually tracking their lines of flight and force within any structure—is more than just a road to understanding. The vital dynamism of embodied knowledge is already a play within power’s trajectory, and a crucial one if we are to have any hope of giving our world a better trajectory. 

Part Three:

“Since the beginning of Western science, we have believed in the “simplicity” of the microscopic—molecules, atoms, elementary particles. Irreversibility and evolution appear, then, as illusions related to the complexity of collective behavior of intrinsically simple objects. This conception—historically one of the driving forces of Western science—can hardly be maintained today. The elementary particles that we know are complex objects that can be produced and can decay. If there is simplicity somewhere in physics and chemistry, it is not in the microscopic models”. -Ilya Prigogine²⁸

“Every substance upon the earth is condensed light. There is nothing in material existence in any form whatever which is anything but condensed light.”-Rudolf Steiner²⁹

The metaphysical, then, properly understood, is not essentially some vague invisible or separate reality, but the intensity of relations between things, the meaningful context and content of all experience, physical or otherwise. It becomes more visible and physical to the extent that we learn to sustainably see, connect, concentrate, and even embody the “points” of significant change that are reality and creative power’s basic “substance”—its dynamic nature as continuous but differentiating transformation, emerging from productive tension and difference.

This can be seen even in the mundane experience of so-called “attraction” in physical fields. Even in the ever-present feeling of the weight of gravity, for example, we can, with the right alignment of pressure gradients in the body, vividly sense, from the heart of matter, the limits of our more or less discordant material embodiment speaking to us, calling us to break through the essential contradiction inherent in spatial existence and spatialized thought—to nullify the impossibility of two bodies inhabiting the same space, and to conceive their relations no longer as extending across a void that sets each thing against every other thing, but rather, generated from within and by relations of continuity and meaning. 

For with attraction more properly understood, things move not merely to converge in a space, but to negate the space that their mutual motion is itself creating and which defines their separation—as well as determining their very existence as relatively external identities conceived against the projection of a common container-like background space.

Of course, on its own, any particular line of attraction is just an inertia, a pull of material forces equalizing the push of its inverse in intensive difference and differentiation. Any line of attraction taken on its own then is defined more by dedifferentiation, by its trajectory towards the “mass” momentum of uniformity, than it is by a path towards dynamic creative harmony. The danger with surrendering to the vital appeal of any gravitational pull or accelerated momentum, as with following any line exclusively towards an end, lies in mistaking the possible leverage—inherent in any equalizing difference, any gradient of intensity—for a free ride to freedom.

What should be a point of transformation that can reveal an internal landscape of important points of interest and significant relations is taken for an absolute spatialized point of convergence or escape. It is indeed easy to mistake simple surrender to another, or to a movement given carte blanche out of blind faith in progress or power, for surrender with another in creative extrapolation out from or through a mutually defined center or end. 

But tragically, in such mistakes, instead of breaking through, we only break down, (or only break through into a static emptiness). Instead of making a “friend of the end” and revealing the significance of any change in the light of the relatively unchanging, we merely become a means to an end, or even, simply, come to an end. Instead of finding the dynamic and infinite tapestry of significant differences, we collapse or subsume all difference into and under the service of a single abstract end. 

By ignoring the divergent possibilities which help frame the relations constituting any particular point of transformation, we risk a mindless surrender to the trajectory of a seeming totality or seemingly inevitable convergence. It is only because of the tension between the inward convergent motion that negates space (“counterspatial” as some call it)³⁰, and the expansive creation of space emerging from individuation and changing relations, that we have a world of both stable and changing forms, both space and time. Neither side can be completely negated because they only exist in relation. 

To review then, there are really no absolute points or lines, no absolute zero or infinity. All quantities are ratios emerging from our sensory selections and their compounding combinations, ratios relative to our collective motion through the rich relational continuum of the universe—life’s meshwork of intensities. The zeros and infinities of our calculations are just relative limits and directions. Any seemingly absolute limit, like the maximum intensity of light speed cutting across all spatial reference frames, is best understood first, as discussed, not as a maximum speed through space, but as a fundamental unit ratio of speed relating equal space to equal time—a one from which all other rates of change derive as displacements from unity. 

But that one to one relation of unity—being (in physical terms anyway) a ratio of space to time—is not a fundamental identity or substance, for it is never fully present. In a sense, it is just a relation of every present thing to everything not present. The unity of light is not just a spatial thing’s relation to some isolated moment of time, but all of time, time being in essence just the other side of the displacement from the infinite we call a localized space. For in a metaphorical way, a single “moment” embraces all space, just as a single “point of space” traverses all time. 

As with any limit, then, it helps to think of the function of this unity less as a peripheral boundary defining the extent or context of a thing, and more as a reflection of the structure of relations which define the essence of a thing as its singular pattern of displacements from and connections to an infinite horizon. 

Similarly, it can help, at first, to think of light as the central reference, with everything moving in relation to it, with it not really moving at all, or having a motion that is just a self-change, an infinite turning upon itself. But really, like everything else—as an essential physical sign of the nature of everything else—light is both space and time, both the stable stage and “object” of change, what holds its relations through change, but also what changes in every determinate context. So it is neither an absolute line of motion, nor an absolutely changeless reference point, but a trace of the proportional relations connecting all things in their relative motion. 

The continuity of these proportions is not an equating of discrete identities, but a relation of their constitutive relations to other relations. It is the thread of creative transformation of each thing into all others, a repetition of the singular relation of the one that is light to itself, distributed throughout space and time in infinite varieties of sense and form.

Any idea of a fundamental space fixed to a zero-point, or even a fundamental space-time fixed to some unifiable field misses the point. Every discrete space or field of quantified forces, even the whole visible universe and its apparent forces, is merely one side of a large-scale displacement from unity—a gravity well not just curving some spatial container, but a cavitation which creates a field in time oriented towards the null point of pressure mediation, pulling us through time, attempting to equalize the displacement from unity. 

Every zero-point is just an infinite line from the other side, and ultimately, both lead back to the fabric of changing relations and a never-finalized proportional distribution of differences, forever attempting the impossible task of finally reconciling the one and infinite.

From our point of view, however, inside the gravity wells of discordant matter and the physics based on this, we need a reference. And as discussed, it helps to make this reference the unity of light instead of the zero of space which prioritizes an already regimented reference system over a reference unit of relation like light. Light grounds relations in ordered series that need not be wed to spatial and temporal distances at all, nor even discrete objects or identities, only connected processes, or repetitions of proportional relations.

If we simply take our point of view for granted, where objects and space are prior, and light appears to us as an invariant speed through space, expanding out from its source—just, as discussed, the space more or less outside our gravity appears to do from our perspective—this confused ground will disrupt all other knowledge based on it. The ground of reality can become itself just a runaway motion, an explosion headed nowhere or destined to cycle around its own empty core.

Keeping in mind the relational ground, building and keeping our theories in tune with vital intuitions and extrapolatable concepts, ensures that no abstract system will dominate us, as each concept must serve as medium to a greater structure. There is a natural intuition and vital continuity in conceiving what we see as space as just a reflection of our own position and momentum within a field of displacements and equalizing compensations, changes which are too “slow”(slow in adjusting to change) to keep our material vehicles and systems above the downward spiral of gravity and entropy. 

Living in our quaint little islands of entropy and limited evolution, we are naturally going to understand change most fundamentally as it is reflected in material motion. But for an understanding of this bias to become a springboard, it must not be covered up by abstract theories. Keeping ratios primarily in mind over any confused conception of discrete forces is helpful as long as we do not conceive of those ratios as primarily relating movements of fundamental objects or of any particular thing. The more discrete our determinations, the more limited their context.

Even what we think of as discrete particles is better conceived as patterns of continuous motions—and not motions of any particular object or thing, because these elementary motions are in some sense just our founding abstractions from the richly textured continuum of light. Though unlike the units of light discussed previously, elementary material motion remains a sign of the part seeking the whole, rather than a whole reflected in the fragments. The simplicity and generality of this motion derives more from its fragmented formation than any fundamental atomicity. 

