Philosophy in the Multiverse Volume III
“On the dumb bosom of this oblivious globe
Although as unknown beings we seem to meet,
Our lives are not aliens nor as strangers join,
Moved to each other by a causeless force.
The soul can recognise its answering soul
Across dividing Time and, on life’s roads
Absorbed wrapped traveller, turning it recovers
Familiar splendours in an unknown face
And touched by the warning finger of swift love
It thrills again to an immortal joy
Wearing a mortal body for delight.
There is a Power within that knows beyond
Our knowings; we are greater than our thoughts,
And sometimes earth unveils that vision here.
To live, to love are signs of infinite things,
Love is a glory from eternity’s spheres.
Abased, disfigured, mocked by baser mights
That steal his name and shape and ecstasy,
He is still the godhead by which all can change.
A mystery wakes in our inconscient stuff,
A bliss is born that can remake our life.
Love dwells in us like an unopened flower
Awaiting a rapid moment of the soul,
Or he roams in his charmed sleep mid thoughts and things;
The child-god is at play, he seeks himself
In many hearts and minds and living forms:
He lingers for a sign that he can know
And, when it comes, wakes blindly to a voice,
A look, a touch, the meaning of a face.
His instrument the dim corporeal mind,
Of celestial insight now forgetful grown,
He seizes on some sign of outward charm
To guide him mid the throng of Nature’s hints,
Reads heavenly truths into earth’s semblances,
Desires the image for the godhead’s sake,
Divines the immortalities of form
And takes the body for the sculptured soul.
Love’s adoration like a mystic seer
Through vision looks at the invisible,
In earth’s alphabet finds a godlike sense;
But the mind only thinks, “Behold the one
For whom my life has waited long unfilled,
Behold the sudden sovereign of my days.”
Heart feels for heart, limb cries for answering limb;
All strives to enforce the unity all is.
Too far from the Divine, Love seeks his truth
And Life is blind and the instruments deceive
And Powers are there that labour to debase.
Still can the vision come, the joy arrive.
Rare is the cup fit for love’s nectar wine,
As rare the vessel that can hold God’s birth;
A soul made ready through a thousand years
Is the living mould of a supreme Descent.
These knew each other though in forms thus strange.
Although to sight unknown, though life and mind
Had altered to hold a new significance,
These bodies summed the drift of numberless births,
And the spirit to the spirit was the same.
Amazed by a joy for which they had waited long,
The lovers met upon their different paths,
Travellers across the limitless plains of Time
Together drawn from fate-led journeyings
In the self-closed solitude of their human past,
To a swift rapturous dream of future joy
And the unexpected present of these eyes.
By the revealing greatness of a look,
Form-smitten the spirit’s memory woke in sense.
The mist was torn that lay between two lives;
Her heart unveiled and his to find her turned;
Attracted as in heaven star by star,
They wondered at each other and rejoiced
And wove affinity in a silent gaze.
A moment passed that was eternity’s ray,
An hour began, the matrix of new Time.”
-Sri Aurobindo from Savitri, Book 5, canto 2, pg.397-398
Volume III: Layer I:
Karma, Control and Creative Recurrence: The Endless Foundations of Infinite Meaning
“There are no limits to the self, only directions in which knowledge of the self may grow”
-Jane Roberts1
Introduction: The Aborted Launch of Unlimited Knowledge in Modernity
“Today science is predominant, not because of its comparative merits, but rather because the game was skewed in its favor…The superiority of science is not the result of research, or of discussion, it is the product of political, institutional and even military pressures.”
–Paul Feyerabend2
The world is in a unique crisis of meaning without precedent in recorded history. Faith in cultural narratives can wax and wane, but when before on our planet has even the most seemingly common-sense ground of reality come, not just into question, but into irrelevance? Doubts about appearances or apparent reality are one thing, and a common thing among various traditions. Doubts about any higher purpose or meaning are another even more common thing in modern times.
But in the 21st century, something else is looming, something gradually seeping into general consciousness, but with a quickening pace as new technologies and strange phenomena foreshadow a potentially unsettling vision of the future and even reality itself. The power of thought’s effect on reality, its escalating ability to manifest its every whim into an explicitly shared reality, seems to stand out against previous historical eras and crises, against their comparatively simple tensions between thoughts about what is real, between doubts and beliefs in the essential truth of what things are supposed to mean.3
It increasingly seems as if the hard-earned sense of truth, nature, and history that modern society has built, and even repeatedly questioned in its way, is not exactly wrong or essentially flawed, (since it is increasingly wondered whether anything is essentially any particular way),4 but rather, that our understanding of the universe is just lagging dangerously behind the complexities we are pushing into.
The so-called progress of knowledge can seem as if it is now hard-pressed to keep up with the progress of technology. It can seem too tied to representations of habitual and dependable phenomena to adequately handle the immensity and mysteries that emerge when our power to change or even mold reality gets past a certain point.
The greater reality beyond basic dependable and inherited appearances is no longer faintly beckoning from other worlds to some spiritual sense—as it more or less had in the recent past. It seems to be instead now pressing on us from all directions, pressing with a force demanding to be integrated with this world, to be consciously participated in through a kind of thought no longer confined to plodding reflections and judgments on things, but rather, one comfortable forming them, one that can navigate the infinity of worlds the mind can dream up, and even (increasingly in our day) make real.
While mystics of one sort or another have long spoken of such possibilities, the general experience of people in recent times has been characterized more by a distinct separation of thought and life. While the average person can have ideas or beliefs about what is real and can have faith that these have some kind of power, this is usually tied to beliefs in their exclusive truth, or the power of having faith in them, seldom some concrete sense of a creative and infinite reality at work in everything, in every life or idea.
Especially since the rise and eventual dominance of the rational intellect,5 ideas have come to be conceived as little more than thoughts about and derived from the material world, hovering over things like some insignificant vapor impotently confined to our heads—perhaps intervening or inspiring events, but not usually moving as a formative force in the making of reality itself, except by way of technical invention, or some manipulation of what is at base something more real and substantial.
Even where and when some sense of a greater reality has intruded into the narrow range of the particular physical experience that has dominated humanity’s mass-consciousness for millennia,6 this sense seems to have more often played a repressive role as “metaphysical” thoughts supplementing and conditioning material life—other realities to be believed and obeyed, or, perhaps, dismissed, but seldom used to expand the range or depth of everyday experience.
Despite the symbolic or conceptual innovation of some inspired individuals, within the trenchant separation and regimentation of things in the civilized world of recent millennia, even the best metaphysical ingenuity could not help but be captured by the literalist leaning in the language and culture of mass-consciousness—and often the social machine manufacturing that mass-consciousness—restricting the potentially more fluid life and flexible power of ideas.
Indeed, as long as the general mass of humanity remains ignorant of how ideas and beliefs structure reality, then the greater the idea, the greater its potential for misuse—the greater its potential power to dominate and stratify the relative freedom of a life tied fluidly and instinctively to the rhythms of the natural world.
The fate of metaphysics in modernity, then, has been an understandable reaction. After ages of restrictions on life enacted by religious dogma, even the potentially liberating systems of idealist philosophy could not help but be haunted by the shadow of a possible repression or overly-regimented subjection of life by ideas. Even at its best, any single system of ideas cannot compete with the greater, even-if still stunted freedom characteristic of modern empirical attitudes.
Empiricism’s potential to engender curiosity about the world outside its relation to us or any metaphorical relation to humans and their values—for instance, the attempt of science to abstract away from the metaphorical rut of reality as it happens to appear at the scale of human life and subjectivity—has undeniably opened thought up to a larger space of possibilities.
Empirical thought, in its potentially wide-ranging interest in all that can be experienced, its willingness to not just reflect but to probe and experiment (even before its creation of modern science and technology) has long held an obvious promise of moving beyond the territory and trajectory of our inherited niche of experience and thought—our biologically-bound conceptual history, and an imagination weighed down by ego-reflections.
Unfortunately, however, this impulse for transcendence has put humanity on a track to not exactly escape the confines of inherited tradition and our niche of nature, but to carry them and the whole planet into the dangerous dead-ends of its abstractions. How has this happened?
For starters, one reason for the initial enthusiasm surrounding modern science—especially in its separation from the mystical and metaphysical experimentalism of the Renaissance—was that, unlike any kind of metaphysical or spiritual science, a secular religion of technology can expand the potential control of an elite power structure, and it can do this without challenging the cultural dogma by which control is maintained.
Around the birth of modern science, that dogma was, of course, primarily religious, but while the dogma has morphed over the course of modernity and itself become more secular, the underlying structure of control and belief has only grown more entrenched into every detail of life.7
While the religion of technology had its roots in notions of Christian salvation—of transcendence of the flesh and the philosophies of the monks who preached it—its most important feature is its style of salvation or transcendence, which has little to do with whether it is culturally coded as secular or religious.8
The version of science that emerged and eventually stunted the flowering of syncretism during the Renaissance—much like the version of Christianity that emerged out of the fertile crossroads of the Roman Empire to become a repressive ideology—was not the best nor some vital synthesis, but rather, what was most conducive to an expansion of political power.
The esoteric and philosophical systems that had entered European culture and helped birth the Renaissance, while initially empowering a few elites, ultimately threatened the rigid structures of belief on which any entrenched social power depends. These systems of thought carried a potential for more creative and experimental approaches to a kind of truth and meaning empowering to individuals.
Yet, the mere fact of a philosophy having an empirical quality is not in itself challenging to monolithic power, even a power that depends on rigid beliefs. What is most essential to such power is that the structure of belief, even in its transformation under the pressure of experiment, is not likely to escape the territory of its network of relations, centralized or otherwise.
Because the empiricism and eclecticism of esoteric or occult approaches to truth potentially deterritorialized knowledge, they were a serious threat. They potentially make truth fluid and adaptable to context, rather than requiring everything to orbit around and adapt to it.
A technology-obsessed empiricism, which only experiments with physical things and depends on a controlled relation to them, is not only acceptable to a coercive power that has an easier time controlling things than people (and especially their minds), but it presents such a power with a way around this difficulty and an avenue to unlimited expansion.
The knowledge system that arises requires and ensures that all possible relations to things are relatively fixed at a basic level, even if the things themselves can be subjected to all manner of variation and experiment. This of course can further the control of such a power over both things and ideas, often without the need for explicit repression, as ideas and all myriad of beings become increasingly oriented towards—or inscribed within—the machinery of things and the social relations even more heavily inscribed therein.
It is true, of course, that such consolidation of knowledge can have important benefits. If a path of knowledge accumulation can escape from the limits of cultural values, from not only the narrow focus of insular cultures and eccentric minds but the chaos and confusion that result when they meet, its growth can seem to have a much clearer path and stable foundation. But there are other, ultimately more coherent ways of establishing stability and integration, and a price to pay on the quick road, with its seductive lure of easy power.
The separation of truth from meaning makes meaning an inconsequential matter of individual faith or belief. It can open up a path to greater power beyond what one person or meaning could hold, but through a truth that is mostly confined to furthering the reach of that power, or even simply explaining and justifying its success, trailing behind a technification of everything, an instrumentalization of life that has no concern with any truth beyond what can be assimilated or “proven” by its power.
While in theory, technical knowledge can be applied or channeled in various directions, the intoxication and narrow channel created by the progress of political power goes unchallenged when truth becomes merely its derivative. Under these conditions, all must serve the system. While individuals or social values could conceivably exert some control over the application of the system, if not the direction of its development, how broad is the range of possible values with a horizon of truth tied so tightly to a ground defined by the system?
And while there may be competition over that control, the system itself is never challenged, not as it might have been had knowledge been more fluidly organized around the metaphysical empiricism of some kind of spiritual science, a kind of science that recognizes, or at least experiments with, the primordial medium of meaning—the relations between infinite contexts within which all objects arise.