Being time’s motion within a space, rather than a motion through space, these building blocks of matter remain more like vorticular vectors to the other side of every space—tunnels to time traced in space, transitory threads spiraling down forever to the unreachable zero, traces hinting at and seeking a hidden harmony, and only at the practical level some kind of basic stuff. Matter is in some sense just a vorticular structure of time in space.  

Unlike the oscillations of light, the oscillations composing matter are not symbols of light’s unity of space and time, but a unity deferred, broken up into complex patterns in space, and into simple copies or reflections of a rhythmic standard of time. The rich texture of time becomes hidden in homogeneous durations, anchored to the seemingly generic and more or less weakly correlated units of material particles in space. 

Space itself is rooted in our spatialized conceptions of atomized time, conceived of as the circle, the repeating oscillation, or the simple spin that turns the spiral of overlapping cyclic developments into the closed loop of clock time. Space, as the other side of time, is like a tapestry of progressing possibilities thrown back upon itself to create a well of inwardness, with compensating lines of outward motion emerging from the boundary of material stability, reaching for and defining the infinite horizon of the sensible expanse. 

It is important to understand, as discussed, that this equilibrium between the outward and inward, between the line and the circle, and between space and time, is what situates mere objects in a space defined by their fall into the gravity of displacements below the speed of light. But emphasizing this equilibrium of opposites as a general principle gets us nowhere. 

In fact, the very notion of discrete and externally opposed principles—even if framed as a balance of opposites—is a stagnating distortion, rooted as it is in overly-spatialized concepts of motion and difference, just like the relations between objects. It reflects the deterioration of creative change into conflict and eventual stasis—into the mutually limiting and relatively closed karmic loops plaguing the game of force and counterforce.

To guide any beneficial development, the notion of opposition needs to be seen as a limit case of what is better understood as a reciprocal relation—not between two equal forces or object oppositions—but between all things and their mutual becoming as they form an open and endless horizon of context for understanding each other. 

This kind of open-system reciprocity necessitates not equalized oppositions between differences in kind (or any duality), but, ironically, must proceed from inequality, from a relative but ultimately inexhaustible gradient of difference in value, or in the level of some value, which creates the potential for all activity. 

Life and change cannot proceed any other way—not without power, not without some principle of difference in value, some hierarchical gradient of continuous potential prior to the disconnected differences of identity and mere existence. But power is not some sovereign metaphysical force acting on a passive matter. It is an opening of potential above the actual already-constituted reality. 

Power must impose limits on what is, to catalyze the production of what could be. Those limitations open up a new space within the great open-system of the one reality of infinite relation—a contraction of the infinite plane beyond all hierarchy and interiority into a great relay of contracting and relaxing tensions, into a system of boundaries or membranes of productive change.

For though in the last analysis, reciprocity reigns, it is power that mediates the middle in which all things take place. Yet power, in its impositions and inequalities, merely delays and determines the dramatic forms of justice, and the ultimate but never fully-present reciprocity beyond discrete relation. 

Cutting through the appearance of even the most imbalanced of localized power relations, is a continuity of proportions enfolding each moment—with its seemingly distant complements and inverse-reflections—into the rectifying embrace of compensating connections, whose ultimate mutual product is one. 

Of course, the dynamic activity of the universe depends on this reciprocity getting a complex distribution across the extents of space and time, of local and nonlocal events. A localized balance—or even a discretely accountable pairing—of separate elements would be a kind of stagnating stalemate imposed from an unaccounted-for third position of absolute judgment, a static frame of dogmatic justice, still subtly inscribed within the modern scientific model of space and time as a container which we then cannot help but long to be liberated from.

Locked into such a closed system of balance and harmony, cut off from the continuity of a thoroughly and infinitely relational understanding, we are led to resist change and death; or alternatively, to surrender blindly to its momentum. A mind trapped within such a materially bound culture will naturally and simultaneously fear and desire death and transcendence. 

Consequently, such minds are bound to strive for the only kind of immortality they can imagine, and may build a kind of virtual facsimile of continuity which arises as an eternal reflection of their own fundamental identities and material attachments. Such a standardized and immortalized mind, as we collectively may soon become, would be in grave danger. Rather than finding or forming a place in the process of continuous transformation, the traps of both fear and desire combine and descend around us as the perfect spiritual prison of pseudo-transcendence of death, and a surrender to the will of a predatory power³¹. 

To transcend the materialist spatially-dominated conceptions of relation and motion, without falling for these traps laid by fear and a desire for salvatory absolutes, the nature of the transcendent or metaphysical must be better understood, and reframed again and again in each age—especially as people lose touch with and a feeling for the roots of all physical life in the greater metaphysical life of the universe. 

It is a continual challenge to overcome our natural animal predilection towards thinking in terms of objects and their manipulation, always requiring some preprogrammed set of internally fixed things to be the objects of all change. 

The convoluted sophistication of our age demands a fundamental, visceral reframing, extending our sense of every stable structure into its dynamic background. We must conceive each discrete thing not as a static origin or passive end, but a selection, a reflection or model of relevant relations formed of other relational actions or processes that have been extracted out of the living continuum where all processes are meshed together in mutual implication. 

Instead of seeing the world merely in terms of our language and sentence structure—subjects acting on a world of objects—it must be conceived that every thing or being is a unique relation or difference, or rather a singular structure of relation, and each act, the creation of a more or less new layer of connections in the continuum, one which alters the meaning of every other relation in its implications. 

Of course, some more, some less, and always relatively so, as great differences always lie hidden beneath the necessary normalizations at the heart of our frame. For the nature of the meaning and structure of any change is only given within other selections, reflections, and modifications. Every discrete “subject” or “object” holds its boundaries only against the background of other possible selections, only along certain chains of consequences tied to certain contexts, and consequent considerations of relevancy.

Such a view retains a polarity like that inherent to our common-sense linguistic breakdown into subjects and objects. But the polarity here is not merely between separate bodies or things acting on or contemplating each other, but between the two sides of any process—between any localized, identified, framed or selected set of things, and their nonlocal background of changing connections with everything else. Both sides are always in some sense, no matter how narrowly material the process may seem, involved in a kind of contemplative contraction and explicative expansion of their other side. For the metaphysical background of one process can become the foreground of another.

There is, then, no pure realm of mind or matter, for matter, in the broadest sense, is just the localized foreground, the contracted condensation of selected significances. Certainly the nature of this foreground and its nonlocal background can take on different forms. Yet, however uneven the split between poles may seem in a given process, even a material object sitting in what seems its natural context has a pole in the nonlocal. Even the most isolated object or blandly mechanical process exists not just in a local material space—with any novelty or significance canceling out over time—but is also part of a structure of time that is inherently never complete, and open to alignment with some field of power or system of significance. 

A simple inert object may seem relatively isolated or just insignificant, with its temporal structure of oscillations averaging out to a bare repetition, but like the polarity of oscillations in iron, in the right context of coherence, the polarities can align, connecting to a greater field of activity. But unlike an applied magnetic field, that context is not some external thing either present or absent, since all possible meanings and contexts are always already more or less “present” and happening in everything, even if they cannot be foregrounded in any given context.

And yet, there are still diverse realms, even if they are never pure or isolated. Even if the two sides of any process are always implied in each other, the relative ratios and proportions of their magnitude in any context can take many forms and values, even resulting in a polarized structure of existence, where one or the other dominates³². The spiritual realms or “heavens” of tradition are where time turns in endless cycles, and continuous change dominates—hence the association of its rhythms with celestial bodies, and their correspondence in astrology³³. 

These inner realms are where the coherent motion of something is intense enough to overcome the dominance of entropic forces. This may be because a process is simple, relatively isolated from degradation—its change, perhaps, uniform, or brought under the monolithic sheltering power of a dominating rhythm. 

On the other hand, coherence can also acquire the requisite intensity to cross the threshold through correlated creativity, where the processes involved are not uniform, but coherent enough in their creativity to require no force or enough to avoid the resistance that would pull them down fully into the localized low-speed zones dominated by material motion, and upon which the spirits ride. 