Yet, it wasn’t just that the metaphysical ideas flooding-in during the Renaissance were disrupting the closed system of Church doctrine, or giving people too much “freedom”. In fact, astrology was hated because it was thought to undermine Christian notions of free-will.9
What esoteric systems really did, especially those like astrology or alchemy, was orient people towards a culture of scientific truth and a view of the material world which was grounded in an experimental metaphysics, grounded in an interplay between truth and context, consciousness and meaning—a metaphysics and meaning which were less literal-minded than what would gel with Church doctrine, or with what would become the expanded regimentation of society arriving with modernity.
Esoteric ideas instigate imaginative and intuitive thinking, which strengthen independent and creative thought. The ideology of modern science, on the contrary, tended to only increase the naive literalism that the Church had worked hard to make the dominant form of Christianity.10
An empiricism of technological experimentation divorced from any empiricism of meaning that transcends it, benefits those invested in a system of literal truth and subjective meaning. Such an empiricism claims a great freedom, but in reality its sense of freedom is tied exclusively to the choices of a set system—to divided and endlessly divisible individuals, to mere variables in the equations of a unified technical power, to a movement limited to the use and navigation of objects (and people) in set relations.
The rise of nominalism (as a restriction of ideas to nominal representations of things is sometimes called in philosophy), oriented both empirical and rationalist strains of thought towards this same narrow track, where contemplating, representing, and manipulating objects—or object-like ideas set or synthesized by a monolithic science of mere appearances— became the dominant horizon of thought’s activity.
Yet, the trajectory of academic philosophy, before the dominance of nominalism and its eventual takeover of thought in modern philosophy, had been on a similar track as that of the esoteric currents of the Renaissance.11
While the notoriously baroque musings of the so-called scholastic philosophers indeed stayed mostly within the safe orbit of religious orthodoxy and ivory tower speculation, they had, nonetheless, before getting left behind in the wake of modern thought, laid much groundwork in the task of breaking metaphysical meaning out of its dogmatic shell, making possible what could have been an unlimited expansion out of the dogma of the middle ages and into modernity, what could have been a deliverance of thought into a larger realm of relations and meaning not defined by their attachment to set things or ideas.12
In a more limited and abstract—yet potentially more liberating way—than the esoteric symbol-systems of the times, this philosophical speculation on the nature of signs opened up thought to the importance and reality of relations. It sowed the seeds for a philosophical understanding of relations as not just ephemeral associations, but an essential aspect to the nature of reality and what we mean by “the real”.
Thinking of all ideas and apprehended objects, first and foremost, not as discrete representations of something more real or bluntly substantial, but as meaningful signs in contexts of relations has revealed itself to be a crucial step in the history of consciousness.13 It is essential for breaking thought out of the insular systems that limit all transcendence of appearances to mere generalizations and abstractions from their assumed form.
Thinking in terms of the infinity of possible relations rather than representing a set truth—whether it is objects that more or less represent the true idea or ideas that more or less represent the real object—opens us up to a larger world foreclosed by the limited freedom of thought’s rooted logical hierarchies, its entrenched sedimentation of generic concepts and limited particulars, its layers of categorical constraints that set a vertical limit on all thought’s permutations, even in its most radical reversals, oppositions, and synthetic extrapolations.14
Unfortunately, the potentially promiscuous violation of traditional hierarchies and categories of knowledge was not realized within the dogmatism of the Christian era. Like the esoteric systems of the time (which worked sometimes creatively and promiscuously with signs and symbols, yet often lacked a clear path to understanding the relational source of their power), academic philosophy’s accounts of signs and relations also could not ultimately free themselves from the limits of traditional frameworks.
The visionary thinking that can create new ideas and symbols, as well as the critical understanding of these as signs of their meaningful relations, are both necessary for culture to maintain a vital structure of knowledge, a structure sensitive to changing conditions and relations.
Even so, even in our day, with the importance of signs and relations being better known and understood, and with creative and even esoteric approaches to philosophy being taken up by influential academic thinkers—the habits of our thinking are difficult to change.15
Thought has a hard time freeing itself from some version of the consciousness we have inherited from the territorial animal mind, from a predisposition towards the most basic level of a bodily consciousness concerned mainly with survival, in other words, with manipulating a biologically and socially conditioned frame of objects.
Meaning is continually rooted back into objects and subjects inscribed within set systems of elements that can be combined or manipulated but not fundamentally transformed16. Even when the limits of such atomism are reached, our science tends to just shift to statistics, rather than risk unearthing the shifty alchemical elements upon which Western science is erected. Even in our highest or most formal abstractions, thought seems to only achieve a limited and frustrated movement within and between fixed positions, between doubt and belief in one rigid frame or another.
Increasingly, however, with the new territories that technology has been opening up to us, the contemporary mind is having difficulty finding any safe ground from which it can believe or doubt, since even doubt needs some standard of stable sense with which it can judge. Judgment itself is losing its productive force, or at least its value relative to the more primordial faculty and need of simply making sense of a strange world.
The Truth of the Relative
“Perspectivism, or scientific relativism, is never relative to a subject: it constitutes not a relativity of truth but, on the contrary, a truth of the relative, that is to say, of variables whose cases it orders according to the values it extracts from them in its system of coordinates …”
-Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari17
As humanity is now fast approaching a world that modern science and thought have not really prepared us to understand, what are we to do? How can humanity make sense of this world which seems to be revealing itself as fundamentally open to whatever we can imagine? Is our planet and its life also something someone imagined? Where does it all begin? Are there ever any definite beginnings?
If not, how can there be any logic of cause or consequence? Wouldn’t every seemingly definite line, whether logical or temporal, be merely an abstraction from an infinite tapestry of implications—from a network of sorts, but one whose threads shoot past every definite node, where every origin, cause, or sequence is merely a myth or infinite imposition, some kind of creative distortion inextricably tied up with the unlimited excess and projections of a bottomless imagination?
If there is not some grounding line of logic or definitive process, does not a universe of relative connections or threads still imply at least some stable sense of things that persists or is even illuminated as those threads are followed and better understood, as thought launches off from any particular line or space, from its territorial infancy into an infinite and open cosmos?
Is it possible that beneath and beyond the quaint island of our crude senses—and the various theories and narratives about what it all means—lies some sense of continuity without which nothing would connect or really make any sense to begin with?
Even if this were possible, wouldn’t any formulation of the truth be a break in that continuity? Wouldn’t any particular truth just be another finite meaning, just another story relative to certain perspectives? Or is there some kind of fractal-like continuity to things, continuing even within every seeming fracture?
If that is the case, then, are the recurring themes that seem to persist throughout the history of cosmology, from the most ancient stories to the most modern and scientific theories of creation, really pointing to some kind of universal truth? How would we know whether any recurring theme or truth is a sign of great significance, or whether it merely shows a lingering bias or attachment to our inheritance?
Could it be, rather, that beneath both the surface differences and similarities, beneath the diverse ways we apply our static ways of thinking, there is not some single story, structure, or origin, but a kind of logic of their relation, of relative creation—of making sense out of whatever sense of things seems to already exist, as the way all things and sense are made? Wouldn’t everything, then, every and any conceivable thing, be some kind of significant sign, some meaningful modification, or even expression of the pattern of everything else?
Wouldn’t any pattern of relations in what we think or sense, give us a clue about some aspect of the truth of everything? Specifically, wouldn’t something of the truth or “origin” of all creation be expressed in any particular creation? And wouldn’t the truth of our own origins or creation be reflected, more or less, in everything we create?
Is it so strange, for starters, to think that life and intelligence, by one mechanism or another, by fate or design, cannot help but reflect and proliferate the truth of its creation, and by extension, all truth, in everything it does—that it cannot help but create worlds within worlds of relation with every new meaning or sense that is made?
Do we not always in some sense pour something of ourselves into and even become what we do, what we create, how we relate, and what we relate to? Does it not make sense to say that life and intelligence not only seed or distribute themselves in all they touch, but also, that the more they do, the more they return to the threads of their prior history? Do we perhaps entwine with and become a part of—even partially “incarnate” within—what we have dreamed or physically created, thus recapitulating, or even, in some manner, entering a process overlapping simultaneously with the event of our own creation?
Could there be some kind of larger, nonlinear logic of overlapping developments, as variations on every thing or idea become increasingly more individuated and uniquely connected to others, where every idea can find a world to suit it or form one for itself, possibly evolving to a point where it has, in effect, looped back around to discover and understand the same “family” of creative problems upon which it was itself founded?
Could the fragmented segments of every logical line, all be pointing, not to a merely circular logic of inescapable relativism and nihilism, but of endlessly overlapping cycles within cycles, of recursive returns orbiting not some static nodal point, but rather infinite variations? There would always be, then, some kind of inevitable return built into the idea of everything, some kind of reckoning as the end of or link between every process.
Would there not also be, specifically in the case of explicitly living processes, a culmination as something’s level of knowledge and power to create new individuations becomes commensurate with what could be considered, at the least, a significant variation on, if not a kind of reflection, of the historical creation of its own unique context?
Is it so strange to consider a logic of, on the one hand, a creator becoming mesmerized by and pulled into identification with what it creates, and on the other, the created becoming creative itself? What greater sense can we make of this theme of beings being eternally “thrown” into or just finding themselves already in the middle of some vividly embodied process or context, with what came before more or less obfuscated?
It isn’t difficult to imagine how this forces a creative adaptation, an ever-more dynamically coherent imagining of the meaning of things, a creating and imagining becoming even more vivid than a being’s inherited embodiment, eventually becoming vivid enough to make them the conscious dreamers and architects of their incarnation, for good or ill.
Is all of this so far-fetched to fathom, even if only as a strange question concerning the resonance this common metaphysical theme has with the emerging techno-social context of the 21st century?18 Are we perhaps now fast approaching one of these crucial points, approaching the possibility of a power to take conscious part in the multiple dimensions of a larger cosmos, perhaps more fully joining the cosmic game determining the structure of time, and the possibilities for future incarnation?
Of course, the “we” here is no doubt fraught with complexity. Even if the time-bending possibilities that science fiction has been exploring are already happening at some level of human reality or of the deepest levels of its secret science, as some claim, there are obviously vast discrepancies in access to any kind of knowledge and technology approaching the level of “determining the structure of time” in some technical way.19 Most of us are unlikely to gain knowledge of, let alone the opportunity to use at will anything like the god-like power of manipulation being suggested. Not anytime soon.
The same goes for determining the possibilities for future incarnations. Even if one grants, if not reincarnation in its crudely conceived form, then some continuity of life, or at least, some stake in the future evolution of the human body, it still is difficult to imagine what the body will do or will look like in just a century or two given current developments, let alone seeing the greater structure of evolution, or playing some role in its destiny.
But this kind of detailed determination and techno-manipulation is only one kind of game, and perhaps, not all it’s cracked up to be. Perhaps the game of time is not as over our heads as it may first appear. Perhaps the bodies we have are already far down the line of an organic development that potentially rivals or surpasses the kind of technology we can build outside or on top of it without some understanding of the deeper dimensions of wisdom already within it.
Perhaps what matters more to our future than access to any technical development or lofty prescience, is tapping the experience already stored within these bodies, a wisdom and connection that can be unlocked in ways that are becoming more broadly understandable and applicable as humanity evolves its creative cognition—its cognition capable of bridging worlds and the parts of ourselves that correspond to them20.
Technology will continue to escalate, whether the wisdom to use it well is there or not. But it should be said that, despite the dangers and restrictions of techno-science, technological evolution has been one of the most productive prods to modern thought and imagination.