It is the uniformly changing cycles of time, however, that not only form simple standards for the spatial basis of material existence, in a kind of “subspace” beneath normal space, structuring the emergence of our material systems, but in addition, form cycles of all conceivable length relative to the basic units. One could say they form a “spiritual hierarchy” of entrenched standards—archetypal patterns spanning a relative scale of intensity, and that are coupled to all “material” existence, informing and manifesting through various developments in phase to their cycles, like the planets of astrology.

So-called material existence is, in a sense, a kind of interference pattern of these more archetypal cycles—full of incoherence and conflict, but also regimes of coherence and power as the various cycles clash and compromise, forming a kind of “hyperspace” of competing cycles, tied together in a vorticular landscape spiriting the heart of every being. The frequencies of these cycles can even be made coherent and intense enough in an overlapping combination that space and matter can seem to “fold” into the vortices, lifting normal space and objects to the level of nonlocal “superluminal” existence. 

This may be beyond the capabilities of humanity’s current physical embodiment, (except perhaps temporarily with advanced technology), but we can certainly experience these worlds through inner coherence—even if it is only for a moment, only an intuition of what is beyond every materially imprisoned singularity, beyond that speed limit of motion in space that structures our visual experience of the world, and would define the limits of our experience if we allowed ourselves to be completely dominated by its syntax of separateness.

As creative thinkers and gifted intuitives have described it, the worlds on the other side are not defined and segmented from without, but merely variegated from within. And though there are seemingly insurmountable separations between things in our world of discrete objects and extensive relations of distance in time or space, all discrete boundaries, even the “light-speed” boundary that forms a productive polarity across the sides of existence, all separation, is essentially a matter of intensity, a matter of the degree or power of participation in any matter or value. The “intensive” differences that structure and connect all worlds, cut through and across any seemingly “extensive” separation of worlds in space or time. 

But given humanity’s long gestation in the womb of spatially-nested rhythms, it is understandable that many people intuit any singularity as a physical limit, as a point of transcendence of space or our experience of materiality. To the materialist that believes nothing exists outside these limits, the same restrictions apply. 

The price of these limitations become apparent within most of what we could call our society’s “political physics”, its way of conceiving of society and social change according to a mostly materialist tradition of sociological thinking. The materialist imagines the acceleration of the technosocial machine approaching some limit past which we may be somehow ambiguously liberated from capitalism, but materialist myth can no longer convincingly give us anything but a dystopian vision of what’s next.

While many may dream of revolution or a new consciousness, anyone with any awareness or understanding of UFO disclosure dramas (mainstream or esoteric), may sense looming over the horizon of overwhelming acceleration, a proximity to something far more strange. 

If our larger cosmic situation is not imagined in vague and awkwardly distant spiritual terms, and something of the physics and metaphysics of this “hyperspace” is understood, it still is mostly rendered as a kind of “higher dimension” separate from our own space and reality. Seldom is it thought through or understood as anything concrete always already at work in the world without any need for alien intervention, even if there is that as well. 

Singularities are often imagined by believers as a destined future of alien or artificial intelligence pulling us in, or, perhaps, a critical moment of contact already past that pulled us into the hyperspatial game. But what needs repeated emphasis is that reality is nothing but this game. The real has always been a continuum of imagination, more or less dense with singularities— that is, “ideas”, significant distinctions, differences that make a difference. In other words, reality is precisely the game of changing the structure of reality, with its roots not below in the earth but above in what can be conceived and can grow as any good idea does, especially as it tests itself in the material trenches of competing existential ideas.

But when we assume some substance or space is primary, and time is just movement through this space, we infer that any fundamental change in our world or society must come from the force of some material agent, oblivious to the derivative nature of such things. Or perhaps we think salvation will arrive from something wholly alien, as if we have not been importing alien landscapes from “hyperspatial” domains onto this planet for millenia. 

Just as we find it easier to imagine the end of the world than to imagine a positive transformation of capitalism, so it is easier to imagine an alien intervention, or the arrival of some supercomputer intelligence, than it is to look closely at the multiple dimensions and scifi-level strangeness that have been with us all along, but which have been pushed to the margins in the brief time of recent civilization. 

The marginal, however, can no longer be contained, as disclosure narratives proliferate and the logical convergence of technologies like virtual reality and genetic engineering, make more and more people wonder about the technical origins of our reality. Popular speculation becomes something real and understandable, as we come to understand that we don’t so much live inside space or move through time as much as they are the way we interpret changes happening in the structure of our reality, and we translate these changes into the understandable motion of objects moving in a space based on the ratios of space to time. 

The hyperspace we creatively imagine as being beyond our own, waiting for us at the end of our life or the world’s demise or transformation, exists always already within us and everything as the deeper structure of time and progressing possibility. We can interact with this structure more and more as the speed of change intensifies, as long as we tap the gradient of escalating change to build a sustainable intensity of creative coherence. 

What beckons us from the other side of any singularity is not some transcendent reality, for the boundary of singularity sits at the heart of every single thing, linking it with every other thing in a tapestry of mutual modulation on each other’s themes and variations. The points of transition are of course important, and are indeed mediated by speed, but not the speed of a material machine moving through space, but the speed of change in an “abstract machine”, a nexus of linked rates of change in the variables of our reality, linked to all other realities through continuous variations ad infinitum. 

Thanks to advances in the more thoughtful corners of our culture³⁴, motion through three dimensional space itself can be understood now not only as a matter of external forces and perspectives, but as a “downstream” projection of changes already determined by the more coherent and therefore “faster” negotiations of organized intensity. Our material world is itself a relatively incoherent aggregate of relations, with poorly linked rates of change more or less dependent on the shared fate of falling into the same tangle of material contingency. 

However, the more we can see the importance of the timing of that fall (as astrology attempts to do), and of timing and rhythm itself, the fall becomes less a contingent fate, and more of a intentional foot in the universe’s poetry, a lifeline thrown from higher intensity, calling us to match its pace and more fully enter the upstream channel.

The “ground” of materialist thinking, and the politics based on it, cannot match this rhythm. It is mostly confined to what has already been determined upstream by the psychic politics of intensity and organized intention. Things at the level of struggling material relations cannot therefore be significantly changed at that level, except in the contingent details natural to physical manipulation. 

These details can be important, however, and their improvement can set the stage for new developments. Deeper changes can also, of course, be catalyzed or be organized around attempts to change material conditions. But this happens often despite the failure of the best intentions, not because of them, as they so often fail to understand the powers making use of any contingency.

That which has fallen out of coherent intensive motion and into the oscillations and stalemates of conflicting forces—into the gravitational inertia of “mass” phenomena—is struggling against gravity when it myopically fights at the material level. The discrete aggregates of narrowly material phenomena are dominated by the simple and weakly-correlated ratios of an already determined space, and an already past time. The incoherence of sub-light matter is, however, the frontier of the universe, since when redeployed by power, the eschewed developmental fragments can form the basis for new development, as the gradient of chaos is tapped and the game is altered at higher levels. 

The seemingly isolated material worlds are the leftovers of lost time, an endlessly recycled goldmine of seemingly wasted potential, where the forgotten or foundering dreams that never quite found their fullness, can be returned to again and again, replayed and redirected within the creative spirit’s eternal return³⁵, a spirit never trapped within the prison of sameness and stuck identities, but who does not discard them either, knowing that precious matter and its constraints are an engine for its creative play, even if the necessary evils of the chaotic material fringe could take more beneficial forms (from our point of view). 

Any politics not deluded by hopes for transcendent salvation must adjust itself to this spiritual truth, that the deeper political game is over what kind of stage we want to set for what kind of spirit’s infinite evolution. The fault lines and spiritual signs pointing to this or that kind of future are there to be seen, but the question remains, what can be done? How can we compete with such a strange and ubiquitous power? How can humanity determine the kind of spiritual drama which plays out in these times so pregnant with divergent possibilities?