While this evolution is quickly becoming an existential threat, it is also poised now to offer, if not some possibility for renewal, than at least a dark mirror that can reflect what we are capable of with the technology we have always had—these mysterious organic vehicles we inhabit and the worlds they hold inside. If some part of our culture could begin to understand what these bodies and minds are capable of, then perhaps we could grow beyond the alluring spells that the prosthetic crutches of our external technology, and the mind beholden to it, seduce us with.
So what does this understanding entail? What makes this wisdom of the body—and the imaginative thinking it can produce—any different than technical knowledge? Is it just a matter of different technological types, say, the superiority of the analog over the digital?21
Or is the wisdom of the body superior because it is somehow incapable of reduction or abstraction into any kind of technological appropriation—something inseparable from the infinite connections branching from its history, something that can be temporarily appropriated, its vehicle or medium replicated, or hybridized, but not really understood without being lived, without merging with its multiple dimensions of meaning and existence?
Yet, as one may wonder, is this just a confused conflation of levels of our being, an imaginative projection of spiritual ideas onto a physical organism mostly composed of various limited contexts of chemical, biological, or ecological function? Doesn’t one rightly think of the body as precisely what binds thinking to practical mechanisms, discrete states of affairs, and the ego endeavors easily replicated in basic technology, while it is the abstract intellect, and an artificial intelligence based on it, that can soar beyond the simple mechanisms of limited embodied contexts?
Our thinkers have indeed had good reason to think of abstraction as the best way to extrapolate from limited to broader or even universal contexts. But if any certain context of life is not just a particular mode of some general theme or idea, but a node in a greater nexus of multiple paths and realities, abstracting from the particular to the general does not necessarily lead to greater or larger contexts. Greater context would be found, rather, through the enrichment of increased relations, not a reduction to some essential or broadly applicable core.
Granted, every relation or determination limits things in some sense, but it also extends things as it contextualizes them; it gives them new life and meaning. Similarly, by giving the novel elements of a singular life as it is lived some kind of overlapping context, life in a body provides a richness of context impossible within the process of abstraction characteristic of knowledge stored as mere information or representation.
In fact, by shedding context through the abstraction process, it is easy to imagine how this loss is precisely what leads us to dead ends, into a deformation of the continuity of living processes—not only to intellectual sterility, but biological as well, as life becomes dominated by the abstract intellect. Repression and disconnection from other contexts are inevitable in such a mode, as the world inevitably falls under the dominion of the chosen system of abstractions.
Yet, surely we cannot do without some amount of abstraction. How can we connect things or change from one context to another without some kind of reduction or imposition? In other words, how can we make sense of an always-changing world without either losing what is important or allowing it to prevent growth into the new? And what is it about the body and its contexts that suggests a different route?
Isn’t there always some lingering bias, or at least some preservation of context without which nothing could be experienced or understood? Is the body a valuable ground then simply because it gives us such a context, a context that it shares with other living beings? Or are those contexts, when treated as a static ground, doomed to be reductive and artificial? Are they fated to be just more generic abstractions from confused composites of earthly experiences, subsuming all within a bare logic of life, perhaps an even greater prison in its concrete detail than a more formal abstraction?
What else is there? Where is the thread that connects rather than the tie that binds? Isn’t any particular form of life inescapably grounded in a certain spin on the idea of existence, imposing its eccentric but familiar pattern upon a vast and beginningless cosmos through its nest of rhythms and regulations?
Is the meaning of any particular life or form of being found in its specific set of qualities, a mere adding of definitive determinations to some general idea of life or being, like branches of some vast tree?22 Or is the idea and meaning of life, of being, not really a general theme or grounding idea at all, but rather the very act of standing out, of expressing some difference, some singular relation of relations, not a particular relation to a hierarchy of more general categories of being, but a relation to everything and anything?
Is biological life, then, the ultimate technology, precisely because it is a distributed system that stretches not just across nodes in an abstract space of discrete information, but over eons of time and the infinities of imaginable possibility? Can it overlap contexts in such a way that memory is fluidly distributed in relation to this infinite, rather than frozen in general representations, or distributed across limited information as artificial intelligence does?
Does life not only store but create meaning as it does so, relaying information in such a way that engenders new forms and connections, making possible an optimization of both individual freedom and larger-scale coordination? Do the rhythms of life and the boundary of death that is their partner, also ensure that memory does not burden any single life until it can inhabit these more fluid rhythms?
If so, how can this greater meaning be engaged without obfuscating its fluid ground with the stagnant forms of the cultural mind? How can culture extend and connect the levels of our being rather than—as it mostly does in our age—reducing them to a knot of contradictory subjectivity, at odds with its various selves and with the world at large?
An obvious answer might be that, since most of culture is not really concerned with these other layers of being, one should forget about the hopeless masses and their limited ideas. Yet even when there are subcultures dedicated to the more or less esoteric task of connecting to the deeper threads of life, contemporary subjectivity still has to fend with a world full of diverse kinds of meaning, knowledge, and a subjectivity inescapably tied up with them. When such subcultures do not help one make relative sense out of the greater world, but merely return to the techniques of premodern culture, they seldom produce much more than cults and cult followers.
Perhaps that is in no small part because the greater mind is not content to leave any being, world, or idea completely behind. Nonetheless, when facing the diverse relativity of the contemporary world, one is hard-pressed to understand or harmonize with it without some kind of radical reduction or devaluation of the world and its conflicting ideas in favor of some relatively isolated ideology. Without that reduction, without the grounding frames of some niche of identity or belief—civil, cultic, or otherwise—one seems to be left with a cynical utilitarianism.
For without a definitive ground of truth or a niche of values, why would one line of determinations, developments, applications, or technology, be inherently any better or more true than another, except in how it relates to some particular situation? Granted, some lines are more effective at achieving their own explicit ends or stated values. But there is no end to the ends to which any line can be supplemented and redirected.
So, directed to where? Doesn’t this relativity just collapse back onto a practical ground, a withdrawal from the delusion of higher meanings beyond our earthly existence and the values that arise from it? Or does this nihilism merely result from the infantile incapacity to live and think outside the womb of a closed context, of habitual rhythms and the generic abstractions we lay down upon them?
Is it so difficult to adapt to a changing and open context of life? Do our ends really need final ends or foundational objects—do they need the grounding clarity and contained contexts of earthly life and subjectivity—to maintain their meaning and sense for us?
Even if our earthly habits and values are not representations of a clear practical ground of basic reality, neither are they completely limited and local in implication or effect. A nihilistic relativism of mere subjective truth and isolated meaning makes little sense to anyone not from a culture kept in perpetual childhood by separating truth and meaning—or subjects and objects—to begin with.
Even if the threads of implication are ever-changing and therefore bar any absolute grounding, they still have patterns of connection that transcend any particular value, practical or otherwise. Only someone disconnected from practical learning, or a mind emotionally reacting to the dissolution of naive absolutes would claim there is no truth.
Still, where does that leave us? Does the existence and effectiveness of practical learning and its connection to the experience of life and limitation imply there are some kind of foundational boundaries—if not between concrete things then at least between processes—distinctions that could ground our knowledge in some basic sense of what it is supposedly about? Is the reality of anything so dependent on the deep well of its significance and variable relations?
In other words, what is the relation of truth to meaning? How can there be truth if there is something other, infinite, and seemingly alien in every supposedly distinct thing? Does this not make life—and therefore knowledge—always a kind of dance, not just between the ground and horizon of our thinking, but between the very reality of our world and alternative arrangements of its structure and significance?
If this is the case, the more important question is not about the mere existence of truth, but this thing that seems to eternally complicate it with the complexity of relations. What is this mystifying factor, this “meaning”, “structure”, or “significance”? What is anything for that matter, if all things have their ground in this variable structure?
How can there even be a stable sense to things, if there is no basic being, truth, or substance of things uncontaminated by this openness to mystery, and to which all meaning can relate? Doesn’t the meaning of being or the being of meaning collapse into some kind of murky abyss of variable contexts and relations?
Even if meaning is not simply the dead-end of definitive denotation, if existence is indeed fundamentally relational, isn’t the meaning of something in a situated context still something that can be known definitively, objectively? Otherwise, isn’t meaning and even truth unavoidably vague and subjective? Or are there other options?
Is it so difficult to understand how every context could be structured without ever being definitive, closed, or even grounded in some naturalized simplicity? Does our language of separate subjects existing, thinking, or acting in a world of definite objects, trap us within its limited horizon of dull dualities and stark oppositions, forever barring us from the real sense of things as aspects and modifications of other things without end?
Or is this language barrier only an impasse to the extent that we take our meanings too literally, that is, when some particular meaning, some truncated string of words, or the form of some closed cluster of particular relations, is generalized and projected rather than extrapolated into variations with others?
What is lost when a particular perspective isn’t just taken as a relative starting point, but instead becomes taken as the limit, ground, or standard, when some meaning abstracted from one situation becomes not just a seed of the past sprouting into new life and situations, but a continually-cloned law or dull expectation? What price is paid when we hold too tightly to our forms of knowledge, refusing the dance with Dionysus by forcing the changing rhythm of relations into a monotonous march?
What is the alternative? Doesn’t our language, with its ground in more or less general or particular meanings, make a conflation of whatever works for us in some narrow practical context with a grounding truth inevitable? Then how could we do otherwise than to build abstract knowledge on the ground of particular and instrumentally-biased appearances?
How can we expand from the known into the unknown without taking some form of our brute biases with us? Could meaning shed its origins in the representations of conventional and habitual reality, in biases that linger on even in the evolution of language and knowledge, and which chain it to the same cycles of stale reproduction?
Could we instead think of our world of particular facts and states of affairs—and the generalities they assume and reinforce—as but an obfuscated and stulted representation of an infinite ground of meaning itself, a meaning both open yet always in the process of being structured? Could meaning then be a descriptive and suggestive word for “being” itself, a word for what everything actually “is”—implying, perhaps, that ideas are not just simple representations of things or thoughts about things, nor are they a discrete attribute or essence of them, of things or events, but rather run through them as their inescapable but infinitely amendable reality, relating and constituting them in various ways?
Indeed, then, would not the discrete distinctions defining everything be a matter of perspective? Would not any actual distinct thing be primarily a kind of relational pattern within some kind of meaningful environment or context—however potentially infinite and radically variable that context may be—a context or milieu that makes each thing what it “is”?
Truth as an Endlessly Elusive Question or Infinite Connective Tissue
“…one must make relations the hallucination point of thought”
-Gilles Deleuze and Claire Parnet23
What, then, are the limits of anything, if they are not primarily substantial or spatial, but relational, if they do not so much contain or bound a thing, as much as they channel a specific potential for meaningful relation and modification along the lines of every unique thing’s particular flavor of the infinite possibilities of existence?
What then does a thing become as its pattern or purpose changes? Something completely new and alien even to itself? Is there a definite point when one thing becomes a wholly different thing?
Or, if meaning and relations are vitally fundamental, is reality something akin to a cosmic word-find puzzle, a maze or menagerie of meanings without a definitive set of boundaries or numbers of dimensions—an ever-morphing pun on every given situation, where beings as meanings overlap in their various contexts and environments in which they can distinguish and discover, themselves and each other—where the alien and infinite live and breathe within the most seemingly familiar and knowable things?
One might think though, that if all things are just meanings, would there not still be important lines between one meaning, being, or context and another, even if these lines depend on further contexts? Is there not some fundamental discreteness, even if embedded within connections? Or, if every line, every boundary, is always already a relation, does it follow that any seemingly foundational structure is inherently open to alternative arrangements, not just along the stream of time or changing context, but overlapping each context or every moment’s apparent structure?
Is every set or separation of things—or even some complementary combination of discrete meanings—not just part of a mesh of set relations and variations, but always just one selective net strewn across the infinite sea of more or less developed ideas and realities, connecting and creating all things in various ways?
Would not then every thing be potentially everything else just seen from different points of view—would not the word-find puzzle of existence really be, in the last analysis, one word, which our language and contexts can only ever catch fragments of?