Part Four:

“The earliest formula of Wisdom promises to be its last—God, Light, Freedom, Immortality. These persistent ideals of the race are at once the contradiction of its normal experience and the affirmation of higher and deeper experiences…

To the ordinary material intellect which takes its present organisation of consciousness for the limit of its possibilities, the direct contradiction of the unrealised ideals with the realised fact is

a final argument against their validity. But if we take a more deliberate view of the world’s workings, that direct opposition appears rather as part of Nature’s profoundest method and the

seal of her completist sanction. For all problems of existence are essentially problems of

harmony. They arise from the perception of an unsolved discord and the instinct of an undiscovered agreement or unity. To rest content with an unsolved discord is possible for the practical and more animal part of man, but impossible for his fully awakened mind, and usually even his practical parts only escape from the general necessity either by shutting out the problem or by accepting a rough, utilitarian and unillumined compromise. For essentially, all Nature seeks a harmony, life and matter in their own sphere as much as mind in the arrangement of its perceptions.”-Sri Aurobindo³⁶

What, then, is the deeper face of power—how can it be known if it distributes itself so well, as it does in our times, when it hides behind the facade of horizontal networks, seemingly with no center or simple point of concentration? Much of its success is due to its apparent novelty in our consciousness, a consciousness used to power being tied directly to material forces, with definite centralized sources and visible applications of repression. 

But of course, these more obvious applications of power have never been much more than a perspectival mirage, a true but fragmented view of the boundaries between the currents of the ocean of time. Hierarchical striations exist within everything but they are always relative to a greater sea of freer relations in all directions. Stagnating systems emerge and shift along and around the precarious tumult of material conditions, like localized whirlpools of spiraling time forming upon the more ubiquitous torrent of power flowing ceaselessly within or “immanent” to everything. 

This “immanent” power is nothing new in our history; it is the background activity supporting everything in the universe. What we see with the rise of a network-control society³⁷ is merely a merging of boundaries between different smooth spaces, a lubricated quickening of territorial power that has allowed it to reach a level of intensity that may reveal the deeper layers of fluid power long obfuscated by the rough rhythms of history.

Since it doesn’t repress things that already exist as much as determine or in some cases control what can exist or even be thought in the first place, it is sometimes treated as a psychological phenomenon, or approached as soft power still centered on definite points and lines of force, even if these are admitted to be involved with the more subtle reality of a state’s intelligence-operations and techniques of psychological influence. 

With the dominance of materialism in much academic social theory in recent times, however, these more subtle or “virtual” dimensions of power have been considered secondary functions of the primary material forces determining the play of history. Even the role of capital in determining the structure of the world through deliberate planning and “speculative” finance has often been reduced to a mere “fictitious” by-product of the all-determining reality of material power-relations³⁸. 

These material relations are no doubt important; to simply invert our materialist sociologies back into some philosophical idealism—where matter is wholly determined by the play of a transcendent idea or singular agency—is pointless, even if there is truth in idealism as well. 

What has become increasingly apparent is that, just as capital has been revealed as a power not contained within in any fixed position lording over a space or quantifiable material, but rather a power wholly dependent on a quantification of the future and a conditioning of the temporal flow of value and distribution of beliefs, so has the futility of any will to power or knowledge still caught up in the spatialized habits of territorial animals, become easier to see. Power is always relative and differential, that is, distributed and dependent through and through on maintaining differences of intensity.

With the right eyes, the increased connectivity and complexity of society has opened a view into the hyperphysics behind our hypermodern world—a world where speed, that is, the intensity of the ratios and proportions of change, is prior to matter and material motion, and where the cosmic game for a higher intensity which determines all existence, is played through coherent connectivity, for good or for ill³⁹.

Most academic attempts at theorizing and periodizing our era still focus on material conditions, and so direct attention precisely to what has already been determined, and the linear flow of effects that proceed from that determination, save some kind of radical intervention. The result is an unavoidable pessimism about change, or at least a large gap between conceived alternatives and the material conditions that are supposed to be the cause of any future change. 

Faced with the difficulty of changing the direction of a runaway machine, humanity’s impulse towards change is probing for a better path, even if hope for radical change continues to spawn various spiritual and political religions. When not merely religious though, but genuinely motivated to understand and change consciousness, when driven not by dogmatic hope or partisan culture war, but an effort to understand the patterns of cultural transformation, the turn to cultural politics can be a good thing.

Unfortunately, with the decline in the academic credibility of large scale historical visions, conceptions of consciousness gets reduced to the psychosocial correlations of material conditions—merely, say, the past or present state of postmodern subjects, or the social structure of hypermodern capitalism, and maybe the material and cultural forces that preceded them, but seldom the structure of possible changes behind the contingent developments of history. Those uninitiated into academic jargon even get confused about whether “postmodern” is supposed to be a critical diagnosis or a positive prescription—a source of much unnecessary resistance to the label as some kind of political program or movement, where it is not necessarily the case at all.

Yet that confusion points to the neglected truth of the metaphysical dimensions of any theory or analysis, the fact that every frame is itself a myth that structures the future, no matter how limited the theory may be to the micro-narrative, or how much critical distance the analysis may claim. Our theories help form the meaning and trajectory of what they analyze; the solution to the problems posed by the context dependency of all meaning and representation, is not irony and diminished scales of thought, but the conscious creation of our guiding myths. To do this is not to abandon truth or render it merely pragmatic, but to guide its development with the potentials and dangers of each path in mind. 

Despite the increasingly obvious limits of materialism, materialist posturing by intellectuals, and the importance of material means and their role in history, are obviously not going away. In fact a renewed focus on material history and political struggle can seem like an important form of resistance to the reduction of humanity’s historical and “analog” existence to the closed coherence and shallow temporal horizons of cyberspace. But as power becomes increasingly distributed and delocalized, the material contests of history, with their characteristically localized and linear narratives, are becoming, or perhaps, being revealed, as a quaint subset of a more complicated political physics of space and time. 

It is becoming easy to believe that the surface details of events capable of being swayed one way or another by the vain power plays and oppositional movements so important to the short-term fortunes of short-sighted human beings, make little difference in the long-run trajectory of our species. After all that humanity has fought for across the millennia, were we perhaps always destined to end up right here? 

Could a different choice or a chance occurrence along the path of history have avoided our dystopian horizon? Or is this emergence of a technocratic prison around us an inevitable consequence of developing structures which have existed at the root of our security-obsessed and doubt-driven thinking since the beginning of rational thought? Since thought and action are always tied up together, it would be a capitulation to the fundamentally discrete nature of the digital medium to say definitively one way or another.

Rather than make more cut and dry distinctions between generic possibilities, it would be better to say that we were always going to have to face some form of this problem as our chaotic and violent existence reached planetary crisis levels and vectored towards the quickest path to global political stability. Perhaps had we not driven the machine of modernity so hard we would not have been pressed to integrate the planet before our thinking had matured. But without this crisis it might have been harder to see the problems that have existed all along. 

It has been suggested in the lore of the esoteric tradition, (and expanded on by contemporary ufology), that humanoid species can become diverted from their natural evolution if they choose to depend too much on technology when attempting to stabilize their society and biosphere, or by forcing an increase in longevity, (particularly when developing artificial intelligence and genetic engineering). 

Whatever the case, it is not difficult to imagine why technocracy might be a likely and problematic occurrence in planetary evolution. Whether there is really some natural course of humanoid evolution, or not, is besides the point. The dangers are obvious when a one-sided focus on stability is extrapolated and implemented so deeply in a society—especially when that stability comes to be seen as best maintained by a supposedly neutral AI.

However, there certainly are many ways of implementing any technology, or of organizing a global society; every situation is unique. The conditions here are the way they are because of the countless events of our history, material or otherwise. At the deepest level, nothing in the historical struggle is completely in vain, even if our little battles are often more vain than we care to admit. One reason for this is how little attention we give to the metaphysical dimensions of every event, that is, the structure of consciousness—and therefore reality—being contested within every personal and political struggle.

While many aspects of our consciousness and reality have changed over the millenia, we have yet to face some of the most deeply rooted biases in our thinking and language, and the way these structure our world. The quantitative digital character of the emerging global system was perhaps in some sense inevitable, given the “digital” quality inherent in language and linguistic thinking, a quality that becomes more pronounced as society is rationalized, and more quantitative as the economic necessity arises to calculate the instability of time itself. 