Is the proper growth of knowledge, then, just an expansion of the edges of any puzzle-frame? Or is it more of an enrichment of its overlapping contours, a constructive interpenetration of the cages of meaning, an opening up of new space in the wild war of ideas so that they may find a less repressive harmony?
With the right understanding of a ground of meaning, might this explosion of difference even reveal how everything we could think or imagine, how the infinitely different forms and possible meanings of existence, merely further specify, in a more or less revealing way, what is ultimately the same sense of a relational being sounding through everything, an infinitely iterative idea viewed at different points in its boundless and centerless process of speaking the word of existence?
Seeing things in this manner, could we possibly and finally move on from naive arguments attempting to ground truth—to anxiously decide or fix meaning to some particular context or concern, or to decide once and for all either the ultimate reality and knowability or unknowability of this or that thing—that is, to know the definitive truth or limits of things in themselves?
Is it not time to move thinking beyond the anxious questions chasing their tail in the hopes of a firm foundation—especially as thinking becomes more conscious that there is none—and embrace the infinite adventure of creating and developing meaning? Can thinking finally forge its higher fate, finding and forming the most relevant truths, morphing its biases into creative connections, and leading culture to the frontiers of an endless horizon of reality, a reality whose limits and negations are always provisional?
This is not to say that the foundations and limits no longer matter, for to create meaning that is necessary and relevant to the great task of building and evolving the structure of existence, one needs always one eye on the foundations we cannot help but create, as well as looking to the horizon, especially to the pressure it applies to the ground of meaning as they both shift or demand reformation.
One just need no longer decide determinately between the true and false so much as alchemically transform what is present under the pressure of its infinite implications, fusing what things seem to mean with what else they could mean—yet done with a mind soberly grounded in what makes the best sense, and what may require new, additional, or critical context.
But are these distinctions themselves just another attempt at grounding all meaning and therefore foreclosing certain opposing meanings? Or more innocuously, are they just philosophical hand-waving? Are they just impractical and indulgently ponderous equivocations with no real relevance to life and society? Why think about such things? Does it really affect the world or the meaning we make to ground them in this or that philosophy? What is the significance of this question of being able to definitively determine the context for or distinctions between anything?
Would we see or build a different world if we stopped assuming that proper thinking will carve it up unavoidably or naturally along the definitive joints of nature—that we inhabit a world of given things whose nature may need to be properly determined, but whose reality is singular and fundamental?
Without such an assumption, are we doomed after all to lose our sense of truth and slide into relativistic chaos? Or are such philosophical concerns as inconsequential as philosophy itself has become in our age? Is philosophy perhaps the problem? Or more broadly, is the need to give everything some kind of unified conceptual foundation mucking up the flow of spontaneous discovery and creation?
Or could it be that a more conscious sensitivity to our unavoidable bias, to the pros and cons of every distinction we root our life and thought within, helps ensure that what grows out of them does not take us down paths full of unnecessary confusion and suffering? Does the proper use of reason demand it be secured to some absolute foundation, or does it function better when divining its ground amidst the ambiguous signs of shifting time?
Does tying a phenomenon to a definitive explanation or some single cause make it understandable, or does it sever life and meaning from truly vital knowledge? Does every act need some responsible agent, or would we do better to shift from blame and judgment to emphasizing a creative connection to the myriad reasons for and in everything?
Would such multiplicity leave us without the possibility for justice, for knowledge, for a soul, since all relations would become free from any final frame, free to take wing across the kaleidoscope of possible mutations of meaning? Is it inevitably confusing if the comfortable lines of causality and consequence become inexorably entangled with the ambiguities of meaning and overlapping intents?
Can we not just simply find the frame, or form and reform the background of meaning along with its essence in a straightforward pragmatic way? Is this not what we do already, more or less, organically laying down the foundations and definitions of things as we go along in life, without concern for such esoteric musings on the mutable structure of reality?
If so, then indeed philosophy should continue to do as it mostly seems content to do—simply oversee its own destruction, making sure the arrogant residue of big ideas is wiped clean from its lingering contamination of the free flow of practical research. But could it be that we have built the structure of our words and their meaning in ignorant ways, in ways that determine nearly every flight of creation and discovery in unconscious ways? Could we perhaps hew a more beneficial path through the problems of life and the paradoxes of knowledge if we were more conscious of what we were doing?
Is that possible? Or is it foolish to try and impose more intention on the process of cultural development? Is science the best we can do—an elite of experts trained to decide all the “real” questions, with personal meaning merely falling in its wake?
What could be better than the will of scientific knowledge to transcend the personal and idiosyncratic and find some at least pragmatically stable ground? Is it not the most realistic and democratic solution to ground meaning in some approximation of definitive relations that are useful to us and that we can determine with the proper scientific attitude?
But then we would surely just say that meaning is not only less than primordial, we would also say that it is not essential. We would no doubt say, as most do in a culture enthralled with techno-science, that meaning is a byproduct of something more primordial, something that may not be capable of absolute determination, but which exists nonetheless, if only as an ideal of impartial knowledge, like “truth”?
Of course, it would not be radically contrary to this paradigm to say that meaning is something important, perhaps even the essential consequence or activity of all things, but still implying that things, or at least some essential being, or pure truth exist prior—and perhaps also consequent to and containing—any kind of meaningful relation.
But does this not just make meaning and life an eccentric curiosity added to generic processes, or a generic being that could just do just as well without it? Does this not imply that all meaningful becoming is just some ephemeral middle term of existence, perhaps some beautifully impermanent spiritual reflection, but not fundamentally formative, effectual, or substantial?
Any thinking that prioritizes things over relations is hard-pressed to do otherwise. At its limit, it could, perhaps, allow meaning to be thought of as grounded in—or even synonymous with—the very process of truth formation and the world’s becoming, relating different definite products together—giving us a more or less fluid frame, perhaps with no primordial or at least permanent substance, but a substantial and determinable reality nonetheless.
But is there not something insincere or inconsequential about all that, like believing in wonders, but wonders tucked safely away in the mysteries of consciousness, a deeper meaning over the horizon beyond the knowable world of definite truth and measurable effects?
Are these the limits and lines of thought we must extend to secure a coherent basis for our knowledge and institutions in these times of radical uncertainty? But then indeed what is the point of philosophy? To merely justify and explain away the limitations and problems in our understanding as a ground of radical becoming—perhaps shoring up some notion of truth against a tide of uncertainty—but not significantly helping form the structure of our knowledge? What, then, is the point of anything if life and meaning are just temporary rearrangements of a basically meaningless or unchangeable substance?
What happens if instead, we go all the way with meaning—and therefore unbounded relations—being thought of as fundamental? Would our sense of substance, cause, and consequence shift so radically as to leave us in chaos? Or can the infinite and radically diverse sea of alternative realities and seemingly contradictory or paradoxical meanings provide a connective tissue, a kind of dynamically stable sense that is more productive, illuminating, and ultimately more coherent than either the dogma of tradition or the mere inertia of practical processes could ever provide?
Even if this is the case, the practical appeal of trusting the momentum of the machine is strong as it seems to grow more and more organized, even if that organization comes at the price of less and less freedom. The danger is often missed when we believe the machine is simply a product of people, or perhaps of a developmental process that—since the ascendance of science or democracy—seems to level out any wayward ambition. There is also the seduction of a meaning or purpose served up ready-made as an inevitable destiny inherent to this process of human social or technological “evolution”.24
But if this process is only a limited cluster of reproducing or at most restrictively ramifying relations whose stability depends on enforcing a particular range of perspectives, the positive value of that process is far from assured and cries out for other, even radically other contexts— new values and relations that can overlap and complicate this overly simplistic picture of the world’s meaning.
Yet, even if we break out of our conditioned reality, what then? Even if we can somehow access radically new perspectives, are they doomed to be merely vague notions and temporary experiences? How can they be practically incorporated into the progress of our knowledge and society?
Leaving the myth of modernity behind not only raises the question of whether any conceived progress is just a myth, but also: who or what even are the subjects or agents of the world’s becoming? Can we even affect a process so complex and seemingly full of a life of its own?
What even is a “process” when the familiar structure of our language is not taken as fundamental, either in a naive projection onto reality, or as a critical limitation of—and inevitable foundation to—our knowledge? What are the terms of a process when the idea or even the reality of a subject acting on objects, or any agent and its actions, is seen as just one kind of convenient abstraction or selective extension of other relations—relations upon relations, without any definitive ends to frame meaning or exclusively determine a process, as our language seems to comfortably do for us?
Does seeing any determinate thing as a selection and formation of a kind of meaning, necessitate that these biased selections are the origin of all we think we know—that our reality is determined by some impoverished artifacts of language or consciousness from which we cannot escape?
Or, as suggested earlier, is this cognitive process a version of the same meaning-making that is the universe in all its modes—a beginningless, endless, infinity, necessitating limitation, needing the myths of things like particular meaning, stories with beginnings and endings, subjects and their objects, and all the processes or purposes relating them, for there to be anything at all?
Wouldn’t the point then be not to escape from our limitations, nor to anxiously question the conditions of our reality and consciousness, but, rather, to critically build on our limits and conditions—to extrapolate on them certainly, but not subject everything to their trajectory?
Can we not, instead, expand our knowledge in conscious creation, opening up the polarity of every process, pulling all subjects and objects—and all seeming causes and their effects—up into the singular stream of joyful sense-making, freeing the ground of things to dance with this line of flight as it traverses across and links all binaries in infinitely overlapping trajectories—that is, in the creative opportunities crisscrossing through all directions of time and possibility?
Though still one might wonder, where would any of this leave “truth”? Is it ever definitive, at least in the moment, or is every moment infinitely split by these trajectories, and so foundationally open? And if open—that is, not separated from relations and meaning—does this mean that the reasons given for anything must be amorphous or arbitrarily selected? What about “reason”? For it to function, must it be a matter of definite truth, with meaning a mere peripheral addition—a cloud of uncertain relations and change attached to a bedrock of “particular” truth, like the way atomic structure is so often poorly imagined?25
Or are truth and reason, perhaps, more like the connective tissue in the organism of the universe, building links and stable structures of shared sense in the sea of infinite meaning, much like organic structure builds coherence within the medium of water in life?26
Redirecting Questions on Foundations
“History progresses not by negation and the negation of negation, but by deciding problems and affirming differences. It is no less bloody and cruel as a result. Only the shadows of history live by negation” -Gilles Deleuze27
Recurring fears and questions about truth and relativity endlessly hamper the potential flight of creative thought once it begins to loosen away from its territorial binds. To summarize the most relevant attempts to hedge the implications of a ground of infinite meaning, one could say: is “meaning” simply our—or possibly anything’s—relations to other beings or things given from some point of view? Is it simply an ephemeral effect, an arbitrary or biased arrangement of some basic material order of events and their concrete causes and connections, a web of material relations that are the only real basis for everything?
Or is meaning, perhaps going a little further, more of a middle term to existence, the engine of its becoming, the impulse to its development and complexification, an impulse which may grow and come to determine more and more of the reality from which it emerged? Or, going all the way, is meaning not only in itself both discovery and creation, both formed and formative, both what everything is and what everything does—that is, is it not only the central activity and ultimate product of existence—but essentially unbound and without definitive relations or margins?
How can that be? How can meaning be both central and without definitive boundaries? If one understands meaning not as some single grounding denotation (this means this), nor an overarching thread or loop of singular significations (this means this, which means this, which means this, etc., like a dictionary), or even as the open-ended nature of every process (this means this now, but could mean something else later or in another context), but as radically open or infinite to the core, then doesn’t this undermine the very idea of a process with any kind of core agent, substance, or center of activity?