The rigidity of human thought was bound to become more noticeably problematic as we increasingly structured the world according to the intellect’s prejudice towards fixed relations modeled on spatial relationships, and as we subjected the flow of time to power’s crude calculus of risk assessment—a reduction of creative evolution to mere statistical games in an abstract space of predetermined possibilities.

But even before capitalism turned every conceivable thing into a speculative cypher in the game of power, human beings have, from an early point, extended life’s territorial instinct into the mind’s activity of calculating and controlling the flux of uncertainty. Systematizing life and society cannot be neutral, so a complex society especially cannot help but entrench and naturalize some preference or prior decision about how to cut up the world, a decision not easily examined without threatening stability. 

Around that decision, and in complex relays of reciprocal determinations, is always some layering of linguistic and conceptual habits that solidify the boundaries of things and events with the seeming permanence of elemental units, or even one elemental unit or fundamental idea of what a thing or “being” is—a generic and unanalyzed simple “one”, counting as the first “digit” serving to root all subsequent distinctions in a spatialized grid, with time and change therefore becoming derivative of what is perceived as the natural order.

A grid of solidified assumptions, whatever form those assumptions could have taken in various historical possibilities, was most likely going to bring us to some version of where we are at, with that grid threatening to become a “Matrix”, or to bring us to an evolutionary dead end, where all genetic variation has been technologically sanitized into sterile combinations, or a monotonous cloning of the same narrow set of preformed possibilities. 

Our imagination has been warning us of these things for some time, but it remains to be seen how deep we will descend into this madness before we, hopefully, learn to examine our primary distinctions and make them a conscious choice—or rather, a continuous creation in the light of an awareness of the fluid ground from which all distinctions are abstracted.

In a system that thrives on oppositions feeding into the binary logic of a digital consciousness, any alternative needs to go deeper than merely opposing the imposition of a preformed data set of binary choices with another discrete objectified substance—say, opposing the digital, quantitative structure of financial capitalism, with the concrete qualitative values of traditional culture or uncapitalized labor, even if this opposition is supposed to bring some kind of liberatory synthesis. 

In fact, it is only with the emergence of corporate capitalism that the logic of capitalism as a quantification of power, and of power itself as the source of all economic value, became easy to see. In such a light, no traditional political project can escape the logic of capital, since capital is already now a ubiquitous coding of all political power struggles through speculative finance⁴⁰. 

Any political challenge to the emerging global system must be rooted in another logic than the narrow field of political economy. It must create value in a way that exceeds the digital (win/lose either/or) logic of capitalism, which turns every amorphous potential into a commodified clone of predetermined possibilities, a mere rearrangement or recoding of the already existent and solely “real” substance of materiality.

To highlight this word “digital” rather than the usual scapegoats of revolutionary narratives, is to undercut not only traditional materialist politics, but, hopefully, the scapegoating process as well. To scapegoat the digital is contradictory, since scapegoating presumes there is some pure other to digitality, like the analog, which it corrupts. But this is itself a digital distinction. 

So if the analog is not the opposite or wholly-distinct other of the digital, what is it? If we take the digital to be the mode of organization that assumes, forms, and naturalizes a stratified space of analysis and division, the analog is not then an analog or analogy of some prior distinct thing to which it refers as its model within an organized space, but the very process of making continuously varying connections between the separated elements of any segmented space, or across different spaces, whose meaning and values cannot help but be transformed in the process. 

If then the digital is considered a synonym for the “Logos”—the word, being, or logic that creates a world through a primordial split, a division of unity into the one and two, into some kind of rationale or ratio of elements with a common generic unit that relates them, (a “one”)—the analog would not be the opposite of the Logos, not be the absence of logic or language, (which would be alogos), but the Analogos, which could be thought literally to mean in sequence or proportion (“ana”) with logos, or just simply, proportion itself⁴¹. The elements of the analog are not then quantities, as in the elements of a ratio, not identities or their attached qualities, nor the static factors of a generic identity (a one), but the proportional relations between any of them. 

Proceeding according to an analog mode highlights the connections relations have to other relations by virtue of their being all some variation, not simply of a one as a fundamental substance or primordial identity that is merely divided or multiplied into other quantities, but of each other. This is a unity of sorts in the sense that it is what is revealed across different patterns of relations, a continuity of sense and meaning that emerges as any and all forms are placed into proportions that give each thing a participation in a connected process or continuum of reality.

But the point here is not simply that everything is one or equal, and certainly not that all are parts of one transcendent or objectifiable whole, but that the patterns of any division need to be put in certain proportional relations for their proper sense to be more fully understood, to be connected and sometimes provisionally equated with other relations in the context of the continuous processes that formed them, and the ones which they in turn form, without beginning or final meaning. In this sense, everything can find a measure of truth when properly paired and related as to critically reveal its contexts embedded within other contexts.

The digital process of analysis, left to itself, keeps us from seeing or changing the nature of the contextual space of problems and contrasts that forms its background. While the analog—working along with the digital—is what forms new spaces to begin with; it could be thought of as that which links different discrete spaces into an open system or heterogeneous continuum. It connects each of the logics that rules any space, not within an overarching logic or view, but with perspectives that can reveal the paths each space or element took as a modulation of another, as well as paths and potentials for transformation, with its openness to the not-yet formed.

It is of course “natural” and unavoidable for us to analyze, just as it is to synthesize, to put together what we have torn apart. But if we merely synthesize what has already arisen “naturally” as practical beings primarily concerned with the manipulation of objects, we will most likely end up “synthesizing” not a higher truth, nor a new and exciting world, but mere synthetic “analogs” of the biases inherited from our history. 

We will merely move from the “twoness” of digital analysis to the “oneness” of synthetic unity—a oneness that merely reifies the abstractions made in analysis without following the relation which defines and connects both sides of any split into the depths of corresponding correlations from which it emerged. 

We will miss this crucial third “dimension” which imparts relational depth, which exists outside every dyadic ratio, like those of cause/effect, idea/thing, or subject/object⁴². We will obfuscate any understanding of the triadic nature of all relations, which can serve to transpose one dyad onto another, opening every arbitrary division and selection up to its alternative histories and futures. 

As we increasingly subject everything, even our analog world of experiences, bodies, and natural technologies to the binary logic of digital technoscience, analog existence becomes merely an analogy, an imperfect clone of our digital God. Yet unlike the earlier eras of our culture that merely fixed all analogies to a transcendent model of a religious God or symbolic truth, we now have the power to make the world in the image of our symbols and models. 

Our techno-gods are coming down to earth as we abstract everything into the uniform representational space of our analytic mind and synthetic technology, and as all nature gets canalized into informatic systems, redesigned to reflect our discordant patchwork of commodified models of life. Yet it does no good to oppose something called “technology” with something we call “nature” since, like all generic oppositions, they presuppose each other in an already constituted space that necessitates them both: nature is always already artifice; any analog continuum presupposes some digital distinction for anything to happen; every synthesis necessitates some prior analysis.

While the material and analog may be in need of reaffirmation in the face of their submersion into mere content for the digital data network, a new philosophical slogan or political movement no longer garners much sincere confidence in the possibility of change⁴³. And even if it did, for the analog to guide us through digital technology and consciousness, it must not be confused with some fundamental substance, some mere material that we oppose to digital abstraction. 

There is no escaping the digital, no fundamental outside to the web of systems and abstracting relations, nor any core substance or objects fundamentally inside or prior to those relations. The relevant and relative freedom from or individuation within the digital cannot be a discrete development. It takes place within and across all other developments. 

Materialist politics and returns to natural modes of living and relating are not in themselves the answer, but part of power’s problem of connecting differences—not ideally a problem to eliminate but to transform into more hopeful problems. The superior problems, however, are indeed not framed by the natural desire for final solutions, but by an appreciation of well-framed questions and problems as the substance of life and its creative advance. 