How then can anything be more fundamental than anything else, unless by prioritizing meaning one means to emphasize not one thing over another but their relations over their isolated identities? To say that meaning is fundamental, could it not just be a way of illustrating that the structure of existence is not one of radically exclusive categories, like being and not-being—a way of saying that being or truth has no ultimate negation, no absolute other against which it gains its distinction?
How then can anything, including meaning itself, mean anything without some opposing distinction? What about meaninglessness? What about emptiness? What about just some kind of material core or definitive division of truth and error that can resist the excesses of meaning-making? Does calling meaning fundamental negate these things, or can it reveal something about their relations to each other?
It should be obvious that marking an absolute other or opposition is not the only way to make a meaningful distinction. But even if reality is not radically disconnected from or beyond what we call meaning, what grounds are there for making it synonymous with being itself? For even following this logic of inclusion, no thing or idea is outside all reality. Why prioritize any meaning or understanding of meaning as fundamental? Isn’t that the whole point in emphasizing meaning, to not turn something particular into something general that can bar other interpretations? Why not just be humble and point out how useful the idea is in some broad way?
It is true that unlike some particular threads of meaning, the concept of meaning can be more easily applied or extended indefinitely to include or cover-over, to connect or colonize everything—indeed imagined as synonymous with truth or existence itself—but this doesn’t mean it is the real, or the truth of everything—that there really is nothing other than it. It doesn’t mean it is more important or fundamental than what appears to, if not limit or negate, at least offer some kind of contrast, some kind of parallel or overlapping infinity.
And if we must have some kind of firm foundation of understanding, there are, of course, more general categories and qualities we could take as being fundamental, concepts that don’t have the exclusive connotations of something so particular like “meaning”. Why privilege a problematic word with such subjective implications over something basic like “being”, or “substance”, or something devoid of all specificity like “emptiness”?
Is it not more humbling and potentially helpful to the ongoing task of vigilance towards metaphysical closure to negate the finality of foundations, rather than relate the fundamental to something so relative like meaning? Why not affirm the transcendent—at least something beyond particular conceptions of meaning, or beyond any concept or meaning at all, at least one that we are capable of?
It is true that every negation or transcendence of meaning still only has any sense relative to our meanings as some kind of limit. Granted, these categories are still a kind of meaning to us, but ostensibly they point to something that exists, if not wholly outside some relation to us, then at least extends beyond our conceptions of it. Just because we can perhaps extend our meanings to encompass anything, or at least account for what is beyond them, it doesn’t mean there is no beyond them, or that our accounting is anything but a pale reflection.
What we call meaning can conceivably have little to do with anything fundamental in the universe. Every line of reason or experience may point to the fact that nothing is wholly transcendent of anything else, but things can certainly be very different from each other. Just because we (or anything in the universe) seem to have no way to approach anything else outside of a specific relation or context within which it can be meaningfully approached or known, and therefore is in some sense determined by—and in some sense essentially related to—what it relates or relates to, this doesn’t mean all relations are equally essential to something, or that things have no reality outside of their relations. But what would that reality be?
Indeed, having possible relations doesn’t mean that something is exclusively defined by them. Having a reality outside of any particular set of relations does not equate to having a reality outside of all relations, but that doesn’t mean it can’t exist. We can certainly imagine something as existing outside of all relations. But isn’t this process of abstraction always just a relative isolation?
Again, while “meaning” or “relation” would not have much meaning as words if they did not have some kind of edge or other to compare to or relate, every edge or other is always specific to a context, or in other words, to another relation. Having such an edge for a specific meaning or relation, even for the concepts of meaning and relation, does not necessitate that meaning and relation cannot be infinite, that they must be essentially “outside” something else, like something more basic to being. For the inside/outside distinction is just another contextual meaning and relation. Some relations can be considered more fundamental or “substantial” within the context of others which define the relevant boundaries.
Admittedly though, one can conceive of some meaning, really any relationally-defined thing or idea, but especially something open or ambiguous, as being capable of grounding an infinite extension along its own lines, and thereby being led to say that everything in the universe is like this thing. So one could start anywhere with anything and say the same thing, that every idea or thing is a potential ground for everything else, giving us infinite “infinities”, or unbounded lines of extrapolation with different relative qualities but no absolute boundaries.
This is the power of ideas and the tradition of thinking of things as in essence ideas—they are all capable of infinite extension, especially as they connect and become each other; they are all capable of occupying the same “space”, all capable of relating to—and with some imagination, becoming an essential truth about—anything.
So doesn’t this just point to the fact that while the concept of meaning or ideas may be a specific meaning or idea—and everything specific is limited when conceived as a thing in itself, like an object in space—when conceived as a relation, every specific thing is an infinite meaning. If this is not obvious, it just points to the habit we have of spatializing or fixing distinctions, a problem even or especially with some fixed foundation between the absolute and relative, or the finite and infinite. For every finite thing is essentially the infinite possible relations of that thing to everything else.
If the universe is not a prison of mere sensual recognition and conceptual representation, but an open system of meaning-making growing through the stability of sense formed across diverging relations, then every finite thing is indeed also the infinite—a reflection, more or less, of every other thing.
Isn’t, then, again, each attempt at synthesizing an identity, either of a part or whole, just different framings of an impossible-to-transcend infinity of interconnections viewed from different starting points? Isn’t the infinite proper merely a finite thing opened up to the unboundedness of a relational universe, and consequently, perhaps just a word for the groundless entanglement of any particular thing with the unbounded contexts of any possible kind, not just what we call meaning? Then, once again, why fundamentally or critically qualify being at all?
Isn’t calling being anything fundamentally, just stubbornly entrenching some bias that would be better rendered aesthetically and with awareness of its relativity? Or is bias unavoidable, even in its attempted negation? Is the answer a humble relativism of personal poetics? Or is that only the beginning of a greater truth of the relative built within an evolving sense of the contexts and conditions of our world?
Does privileging this word “meaning”, or perhaps its synonyms like value, sense, or significance, as a ground of sorts perhaps undercut some of the bias towards trenchant distinctions already baked into the usual basic categories of existence and emptiness, being and becoming, and all the confusion of something being absolutely true, real, or present vs. not being these things—or in other words “being” anything at all, since saying something “is” really has more to do with a fundamentally meaningful distinction of value than some necessary inclusion in some privileged order of existence?
Even the absence of being is still real and significant; even the absence of meaning is still meaningful. Nonsense hides a greater sense. The insignificant is only relatively so, and more easily kept in mind as relative than the belief in absolute non-existence or falsity.
There are indeed consequences to privileging meaning in all contexts, especially over something like truth. But understanding truth as the coherent fabric of meaning—as a structuring connective thread that conditions and contextualizes the infinity of meaning, rather than as a universal structure that grounds all meaning—has revolutionary consequences in thought and life.
It frames all distinctions as relations, not fundamentally as separate solitary things or their qualities devoid of context. It guarantees, with the force of all reason, that even if our particular meanings are basically in “error”, or distorted reflections of a deeper truth beyond our conception, they cannot be radically other than the truth—that the truth cannot conceivably be separate from any and all relation, even as it is never contained by them.
In other words, the seeming limits or negations of meaning—or really of anything—are just the limitations of any particular meaning, of particularity itself as it fails to abstract into relations that can extend and connect it, thus falling into the shadow of negation or the encroaching emptiness of increasing generality.
In contrast, understanding limits as relations makes them avenues of expansion and transformation. It turns them into a relatively negative part of the positive content of finite structure that an infinite existence would need for there to be anything at all. It suggests that all limits are relative, that they are always the apparent condition for the experience of something particular and singular, but never a general condition for all experience.
For if all negations are just contextual limitations, they are in some sense just ways of making “space” for the possibilities of ever-new meaning within all things, even as particular meanings are limited and determined within a specific context. Hence the existence of space itself and the discrete boundaries within it, which together serve as a medium for generating novelty, a medium not possible in a universe without some kind of shadow of disparity, or at least, not without its possibility, without a world like ours as its essential margin or dark frontier.
The lack or inscrutability of meaning as well as the clash and resistance between meanings—like what is so characteristic of life lived among the vast negations of space and the brutality of spatial existence—are precisely what fulfills the possibility of a meaningful existence, an existence not inherently doomed forever to the confinement and overbearing determination of a merely factual world, of a life lived without death and the meaning it makes possible.
However, it does still stand to reason that meaning could just be one particular quality of existence that happens to have importance for us, and indeed could potentially be entangled with everything, but is not essential to every corner of existence.
While this is true of meaning in the restricted sense often given to it as a quality of “consciousness”—as a value to some specific subject or agent—such meaning could be seen as just an extrapolation from the concept or sense of significance, distinction, or relation itself, essential to any conceivable reality or ordered activity, short of the idea of complete chaos, or blunt factuality. But these are just opposing generic abstractions that reflect the truth of abstraction itself.
A substance without structure or relation is really nothing at all, or perhaps it is everything at once. It is the all taken as some abstract essence. It is everything and nothing because these are so only in a relation that collapses into a seemingly transcendent absolute being, an absolute other to every relative limit, an eternal sign of any being’s (which is all being’s) relative freedom from the bounds of particular relations and becomings.
With all this in mind, it should be obvious at least that meaning is best not thought of as simply some particular thing that is applied to something else, like for instance when a feeling or concept is projected onto a seemingly basic material situation.
While conceiving it instead as the foundation of particular things has its dangers and misunderstandings, it helps undermine the tendency to think that outside or prior to meaning there is some neutral valueless structure or objective material which it appropriates, when in fact every substance already carries some structure of a variable sense from previous contexts and processes to which it refers and from which it replays without end.
To reiterate, then, meaningful sense is a significant modification of other modifiers, all others to some degree or another, since the finite is not radically other than the infinite. The infinite consequently always and everywhere has something of the finite, some inherent trace of positive potential and therefore some limitations in its possible effects and applications, some stability of sense, some uneven distribution in its pattern of relating, and consequently, some significance, even if that significance is always seen within contexts and variations which suggest no limit to the possibilities of modifying those limits.
This suggests that meaning is not primarily a cognitive nor a material operation, for such a distinction would be little more than a confused copy of the more primary distinction between levels of abstraction within a context, not between some base level considered concrete or material, with further abstractions considered more universal, general, merely mental, or possibly less real. To be is to mean something, so all meaning is real to the extent that it is capable of consistent connection within some environment or context, and ultimately across new and different milieus.
So to be, to mean, is indeed to become, to be open, to enter the stream of significance—to relate or reflect something to something else in some way relevant to any other thing, to emerge between things in a way that colors their meaning, and in some sense modifies everything else through the pattern of reflections.
Is the universe in truth made up, then, not of any fundamental stuff or core determinable event, but of the meaningful relations generated between things, which are themselves just more structures of interactive relations? One might still complain that saying things are just structures of relations is a restrictive obfuscation of their substantiality or their individuality, their ability to maintain their consistency through changing conditions and new structures of relations.
Could this lead to a reduction of their other qualities into mere peripheral products of some supposedly more real level of “structure” or “meaning”? Or is it merely a way of saying that any quality, identity, or substance, becomes what is within a context of dynamic relations and interaction?
Without some essential core, how can anything resist its inscription in any desired meaning or motion? As has been said, while anything may go in theory, not everything goes the same ways.28 A relational universe doesn’t mean that everything is equally related or compatible. And though, again, it does depend on context, contexts, even—or even especially—in their proliferation can provide stable and lasting guidelines for the making of sense and its relevant relations and distinctions.
For though meaning is radically open and sense-making potentially though always relatively formative, there are certainly contexts that are resistant to certain reformations. Is this what we call “matter” or “reality”, or is this just a sign of competing regimes of meaning? Certainly, it isn’t just matter that can resist a certain meaning, and certainly, resistance to a new or strange meaning is no criterion for absolute truth or reality.
Yet, must meaning always be considered so important, as implied by being placed at the foundation of things? Is it always prudent to emphasize relations? Should we always affirm the open, the changing, the dynamic, the context-dependent over the stable and dependable? Are they not dependent on each other, and together one of the most important, well, relations? Indeed, everything seems to hinge on this relation.
However, if relations are not just framed as mere attributes of a core substance for convenience, but understood primarily in this way, with change or relations thought as secondary to identity, there are potentially more serious and problematic consequences than when there is an explicit understanding that the core is an open system of relative changes, a system whose impassive elements are merely differences themselves empty of any essential identity—though not in the nihilistic sense of empty of all stable sense, but rather, open to a network of ramifications and extrapolations with no final center.
Yet, again, are there not just as many potential problems with this, or with any attempt to give some kind of foundational account of things, or even to describe the universe in any way? Why make any prior decision between competing fundamental descriptions at all?29
Certainly, there are times when emphasizing stability or identity is more important than the value of difference or change. When we argue for one philosophy over another, are we perhaps just trying to emphasize one quality or meaning over another, qualities on either side having some reality but not necessarily equal importance in situations? Should it not then, in the last analysis, come back to a matter of pragmatic use, rather than some kind of foundational debate?
Certainly in practical life, the connection between interpretation, decision, and consequence can be relatively easy to see. It can certainly help to have many kinds of concepts for different situations. And since meaning is relatively open, especially in a philosophy prioritizing meaning or relations, it follows that even within such a philosophy, prioritizing relations will not always be a better strategy than some of the concepts and philosophies this relational emphasis seems to displace and deemphasize.
So why build any kind of foundational philosophy? Why not just take all ideas for whatever they can do? Pragmatism need not imply a negation of metaphysical meaning. Why is it important to think of making meaning as the core activity of reality? Is it possible to do without prioritizing any particular meaning, even this particular view on philosophy? Is it perhaps that we get the most out of all ideas—even ones that contradict an emphasis on meaning or relations—when we understand something about meaning, value, and relations being prior to things?
Concepts, of course, are not just in our minds, not just tools we use in our lives that can be applied as we see fit. They tend to become embodied in our relationships, society, and institutions, and these further limit and determine a concept’s function. Even if our concept choices were only a private practical affair, they are much more than their use. Every concept gains its meaning from a structure of beliefs that shapes every understanding of the world.
Seeing all concepts in a theoretically equal but pragmatically ranked context is all well and good. But if this is not wed to a deeper understanding of how ideas connect—how their sense, beyond any particular meaning, shapes the world, and even the ways in which this sense constitutes the world (even as it is generated by it)—pragmatism can indeed become merely a euphemism for an obfuscation of the deeper cosmic game by the delusion of merely pragmatically localized contexts.
Understanding of any kind demands coherence, but for an understanding to grow beyond the niche in which it was formed, it requires an increasingly intuitive and variegated coherence. Institutions, and most people, lean heavily on the sense of order provided by stable contexts in life if not fundamental dogmas of interpretation that impose a certain amount of rigidity rooted in specific life problems.
One can certainly have a more or less philosophically pragmatic and open-minded system of values, but even when that is coupled with a plethora of diverse kinds of knowledge, there is usually a coherent context of pragmatic aims that ensures stability. These aims may be relatively selfless, but even with some ideal detachment from all entrenched preferences, seemingly eschewed of all partisan purpose, the very act of cognition and interpretation of reality presupposes some kind of prior structure of value and understanding.
For a personality, knowledge system, or institution to truly be free from rigid coherence, to open to ever-more of the complexity of reality without becoming unstable or incoherent, then naturally the continuity underlying any coherent sense must be expanded into ever-more diverse differences. What can be provided by the consistency of the personally or practically motivated judgment, or even an “enlightened” detachment from and openness to everything only goes so far.
While the use of any idea is inevitably shaped by the interests of specific people and contexts, the understanding that informs that use is always more than the specific moment or context. The structure of a person’s beliefs, for example, is not just a sediment of social customs and past experiences, but a living tissue of vital otherness stretching back through the history of not only their culture and family but other histories and lifetimes, connecting seemingly distant counterparts of every situation and the various values upon which they have built.
Openness and emotional detachment from bias is one thing, but understanding the vast structure of conditions undergirding our experience is quite another. Even a relatively disinterested cognition must also have a positive vision, some sense of continuity and connection to make any sense of things at all. Minimizing bias is a laudable goal, but a misleading one if it does not become a will to understand the endless trajectory of conditions and biases that ramify into the past, future, and alternative possibilities.
The will to objectivity followed beyond its naive early stages must become the selfless devotion to the pursuit of an ever-expanding coherence of the threads of life and value that generate everything. Simply rooting out bias is not sufficient; our experiences of things are not some discrete set of eccentric personal or species-specific filters that can be simply excluded or neutralized in objective convergence.
Our experience emerges, like all things, from an endless plane of continuous variations and redeployments, where any convergence into the symmetry of a singular sense or truth arises amidst the more or less harmonious divergence of mutating meaning.
Yet still, is it really necessary to invoke the infinite and endlessly divergent? Why risk the chaos of expansion beyond common sense boundaries and assumptions? Is it wise to ground practical concepts and institutions in some deeper metaphysical understanding, especially one so amorphous? Hasn’t science provided us with the ideal balance of change and stability, grounded not necessarily in some single vision but in the constantly evolving discovery of diverse truths?
Certainly, modern life is proving we can have a basically stable, more or less pragmatically-open truth, and a freedom of meaning at the same time. There are, of course, downsides to the modern compromise with chaos, as anyone can see. But are these metaphysical complexities a workable alternative? A difficult question for sure—one that is becoming ever more pressing as the relative stability of consensus science, and even reality itself, breaks down, and the necessity becomes obvious for a different kind of knowledge, one that exceeds the shaky and brittle constructs of our pragmatic compromise.
The ancient future of sense-making
“Ordinary experience is only half of reality. For the senses, only this half is there. The other half is present only for our spiritual powers of apprehension. Our spirit lifts experience from being a “manifestation for the senses” to being a manifestation for the spirit itself.”-Rudolf Steiner30
It can sometimes seem of late, especially as the usually unconscious activity of basic sense-making becomes, in our era, something potentially more conscious, powerful, and far-ranging, that another base of reality is approaching or descending upon us, some visceral memory resurfacing from a forgotten ancient-future.
Like a kind of techno-spiritual sense that one has been living inside a game, it is perhaps only now, as our game within a game, as our dream within a dream, has become sufficiently sophisticated, that the greater play has revealed itself enough to trigger a more vividly conscious understanding.
It is certainly becoming easier to accept a kind of relativity of realities given recent technological developments. For those with the inclination for philosophy, it is also becoming easier to think of “the real” as having more to do with the relevance that any idea or experience, any game or dream has to others—more to do with the richness or intensity of relations that link any thought or world with other thoughts or worlds—than it does with having some ground in a single one.
Yet, how can one be sure that this sense of the real untethered from any one meaning or reality is not a dangerous illusion? Couldn’t it just be a late-modern pathology brought on by the rise of artificial intelligence, virtual media, and our ensuing enslavement to the converging powers of techno-manipulation?
Or has the real meaning of things, or their true sense, always been something unbound and distributed? Could it be some kind of continuous membrane linking each moment with a ramifying realm of eternal significance, a truth or reality so connected that it transcends any particular time or discrete context, but which would also be forever tied up with and seemingly moving between every possible thing and conceivable meaning?
Could this sense of the real be something that is both continuous and open, something growing out from every point, being determined by each event of the universe, and at the same time be something that, once made, is made forever?
Could it at the “same time” be something that has always existed as an eternal event, even if it has no center or place where all time could be collated—no time or perspective when it could all be completed—for it is everywhere and everywhen entering into radically different arrangements, new portions and versions of the one event which continue the endless process of determining its meaning—the meaning of everything?
Is the meaning of things some kind of essence of their existence, but an essence whose nature is in the singular flavor of each thing’s infinite relations, the way it changes or experiences other things, and which therefore cannot be fully understood apart from those other things? How, then, is this different than just being something’s essential potential and its cascade of consequences?
Are things simply what they do or how they are used in each situation? Or can that use-value be extended beyond what we tend to think of as actions and singular situations to some kind of metaphysical science of harmonizing relations, to not just a foundational accounting of static causes or formal essences, nor some merely practical inventory of their secondary effects or relations, but to an endlessly harmonizing vision of an essentially experimental universe of ideas, one which grows and changes as ideas grow, that is, that helps them grow as they are used or experienced in any way?
Indeed our culture has been struggling and resisting taking this kind of step in the face of numerous crises in the foundation of our object-oriented knowledge. Across the knowledge disciplines of the 20th century, the meaning and degree of relativity of the real have been haunting a culture long convinced it could divorce truth and meaning.
It is just that in the 21st century, this has been undeniably mutating into something less strictly academic as concrete signs of the complexity and multiplicity of realities emerge. Once again, people are turning to the metaphysical, but now not just to metaphysical forms of esoteric, ancient, or medieval religious philosophy, but to new guises of the gods in an age of unlimited imagination.
The now cliched fears of relativism take on new relevance as the old platonic distinction between the ideal model and mere copy grows thin even to the average person as they learn to navigate the new reality of burgeoning virtual environments and intelligences. Confining the real to the particular no longer makes the same kind of sense as it did to the nominalism of modernity, as everything becomes part of a promiscuous general medium of information.
Yet reducing the infinite realm of ideas to representational information seems to serve as a reversal of the same-old hierarchy, swinging back once again from the particular to the general, from the material to an ideal that merely reflects the pre-formed material bias of set objects. This now takes the form of a renewed focus on Western rationalism’s long attempt to tame time and number, domesticating their uncontainable and non-commutative properties, rendering all infinities and asymmetries, all continuities and lines of flight into closed and controllable matrices.
While, again, the infinities are indeed striking back, institutional science has struggled to understand them, having long ago drained the rich qualitative dimensions of ideas and numbers out into a stale simulacrum of hollow shadows haunting physical things.31 And now things themselves are increasingly being reduced to these discrete bits we call information.
This doesn’t imply that materialism is going away, since the other pole of the tired debate always looms, and will continue to play out in interesting and problematic ways as life and matter take on new forms under the pressure of the expanding digital medium.
Even as the concept of information gets ideologically incorporated into the privileged domain of the real and treated as something more than a representation of the one true world, the concept is hard-pressed to shake the context of its creation as a discrete phenomenon with fixed relations and meaning, perhaps giving birth to unrestrained realms of simulated imagination, but realms never too far from the old material assumptions, laden with shadows from the brutish dreams at the root of techno-science.
Yet, in light of or even because of all this, many now half-consciously wonder, or even consciously ponder more creative, cosmological questions like: what on earth is really going on, not just vaguely with life in general, but specifically, cosmically, with the story of life on this planet? Is our waking experience in this reality, in this era of humanity, really something so generalizable, or is it just a particular kind of reality that we have come to focus on? Are the things we consider merely possible, simultaneously real from another point of view?
How, then, have we come to be so narrowly focused on this particular world? Have we evolved out of something very different than how things now appear? Are we, perhaps, headed somewhere even further afield, somewhere not easily thought or imagined, but nonetheless better approached through a kind of thought in touch with imagination, with the wider expanse of consciousness we tend to only approach through our intuition and dreams?
Living in such a rapidly changing world can’t help but press even the less than philosophically inclined to wonder, as discussed, about the limits and foundations of modern knowledge, but more than anything, people want to know: where is all this going? The feats of technology, which used to inspire unquestioned faith in modernity, have been increasingly revealing themselves as less-than-ideally motivated.
Still, the ideology that supports that naive faith has been difficult to displace. If our rational attempts at understanding things, along with the technology that has become so crucial to that understanding, are not tracking or fulfilling some kind of natural development of truth, or at least an ever-broader practical power, then what are they doing?