For instance, by appreciating that our natural world is inescapably tied up with infinite abstract and technological systems, overlapping and relaying beyond our wildest imagination, the power to change the nature of those patterns of connection becomes more available.

Of course, beyond all branded movements, slogans, and factional disputes, there are already developments all over the planet, in cultures and countercultures, that are indeed transforming and embodying our political problems in ways that go beyond mere resistance or abstract solutions—especially those embodying new possibilities for life.

But since they cannot escape the context of the world in which they exist, any novel modes of living must establish some kind of proportional gradient with the world, some kind of smooth space through which can flow a new line of intensity—a linking of truths and factors from one system to another as to reveal some measure of the relative intensity each truth or factor has in relation to others. 

Without forming some plane of transposition and mutual understanding with the emerging cybernetic global-system, all alternatives and lines of escape will surely be short lived. Alternative culture and niche movements may sow the seeds for a future to arise after some hypothetical collapse, but more often than not, they merely avoid the fundamental problems of power that arise in large scale developments, and which will return again and again until they are transformed by a superior form of power. 

And while many partial collapses of society may happen over the coming millenia, these will not wipe out the spiritual seeds of humanity’s susceptibility to the old or new gods of power. While it can be imagined that certain people, or even souls or groups of soul-qualities may follow a different track than the rest of humanity, leaving this planet and its whole structure of possibilities for another planet, or another kind of existence altogether, this planet’s future is an integrated global society, and this necessitates and inevitably produces a certain level and kind of coherence, for good or ill. 

We all strive on some level for coherence, whether it is just in our own life, or in the fields of life and society. We cannot help but strive to make sense out of and, eventually, vitally align the phases, the rhythms, the stages or states of all that confronts us, as we learn how connected it all is. 

However, this will to impose order can go down different roads, roads that eventually, if traversed far enough, converge around one kind of power or another. All power can preserve relations and symmetries through different transformations, or through projections into new worlds and spaces. But they do this in different ways. And while certain powers may claim to embrace and preserve all in spirit, the character of that embrace and preservation cannot be neutral; there is always some style of transformation. 

Certain selections must be made. While it may sound nice to become one with everything, and certainly, there is a kind of coherence and health that can be achieved through an “entrainment”, or matching of one’s rhythms within the dominant patterns that rule a system, this kind of coherence is morally questionable, and ultimately unsustainable in a complex system where diverse and often destructive powers are at play. 

Surrendering one’s polarity and power, even in a passive spiritual union with the most general symmetries and broadest powers of existence, merely takes one out of the play of existence, or relegates the soul to a spiritual backwater of differences that make little difference.

And since in bluntly resisting a force of change, one merely becomes a force, or tool of some power beyond the struggle, and despite the many flavors of personal power, and the option to opt out of the drama—which probably gets old after a while—the only real choice is how one harmonizes one’s power with others. 

How one maintains coherence through the transformations necessary for continuity determine the true character, power, and destiny of every soul, much more than some essential spirit. The increasing power of civilization, in its seductive and hegemonic pressure, offers a unique test in the life of a soul, a test that expedites the path towards one polarity of power or another.

In its later stages approaching collective consciousness, the greater and also more disturbing possibilities for civilization become increasingly possible. The pressures of one path or another become acute the more we are exposed to greater complexity and a higher density of time and information. Even those not intently seeking any power will soon face a choice as increasing complexity requires a more decisive context. 

The potential for power accumulation increases with complexity, and for those willing and able to harvest the chaos that those caught in its conflict cannot assimilate or understand, the temptation to increase their power and coherence through the established structure also increases. The single minded path of power accumulation merely feeds off of change, sustaining its insular structure through a dynamic appropriation of the new, a nomadic hunt for power perhaps, but one ultimately tied to a discrete sedentary core, to a preservation of some abstract essence⁴⁴.

The other choice is the path that is open on all sides, not just to the incorporation of the new, but to a true dialog and transformation of the whole, to a reaching back to origins in a re-tuning of foundations, to an ever-wider harmonizing of systems and beings. Rather than a reaching for a transcendence from the tragedy of death and destabilizing difference, into a ready-made unity that so often becomes a repression of the emergent—and either an apathetic or power-hungry complicity with some reigning order—we can face death and all limitation with a vital faith in creative continuity.

With a knowledge and feeling of how every limit is a link, one can see how even the boundaries between life and death, known and unknown, are not some fundamental limit of uncertainty, or an anxious prod towards greater certainty and control, but a call to a higher harmony between reciprocal elements, and across all boundaries. 

The challenge of all limits is the call to power, the call to become more than we are, and decide exactly how one will turn every perceived limit into a vital link. The pressure of limits is an opportunity to learn the differences that make a difference, to play and grow the game between sides in the polarity of power. Harmony necessitates differences and discords to harmonize, so both sides of power’s polarity are a vitally necessary dimension of dynamic coherence and creative evolution.

We are forced by power to push the limits of knowledge and life, prediction and sustainability, limits which exist as long as our coherence is an island in a sea of incompatible change. Eventually that unpredictable flux beats down the walls of order and all returns to the infinite sea. Without a regime of power organized around the negative pole, exploiting incoherent worlds, there would be little impetus for those worlds to create large structures of power of any kind. 

While this may be the libertarian’s dream world, without large coordinated structures, there is little chance of material beings forming intense enough links to transform the low intensity of animal and humanoid life into something sustainable or possibly immortal.

While power and immortality may seem delusional or dangerous goals, life cannot help but seek such things. The point of life and the heart of wisdom is in approaching that never perfect harmony of ideal capacity, in the tapping and tempering of that sea of potential gradients, continuously connecting the surprising sign—which only the digital processes of mind reduce to mere information—with a living continuity of context. 

That harmonizing context of a singular life, especially one lived not simply for the growth of its power and the structure of its representations, but for the power in all life, turns entropy—and its digital analog: information—into a meaning that can exceed yet traverse any space of representation or discrete information. 

The immortality spoken of in esoteric spiritual texts is not just the basic indestructibility of the spirit which exists in all things, but the attainment of an indestructible body, in some traditions called a “diamond body”, which can be helpfully understood not as some everlasting fleshy vehicle, which would be a kind of nightmarish prison for the spirit, but a vehicle capable of    maintaining a continuity of context and memory, a richness of temporal context and meaning packed so densely that it cannot be reduced to any schema or broken down and extracted by the forces of entropy⁴⁵.  

This is supposedly achieved by the rare advanced mystics, but possibly a future state of all humanity in the far future, if we do not become trapped in our own digital prison of techno-immortality. But even if we do, all paths eventually converge, and any wayward path must eventually give return to divine compassion, to a way of being that straddles every conflict so widely, so intricately, that no more tempering is needed, and all contrary motion finds its meaning in the light of the infinite. 

Even then, are there not ever-more mysteries and novelties to explore? Perhaps explored, however, without the suffering and exploitative power that seems necessary to push beings to a sufficient level of sustainability, to find and form the patterns that cannot be broken, to live a life dense with the richness of worlds within worlds by learning to harmonize them.

The more we walk that path, the more we cease to be finite beings struggling against time and fate, desperately defending or aggressively seeking some small measure of relative coherence, then the more we will become aspects of a continuous unbroken chain of being resonating with ever-greater symbols and songs of an endlessly improvising creative cosmos.

Between the traps of a techno-based pseudo-transcendence, and the resignation to the limited horizons of life’s endless cycles, the call of what is called in the scientific underground, a “higher density”⁴⁶ existence—where through knowledge, our very cosmic context can change and approach a wider more harmonically-inclusive coherence—beckons us to stand on our own for the first time as beings of knowledge, bliss, and power—to rise from our role as rats in the cosmic maze to become architects of our world and co-creators of cosmic destiny.

Yet even if humanity overcomes its current challenges with technocratic repression, and achieves a relatively high degree of coherence in the coming centuries, individuals simply belonging to a certain level of collective development is not the same as achieving that development on their own⁴⁷. Even the most beneficent kinds of power are still power; they still bind us to larger forces than ourselves, forces we may have the tools to navigate, but not necessarily navigate well. 

A society may be further along certain developmental lines than simpler cultures, but increased complexity obviously brings increased problems. New Age myths seem to think the good is always on the way, but spiritual culture has usually shown itself to be a poor judge of power, often idolizing convergence and coherence without the awareness or willingness to recognize the darker side of “higher” consciousness, power, and its greater coherence⁴⁸. It is good to be optimistic, and the good myth-maker knows the practical benefit of belief. But the optimism of a creative coherence is not opposed to pessimism. It embraces the philosopher’s love of problems as the very “substance” of creative life.

Notes:

(1) Castaneda (1998) pg. xiii

(2) de Jouvenal (1976) pg.xvii

(3) from the Doors’ “Break on Through (To the Other Side)”

(4) see Spengler (1922)

(5) see my “New Age of Post-Everything: Aliens, Astrology, and Alternative Cosmology”

(6) this is just one tentative definition of Power for the purposes of this essay, which draws from Gilles Deleuze’s Nietzsche and Philosophy and other post-structural texts, but also spiritual authors like Sri Aurobindo and Carlos Castaneda, and social science texts like Bertrand de Jouvenal’s On Power: The Nature of its History and its Growth, and Nitzan and Bichler’s Capital as Power: A Study of Order and Creorder, as well as from the alternative physics models I am interpreting in this essay. Such a wide spectrum of influences and attempted resonances is bound to make the concept rather slippery, but that is the basic idea; power is what slides through everything with no resistance. In that sense, it is less an agency with an object than it is a vital activity, a word for all effective and continuous action prior to its segmentation, struggles, and representation. Yet as Gilles Deleuze’s philosophy of “immanence” implies, this “unconditioned”, continuous, and ubiquitous action is “immanent” within everything, but only immanent to itself. Coupled to it are all the separate, actual things of the world, to which it is transcendental. The use of the word “coupled” here is meant to resonate more here with systems theory (see note 19 below)

(7) The concept of emergence “emerged” out of and tends to reinforce the dead-end debates in biology between vitalism and mechanism, reflecting other sterile dialectics between reductive and metaphysical explanations, or between continuous and discrete conceptions, like the Einstein/Bohr debate in physics. These have tended to feed into the fragmentation and hierarchical organization of disciplines (See Thalos 2013), or of culture itself, with the higher-order disciplines or bigger-picture explanations becoming automatically seen and usually rendered more vaguely or metaphorically, or more obviously laden with the ad-hoc agents, forces, and variables already baked into the set-theoretic thinking that reductive physics takes for granted, and which grounds the whole hierarchy of knowledge. Contrast this with category theory, where the discrete and continuous are understood as always relative, not grounded to a fundamental level considered more real or concrete (see Gangle 2016). Everything “emergent”, every break in a logical or ontological line, is always from its interference with another line. It may be mysterious to us, or it may be more or less statistically predictable from the previous line, but such attitudes prevent it from really being “vitally” thought and understood as a line with its own reasons and lineage. 

(8) see de Jouvenal (1945)

(9) Entropy is an important concept for this essay, particularly in its relevance to  information theory, here explained by Paul CIlliers in his wonderful Complexity and Postmodernism: “Entropy can be seen as a measure of the ‘disorder’ in a system. As a system transforms energy, less and less of it remains in a usable form, and the ‘disorder’ in the system increases. The concept of entropy is a complex one, and it was a stroke of genius by Claude Shannon to use it as a measure for the information content of a message… By replacing ‘energy’ with ‘information’ in the equations of thermodynamics, he could show that the amount of information in a message is equal to its ‘entropy’.The more disorderly a message, the higher is its information content….The less able the receiver is to predict the next digit in [a] sequence, the higher the information content of the message. A message high in information is one low in predictable structure, and therefore high in ‘entropy’.” (Cilliers 1998 pg.8)

(10) This digression on evil has been my interpretation of many esoteric texts, specifically the “RA Material”, which, despite its questionable claims and predictions, renders some classic esoteric ideas into physics concepts compatible with those discussed in this essay.

(11) Alexander, Samuel (1966) pg.38

(12)Steiner, Rudolf (1990) pg.130, as quoted in Zajonc, Arthur (1993) pg. 219

(13) Deleuze, Gilles (2001) pg. 30 

(14) Gilles Deleuze’s concept of an “abstract machine” is helpful in in breaking down the false dichotomies of the mechanism/vitalism debate, as long as one doesn’t take this as a reduction of everything to material mechanisms, but a way of showing that there is a physics at work in everything, that there are the same processes at work at all levels of reality, and hence no absolute divide or essential separation between physics and metaphysics. (See Deleuze and Guattari 1987)

(15) A “point” should be understood as an abstraction, like, for instance, an idealization of some relation(s) taken as a thing, not some fundamental origin or atom of dimensionality.

(16) In much of the theory in alternative physics culture, gravity and magnetism are not different forces but different modalities of the same pressure mediation, whether this is conceived as an aether modality, as it is in many of the theorists, or as a “scalar” motion, a motion without inherent direction, as it is conceived by those working in the tradition of Dewey Larson.

(17) “Frozen light” was a term David Bohm was apparently fond of using, though I prefer Steiner’s “condensed” light metaphor, for the density spectrum is a better way of conceiving of different levels of existence, since unlike intensity, frequency, or speed, which are relative to a certain context, density, though still relative, implies more the relative concentration and overlapping relevance of contexts. 

(18) Like much of the physics in this text, this is meant to resonate with the ideas of the Reciprocal System of Dewey Larson and those who have extended his thought. But I am also thinking here of Wolfram Schommers, as well as William Tiller, all of whom independently developed (as far as I can tell) ideas of reciprocally related spaces. Schomers and Tiller both highlight the fourier transform between these spaces, thus indicating deeper explanations of the uncertainty relations between momentum and position, or energy and phase, explanations that are hopefully intuited from some of the ideas discussed here. See: Tiller (2001), Larson (1982), and Schommers (2012)

(19) Mae Wan Ho also notes that in organisms and all coherent domains there is a coupling between a reversible process where energy can be distributed without loss, and the entropy-producing non-reversible dissipative processes usually associated with life and time. See: Ho (2008)

(20) see Larson (1965)

(21) Both philosopher Manuel Delanda (2002) and alternative physics researcher Bruce Peret, have underscored the importance of conceiving of a hierarchy of geometry. As I have been developing here, the unity of light would correspond to the most continuous, or “topological level”, where only the order of connections is important, followed by progressive breaks in symmetry that give an increasingly conditioned space, as assumptions are added to give definite directions, angles, distances, etc. Peret, however, using the concept of light as unity makes possible this interesting way of thinking of motion and energy as inverses which balance out to one.

(22) This is a logical extensions of the ideas here, but it also echoes the esoteric idea that the higher ranges of development, while still maintaining some kind of demarcation of beings and even a bodily vehicle of a sort are less and less defined by such things as boundaries become luminous links within the Divine.

(23)In the descent through layers in the hierarchy of geometry (see previous note), the inward/outward distinction adds an assumption crucial for the birth of the boundaries and distinction necessary for spatial existence. Larson called this “scalar” motion, and Peret recognized this as the projective level in the hierarchy of geometry. Our discussion on the finer points archived here, but some familiarity with fringe physics terminology is assumed: http://creativecoherence.co/2018/03/10/conversation-on-the-concept-of-scalar-with-bruce-peret/ 

(24) phase is an important variation on the concept of time, especially when attempting to understand the reframing of uncertainty as reciprocal determination. See Ho (2008)

(25) also Larson (1965)

(26) A form of the uncertainty principle often referred to as time(phase)/frequency uncertainty

(27) This significance of this point has been developed by numerous alternative science figures, particularly Juliana Mortenson:(https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Juliana-Mortenson)

(28) From his “From Being to Becoming” as quoted in (Friedman 1993) pg.52

(29) From Steiner (1910)

(30)“Counterspace” was developed as an important concept within Rudolf Steiner’s esoteric geometry and has since become important to alternative physics culture, notably through the influence of Eric Dollard on fringe electrical engineering research, as well as through the influence of Anthroposophical writers on Bruce Peret (a mentor of mine before he died too soon), who used Steiner’s concept to evolve the physical theory of Dewey Larson that influenced much of the physics ideas described in this text. 