Have we been building our sense and knowledge of the universe, our concepts, and their creations on shaky ground—or rather, on an island within a vast sea we are unprepared to navigate—a shelter perhaps, but one which could become a prison made by the particular conditions specific to the narrow range of our waking existence, to the daydream of life as it appears to us within the increasingly controlled environments and uniform structures of consciousness made by modern society?
Does our space or realm and its apparent history only appear as it does in the vicinity of the particular point we find ourselves in, a point in what appears as some larger process or cycle, a development perhaps, but headed God knows where?
Prison or not, we are certainly headed somewhere. But will we be able to see what we need to see if the niche of conditions that has formed us, and the assumptions we have made based on it, are merely generalized and imposed on everything? Has this niche of ours created not just a mobile prison, but one on a track headed into dangerous territory for which we are not prepared?
If we want to understand this emerging territory, perhaps we should be asking some different basic questions, questions about the terrain of ideas we inhabit and their implications— repeatedly, continually inquiring into, and attempting to extend the range of possible frames of understanding that connect to each and every form.
Most basically, granted some kind of truth or applicability in our knowledge, we should not only be asking: how general are its forms? Because if, as discussed, generality is relative, the important questions are along the lines of: how well do these forms illuminate their connections? How well do they lend themselves to a varied expansion and extrapolation? How do they prepare us for the realities they draw in? In other words, not only: how deluded are we really? But more practically: how can we proceed in building our knowledge in a more conscious and less deluded way?
It all depends on how much of the bigger picture are we missing or seriously distorting when we take for granted perspectives tied to the particular groove of development humanity has happened to follow, especially as viewed from a kind of consciousness that seems to have only emerged relatively recently.32
Even if we can claim that our worldview stands firmly on the rock of a rigorously tested structure of material reality, or at least is approaching some stable ground through science or the general development of humanity, is it not now apparent, with our sense of reality getting increasingly complicated, that even what we see as our extended physical cosmos is just one particular kind of reality within the larger space of what can be imagined, and therefore, simulated—or perhaps even created? Is there a fundamentally discrete difference between these?
Or is the difference only a matter of degree, a matter of the richness of context and connectedness that makes the created, the simulated, indeed even the imagined, something more or less real and true? It is true that specifically speaking, dreaming of a world, technologically simulating one, and what we think of as the god-like power that can spark the birth of a stable extended universe like the one we seem to inhabit together, must be very different things.
Even the scientific creation of a life or consciousness out of nothing, let alone a whole physical cosmos, defies logical understanding. Yet perhaps that is because such things don’t really happen this way. Simulating or synthesizing life or intelligence through programming, manipulating, or attempting to replicate them with existing mediums, or with information extracted from them—or even the normal act of creating life through procreation—are very different from the idea of creating life or consciousness from the inanimate.
Perhaps because there is no special code of creation or consciousness that can spark new life, only conditions that spark a dormant seed to pick up again its task from some ancient-future lineage. Every code, then, is, like everything else, a more or less ambiguous sign, a pale reflection of what it can trigger, just an ephemeral trace of a vast history and living structure of possibilities that can never account for all the relevant context.
A mere code can certainly tap into the infinity of histories and possibilities, but that history is always changing, so we should be careful of the possibilities we tap. To think that one can design from an absolute beginning and control all the conditions is to have it all backward.
Life only comes from life. It is just another form of the same creative intelligence that is everything, and that has no absolute beginning or end. One can create the conditions for the “emergence” of life or intelligence, but as any attentive parent knows, what emerges comes already laden with a trajectory of its own beyond both nature and nurture narrowly conceived as finite accountable sources of soul.33
Even in what seems emergent within what seems a simple or isolated system, these systems are always already seeds from and signs of the vast memory of the cosmos. Nothing is entirely disconnected from life or consciousness, and nothing ever created ex nihilo.
It is possible, of course, to more or less predict or control some systems or codes, and go a long way towards mapping and reproducing things. But their relations must be relatively simplified and isolated for this to be maintained, or their openness reduced to a statistically controllable zone of possibilities, which has severe limits.
The dependability and controllability of life and matter confined to predictable limits are admittedly helpful stepping stones for fledgling spirits like ourselves to get a foothold on things—to sustain ourselves, to reproduce and evolve into new territory, riding on and sliding through the systems that we can objectify, pursuing our spirits’ desires on the backs of bodies and lives more ensconced in and enslaved to predictable mechanisms. But such relative freedom and power only goes so far.
The mediums of spirit and life—the objectified others they inhabit, control, and consume for sustenance, bodies with their own creative light seemingly more “imprisoned” in matter and mechanisms than the subjects which use and consume them—have a life and soul of their own and potentially creative reasons for the depth of their submission.34
Even seemingly inanimate matter is only controllable within limited contexts for so long; or more accurately, the limits of that control are only narrowly extendable. Eventually—or rather, in a broader realm of context, not necessarily down a single line of time—all things are set free, or in some sense are always already free, with both user and used liberated together from their reciprocal dance of death and dependence.35
What is spirit or subject in one context is body or object in another, and in yet another, the distinction between spirit and body is no longer relevant. In such realms, the opposition of mutually external identities, of subject and object, need not be annulled into a blandly monolithic identity or a seemingly impotent transcendence but can be transformed into a power based in spontaneous and simultaneous mutuality.36
In such contexts and worlds, coherence is disentangled from set relations predicated on trenchant distinctions between things and beings set against or merely compromising with each other. The appearance of more or less degrading processes—which characterize the so-called arrow of time in physics—disappears in contexts where distinctions are not oppositions, not rooted in or confined to the incompatible fixed relations of competing schemes, no longer wardening off a section of the infinite play into the territories of bluntly finite beings and discrete perspectives.
The limited perspectives that give the appearance of ephemeral dissipative processes—the necessarily destructive and rigid regimes with which life is coupled for sustenance—have, obviously, a limited reality, but a reality nonetheless. As discussed, some contexts have to be limited within other contexts to make space for new developments. But nothing is really destroyed; those seemingly destructive limits are only a partial reflection of what, in the right light, is revealed as a deeper continuity.
Wherever there seems to be one thing destroyed at the expense of another, where there seems no recourse, no return, or reversal from the jaws of death and entropy which loom inescapably over every life or endeavor, where the past is lost, or only generically repeatable—or reductively retrievable—these limits exist only within the incoherent impositions of confused subjects, believing that they are acting unilaterally on each other as mere objects.
Such illusory entanglement necessitates oppositely oriented processes to replay the other side of the split, to redress the appearance of incoherence, waste, and entropy engendered by the fixity of relations, by the attachment of relation to a mere duality of terms it relates, of activity itself to the illusion of actor and acted upon, beginnings and ends.
Outside the necessary abstractions of beings that need the shelter of limits to learn, and outside the concomitant play of generic oppositions, that is, the play of return through the disconnected lines of time and alternating dualities of existence back to the greater plenum of multiplicity—or more accurately, running through and redeploying the play of limits and its products in a symphony of connections in layers of continuous contexts—all time and activity are simultaneously and creatively replaying and revising their dramas from every angle actively imagined.
Experienced in such a light, no spirit is ever really not light. One is never definitively fallen or imprisoned light or spirit, as the mystics used to say—never absolutely solidified, or stratified to serve as body, ground, or vehicle of another, since in other contexts, each creatively serves all.37
Such harmonious realms and contexts, however, are indefinitely obscured and delayed by prolonging or extending the necessity of enclosing life into systems of control. And though a kind of evolution can proceed in such a fashion, extending into vast multi-dimensional systems of predatory power, there is no way to really master it or become free from the reciprocity which reverses and dissolves all fixed relations.
Indeed, the steeper the rise, the greater the fall. The farther we go along the path of power by control, and the more fixed and intricately dependent our relations become, the greater the effort required to maintain them against the inevitable transformation. And though this can be conceivably maintained indefinitely, those involved cannot escape their self-made prison without surrendering to the inevitable reversal beyond the gulf they have created.
Though there is a kind of power in prison, it cannot translate fluidly into power outside its confines, or that of similar systems, except at the very limits of power’s polarity, where all opposition becomes a beautiful play of contrasts, and all power revealed as a note of delightful difference within a divine harmony. In any case, the power tied to set relations pales in comparison to the true nature of divine power pulsing in the heart of creation, a pulse one can only temporarily seem to control, and by doing so, not really take a unique part in.
True creative power only pours forth in a dance with receptivity, its rhythms stunted by too much control. And without that receptivity, though we may be able to track everything within narrow limits, we lose track of the seeds we sow beyond the artificial niche of the seemingly closed system.
Humanity furthers its momentum down this dark path as it becomes enamored with the capacity of genetic engineering and digital technology to shelter life from the spiritual pressures of difference and creative evolution. Even if this can seem empowering at first, it leads to a debilitating subjection of the individual to a system that, eventually, no one can understand or control.
As we reduce the complex but correlated connectivity of all things reciprocally determining each other to the fixed meanings set by the context of their control, we end up conflating knowledge with mere information; we confine knowledge to discrete abstractions that cannot be adapted to other contexts, embroiling it within the confusion of contradictions and conflict that plague our common concepts, especially as they are reduced to their function on a muddled plane of references to and categorization of set things.
The Limits of the Limit
“Aristotle’s view that philosophy begins with wonder, not as in our day with doubt, is a positive point of departure for philosophy.”-Soren Kierkegaard38
Much like conflating life and consciousness with the instruments and mediums of their expression, reducing them to mere codes with a definitive meaning and controllable source obfuscates the truth that every identifiable thing is merely a trace, a sign, a seed from or portal to others layers of existence without end. If humanity continues on the path of technocratic control, it merely carries its stagnant systems and illusory control into wider control systems, entering more fully the side of the cosmos where vast regimes of power compete for dominance.
The more we ossify knowledge—the more we isolate and inscribe it within the techniques of control—the more we reduce the meaning of our lives to an abstraction without value, or with a narrowly instrumental value that turns everything into its objects, subtly opening us up to becoming increasingly objectified tools ourselves in the exploitative side of the cosmic game.
Though there is, perhaps, a side of this game, where attempts are made not just to compete in some cosmic game of power, but build or simulate a separate universe as close to self-contained and easily controlled as possible. Extrapolating from present technology, it is not difficult to imagine what the myths of such things might be describing.39
Perhaps the selfish ego’s core dream of an unlimited vital freedom and uncontested power can be achieved for a time, on various scales, in the various opportunities life and technology give for something like absolute control. Perhaps one can play god (or rather his challenger) in more or less mundane ways, blocking the alien and infinite from seeping into one’s fantasy or disrupting the system of control.
But in the end, the more one succeeds in controlling life, the more that life becomes less real, less explicitly connected or significant to other realities and beings. Such solipsistic dramas have limited interest and applicability since they tend to be games one plays only with one’s self and its reflections. Even if one can suck in novelty from the outside, trapping creativity and soul within one’s designs, how far can such a parasitic power go?
For life or knowledge to progress past the limits of fixed assumptions, they must ultimately open to the infinite and serve the progression of all life. But to do so fully, knowledge must become cooperatively receptive and consciously creative; it must become the means of life’s greater capacity to serve the evolution of creation more than a means of controlling what has already been created.
Life and mind must embrace the challenge of serving the birth and growth of things towards achieving their own momentum of individuation and unbound reality. Such vital creation releases seeds into wider environments of otherness, or gives a seed such a context in which it can draw together diverse influences and become something new.
There are many kinds of creation of course. But from the most generic act of procreation to the most seemingly singular act of genius, if one is to be more than just a minimally creative link in a chain, more than a passive vessel or channel of some line of influence, one must in some sense serve both sides of creation at every stage in the breath-like flow of life, letting go as one receives, and letting in as one pours forth.