(31) I am thinking here of Steiner’s development of the theosophical concept of the “8th sphere” into a key point of his mythology, and a potent warning symbol of our potential future

(32) This is key to the physics of Dewey Larson’s Reciprocal System of Theory and the RA Material mythology that references it as the most advanced basic understanding we have produced (Elkins, Rueckert, McCarty 1982). 

(33) In using the word heaven here, I am thinking more of the Western esoteric and Chinese traditions than mainstream Christian. The Chinese especially conceived of the heavens as “The Creative”, a doubling of the yang principle, characterized as ceaseless change. In addition to my love of Taoist philosophy, my analysis here of spiritual cosmology and this way of putting it on the same plane as physics, however, owes much to Sri Aurobindo, Jane Roberts, Carlos Castaneda, and Gilles Deleuze, as well as the RA Material and the reciprocal system community. (34) The thoughtful corners of our culture I am thinking of here are most explicitly the alternative physics culture, but also, I believe, the implications for physics implied in the work of academic philosopher Gilles Deleuze, especially as developed by Manual Delanda (2002) 

(35) for instance, Deleuze’s version of Nietzsche’s eternal return, which is not just the more or less joyous return of a well-lived life but endless creative change. As A.W Moore puts it:“what [Nietzsche] had in mind was endless change – but endless change in everything, including everything that had been and everything that would be. The whole of the past and the whole of the future were to be conceived as coming together in each moment of change, so that what happened at any moment happened at every moment – albeit at some moments as future, at some moments as present, and at some moments as past, and albeit at each moment in some new guise, so that every moment afforded its own unique perspective on the whole.” Moore (2019) pg. 246

(36) From Aurobindo (1939/1990) pg.6

(37) A concept developed by Gilles Deleuze and expanded upon by Alexander Galloway in his books, especially (Galloway 2004)

(38) See Nitzan and Bichler (2009)

(39) In using the word “hypermodern” I am speaking rather generally than any specific formulation, like that used by Paul Virilio.

(40) again, see Nitzan and Bichler (2009)

(41) I owe much of these insights on the digital/analog distinction to Alexander Galloway (2014), and this lecture he gave in 2019: https://youtu.be/eq4CDLNAvXU much of which naturally fall out of Deleuze’s modern reframing of traditional metaphysical account of the one and the many, as reflected in the opening quotation.

(42) See Gangle (2016)

(43) While the analog and the philosophy of Deleuze with which it has long been associated (https://media.icamiami.org/2020/10/816eb033-massumi-on-the-superiority-of-the-analog.pdf), are often claimed as a materialism, I think this owes more to contingent social and academic fads than to any lasting significance of these terms, despite, as was discussed here, the continued relevance of these trends, especially the ideas within them, as the context of materialism changes.

(44) The nomadic vs. sedentary is an important polarity in the work of Gilles Deleuze

(45) Cilliers again: “In [Gregory Chaitin‘s] reinterpretation of information theory, in what he has termed ‘algorithmic information theory’, randomness is defined not in terms of unpredictability, but in terms of ‘incompressibility’…It is…possible to reduce any non-random sequence to a random one…Through this process, randomness becomes a measure for the amount of information in a sequence, but, and this is vital, randomness understood no longer in terms of unpredictability, but in terms of the denseness with which the information is packed.”(Cillers 1998 pg.9)

(46) The term “higher density” was popularized by the RA Material (Elkins, Rueckert, McCarty(1982), but has since become common terminology in the more esoterically styled narratives of Ufology. RA however makes repeated references to the physics of Dewey Larson, whose ideas have inspired the best thinkers in the subculture of fringe physics.

(47) As Rudolf Steiner discussed in this interesting passage:”Consider how in the older civilizations, like those described yesterday, mankind in general perceived — in all the kingdoms of nature, in every star, in every moving cloud, in thunder and lightning — spirit and soul. On the background of this general consciousness the Yoga exercises evolved. As I explained yesterday, the Yogi attempted to penetrate to his own self. Through inner exercises he sought to attain what today is taken for granted because we are born with it: consciousness of the `I’, the feeling of selfhood. This the Yogi had first to develop in himself.

But, my dear friends, it would be a great mistake to compare the ordinary consciousness of self that we have today, with that of the Yogi. It makes a difference whether something is achieved through one’s own human effort or whether one simply has it. When, as was the case with the Yogi, one first had to struggle to attain consciousness of self, then, through the inner effort one was transported into the great universal laws; one participated in world processes. This is not the case when one is simply placed into the sphere of self-consciousness. To belong willy-nilly to a certain level of human evolution is not the same as attaining that level through inner exercises.” Steiner (1922)

(48) The account given in these paragraphs concerning human spiritual evolution is influenced by Theosophy, Anthroposophy, and The RA Material, all of which give much detail to the dark side and negative potential of higher consciousness. I do not claim any of these sources have value as revealed truth. They have the same potential problems and open-value as any philosophy. The RA Material, for instance, while it falls victim to the common errors of New Age literature in its optimistic prophecies and determinism, also gives one of the most deeply interesting descriptions of negative forms of power in any philosophy.

References:

Aurobindo, Sri, Savitri (1950, American edition Lotus Press 1995)

Aurobindo, Sri, Life Divine (1939, Lotus Press 1990)

Alexander, Samuel, Space, Time, and Deity: The Gifford Lectures at Glasgow 1916-1918 Volume Two 

(Macmillan 1966) 

Castaneda, Carlos, The Active Side of Infinity (HarperCollins 1998)

CIlliers, Paul, Complexity and Postmodernism (1998)

Delanda, Manuel, Intensive Science and Virtual Philosophy (Continuum 2002)

Deleuze, Gilles, Pure Immanence: A Life trans. Anne Boyman (Zone Books 2001)

Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia (University of Minnesota 1987)

de Jouvenal, Bertrand, On Power: The Natural History of its Growth (1945, reprint 1976 Liberty Fund)

Elkins, Rueckert, McCarty, The Law of One, Books One Through Five (Schiffer 1982-1998)

Friedman, Norman, Bridging Science and Spirit: Common Elements in David Bohm’s Physics, The Perennial Philosophy and Seth (Woodbridge 1993)

Galloway, Alexander, Laruelle: Against the Digital (University of Minnesota 2014)

Galloway, Alexander, Protocol: How Control Exists After Decentralization (MIT 2004)

Gangle, Rocco, Diagrammatic Immanence: Category Theory and Philosophy (Edinburgh University Press 2016)

Ho, Mae Wan, The Rainbow and the Worm: The Physics of Organisms 3rd edition (World Scientific 2008)

Larson, Dewey B. New Light on Space and Time (North Pacific 1965)

Larson, Dewey B., The Neglected Facts of Science (North Pacific 1982)

Moore, A.W. The Infinite 3rd edition (Routledge 2019)

Prigogine, Ilya, From Being to Becoming: Time and Complexity in the Physical Sciences, WH Freeman, 1980

Nitzan and Bichler, Capital As Power: A Study of Order and Creorder (Routledge 2009)

Schommers, Wolfram, Cosmic Secrets: Basic Features of Reality World Scientific 2012

Spengler, Oswald, Decline of the West (1922 reprint by Windham Press)

Steiner, Rudolf, Truth-Wrought Words trans William Lindeman (Spring Valley, NY: Mercury Press, 1990)

Steiner, Rudolf,The Elemental World and the Future of Mankind (lecture given May 28, 1922 Dornach)

Steiner, Rudolf, “Manifestations of Karma: Lecture 10: Free Will and Karma in the Future of Human Evolution” (lecture given May 27th, 1910 in Hamburg)

Thalos, Miriam, Without Hierarchy: The Scale Freedom of the Universe

Tiller, William, et. all, Conscious Act of Creation:The Emergence of a New Physics (Pavior Publishing 2001)

Zajonc, Arthur, Catching the Light (Oxford University Press 1993)

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