One must conjugate the feminine and masculine principles in each act, sensitively receiving and nurturing the seeds of the universe while at the same time guiding them out into a greater world—where they hopefully can go on to forge new forms of reality. Any true creation, just as any productive kind of knowledge, is always already both a projection into new kinds of relations, and a more or less creative modification of our medium, drawing down new reflections of what always already is in some alternative context.
If humanity’s problems in the foundations of knowledge are not covered over too much by the shallow solutions of control, if we can avoid the temptations of escalating the confines created by temporary patches over problems, of increasing dependence on the crutches of technical prosthetics, any crises in knowledge could serve as birth pangs into a potentially more conscious era of responsibility for the evolution of our planet. Either way, we are headed into an era of rapidly changing, competing, and proliferating ideas, and of an escalation of their potential power—technical, creative, or otherwise.
Even if one is less inclined to embrace esoteric lines of speculation and implication, speculation loses its impractical connotations as any idea can become a ground for the vast experiment and play of the universe (or perhaps, multiverse, to use the popular, if misunderstood expression).
Yet, the universe being an open-ended and potentially infinite experiment does not relegate its coherence into separate, subjective, or even parallel realities, nor lines of truth relative to an arbitrary aim. It certainly does not reduce truth and meaning to utility, or to mere instruments of a unilateral power as decisive ground, but rather, opens them up to a play of all values, to the very processes that determine truth and power.
Even if one believes that our concepts and knowledge have an arbitrary foundation—if our very world merely stands on layers of standardizations and impositions forming and formed by our particular branch of life, by the more or less particular way it organizes consciousness, space, and time—still the questions of truth, meaning, and even being itself, do not lose their orientation. They merely shift from any kind of ultimate ground of reference to the patterns of modification connecting each and every thing in various ways, from foundational identities and knowable essences to patterns of contextual differences.
While this kind of shift has indeed been a characteristic of the best in recent academic philosophy, there is only so far normal philosophical speculation can go without critically opening to the broader structure of imaginable ideas. Our thinking must lucidly dream itself beyond the shackles of passive reflection and the biases of modern institutions. A truly vital metaphysics in particular must develop an active strength, an ability to synthesize and create as carefully and critically as scientific thought drills down into the details of its unconscious creations.
Philosophy must move beyond simply mining the personal, artistic, and religious imagination as some kind of reservoir of metaphors for material concerns, and into a sensitive engagement with them as forms of the primordial medium of meaning from which all reality, even physical reality arises, albeit in complex ways.
Opening deeply to inner worlds in our era, however, quickly confronts one with pressing patterns of meaning that swirl around our escalating awareness of the plasticity of time and reality. The questions that follow from this can quickly acquire the tenor of something like: are we ready for this opening into the variability—perhaps even infinity—of realities?
How can we become ready? Can we have some sincere sense of how we got here and where we are going? How can we trust any particular narrative line or knowledge system if their only ground is other lines of meaning? Is there some kind of guiding logic or character of thought that emerges as one embraces this more open and relational structure?
To begin to answer such questions, it would make more sense along these lines, to set aside all the anxious questions, all the defensive searching and desperately clutching for some stable ground—to begin not with a certainty-seeking doubt, as modern philosophy did in its infancy, not with a search for foundations as fortified beginnings, but as openings best approached with wonder, much like Kierkegaard suggested philosophy do once again.
Since we find ourselves already enmeshed within our particular line of life and human development, and at a point where certain fantastical interpretations of reality are becoming increasingly plausible deductions from the trajectory of our thought and technology, a new kind of ground should be embraced, one already at work within the crises of modernity, a kind of middle-ground aware of the relative determination of everything by contexts and relations, but also aware and inspired by everything’s transcendence of any definitive context.
As our consciousness adjusts to this expansive structure of relativity, any disorientation should be increasingly falling away. Indeed this is happening more and more in the culture. We are becoming more ready to cautiously, yet non-exclusively, open to the imaginative implications, implications burgeoning out of the collapse of all definitive metanarratives that had previously grounded us in some more-or-less-stable worldview or another.
The inertia of modern institutions lingers on, of course, for opening to unsettling implications is not easy within established structures, especially as any consistent meaning within those implications has been difficult to see. Consequently, risking the possible chaos is seldom done outside the extreme fringes of culture, where wonder and terror, creative and reactive imagination proliferate wildly, and without much hope for the kind of coherent knowledge-production possible with wider cultural and institutional support.
Yet some kind of understanding must be forged out of the teeming chaos of our cultural imagination. With the escalating encroachment of artificial and alien intelligences, and a culture of experts completely out of their depths—and even fighting vehemently to shore and patch up the failing systems threatened by these depths—the stakes are too high to continue down the path of precarious, fearful, and shallow speculation.
To begin to extrapolate in self-assured wonder from what cannot help but be, in the beginning, a more or less deluded perspective, and within what may be an insignificant backwater of the universe, one must, of course, be capable of self-assurance and wonder.
This is difficult as long as the modern mind retains its solipsistic doubt, its refusal to open to the unknown without external foundations, its longing for a pure truth and the concomitant fear of contamination by meaning and illusion. To the extent, however, that it becomes comfortable with the complexity and openness of reality, the seemingly confusing place we seem to occupy in the story of the universe cannot help but spur the imaginative creation of new ideas and, indeed, new truths.
While things may seem chaotic and daunting in this era of uncertainty and endless mysteries, it doesn’t take an abandonment of cultural coherence or stable truth to appreciate the expanding niche of life we find ourselves in, its overflowing of potential threads and layers of meaning. And though this abundance is tied up with an often depressing fragmentation, the diversity is, when appreciated, fertile ground for deeper truth.
As life and culture flirt with the possibility of shedding the comforting niche of fixed truth, the complexity that arises may bring increasing chaos and conflict, but such shedding is necessary for life to fulfill its destiny, for it to approach some ideal coordination of its experiments in novelty, some infinite horizon where each single life can create and fully realize its own unique structure of meaning and relations with the all.
It is true that while every life may be singular in essence, that is, in its relations with the infinite, nascent forms of consciousness must first form a foothold in some dependable relations, an anchor to some finite general scheme that locks it into some niche of particularity. Yet, the level of each life’s realization of its singularity and creativity depends on it coming to terms with how its meaning relates and changes through ever-more diverse contact with a changing environment and other realms of meaning.
Whatever the apparent level of novelty of our relations, no thing, no perspective or idea, no meaning or truth, makes exactly the same connections as any other, and each adds something to the universe, even if this is not immediately apparent from within the schemes of fledgling minds. Nonetheless, even seemingly delusional meanings or just the arbitrary conceptual niches of history and convention, are more than they seem, more than the meanings they have explicitly realized. And they would not have attained whatever sense they do have without serving some unique “purpose” within the greater structure of reasons for things.
While what appears as the functional purpose of something, say, in some kind of pragmatic psychological or biological context, may not resemble anything like the “higher” purpose professed by most of what gets called “meaning”, nonetheless, those contexts also depend on other contexts, so they are in the same position. They can neither ground nor negate any other sense of purpose.
Just because some meaning fails along certain lines, this only adds context to its connections; it doesn’t disprove anything absolutely. Any meaning may be limited by and relative to certain— even seemingly deluded or isolated—contexts, but, again, there are no absolute limits to any context. Since the boundaries between them are dependent on others, who is to say what is limited in one frame or negated in another, is not affirmed and given new life in yet another?
There is certainly ample evidence of this in the story of the Western mind, where previously “disproven” perspectives return in different forms. Are these merely illustrations of the contingent and surprising structure of scientific development, or are things less random than they appear?
The logic of this context connectivity and relativity, when pressed to its limits, leads not to a collapse of all truth, but to a deeper logic of recursivity, or even of infinite “iterability” to everything, since everything that has achieved some significance in any context, is reiterated to some degree in all contexts.40 The purpose of anything then is in the meaning it adds to the universe, a meaning and purpose that is never complete or finished but is nonetheless inviolate.
Indeed, while ostensibly limiting all things and consigning us all to a looming horizon of ephemeral existence, a relativity of identity actually implies, not most essentially some inherent emptiness of stable or knowable reality at the heart of all things, but, paradoxically, an immortality of—and intimate knowing between—all things.
Everything is immortal and knowable not as a discrete identity, but as a being with infinite relations to all, as a modification or relation with a sense beyond whatever it seems to modify or relate in any particular definitive context, yet touching and even passing into each and every one. This implies a continuity of all things in existence as relational becomings, as links in a reality with no outside or end, no external law or inherent limits.41
The only lasting law, the only general limit or negation, is one accompanying and reflecting those boundaries assumed in or carried into any particular idea or context, a seemingly absolute boundary that is only universal in the sense that all things are universal, all ideas and their relative limits and potentials are implied in some diverse sense in each one.
All things are modified by each other, and so serve as some kind of relative limit, but one reflecting an absolute boundary in the sense that no one can infinitely impinge on or contain the ultimately boundless nature of each and all.
Dealing with discrete particular things leads one to believe that their existence is tied to specific limits, and to project and assume some general limit, some transcendent truth or grounding condition. However, the nature of this abstract boundary only reflects the extent to which any particular thing can limit or be limited by other things within a particular context. The general is just another, perhaps larger or generically applied particular. And like particulars stuck in their identities, generalities also cannot be absolute or infinite—cannot even really exist as any singular or meaningful thing at all.
Without some particular context to fill it with reflections, the absolute as general condition reduces to the ironic core of limited existence, to the tragic limit of all limits and limited things: their incapacity to accept their greater life as a unique filter or changing path through unlimited limits, their conflation of this infinite finitude with the futile quest to contain or determine the infinite once and for all.
The general, then, is just the shadow of the particular and relative on the infinity of the absolute. No general or particular can exclusively determine the infinite possibilities of things to relate, modify, or become other things; any thing’s “exclusive” truth is not in its more or less particular limits but in its unique and inviolate pattern of relations.
This essential and infinite pattern is exclusive or inviolate mostly in the sense that if something makes sense in some context, it can only be negated in another context, not in all. Anything in the universe is possible, and anything possible, anything that means anything, already is in some sense and always will be. Yet, the meaning of absolutely negating something does make some sense, so does it not have some reality?
Meanings always have some relative reality within the contexts where they make sense, but when they confuse those contexts with an absolute, they misconstrue the nature of their limits. Absolute negation does have a meaning and therefore a reality. Just like any limit, its negation is relative to certain contexts, but also has a kind of infinity as well in the sense that limits also have no absolute limit; they can be endlessly applied, and just like anything, can even become a relational part of a stable ground for expanding realities.
Though unlike a limit conceived as such a recontextualizable relation, what we tend to think of as a limit is the part of each thing which weds it to specific contexts while limiting others. So unlike the open-ended meaning and infinitely changeable idea of something as a modifying relation to anything, the part of things that clings to certain definite things and negates others has more of a secondary reality.
It has a secondary or negative existence in the sense that, outside the kinds of sense defined by the specific limits, it either becomes a part of what it had previously defined itself against (the negated other of the limited identity), or it simply reduces to the generic and ironic truth of limits having no real limit except in contexts where they insist, where they refuse to make some kind of new sense. When something clings to its identity as a limit or limited being, it can make no additional sense, at least within its own self-made prison.
The only absolute condition then, is the ever-present but relative conditions of sense. Things have to make some sense in some context to exist in a specific way. But this is no absolute limit, only an absolute opening for the possibility or perhaps necessity of the relative existence of finite things in the infinite.
So while some kind of general limit of life or law of death and liberation may seem to contain or negate the concrete or individual limits and particularities of things, and even seem to play an active role as a universal condition or negative power—an ultimate abstraction pushing everything into some larger definitive structure of more universal relations—this transcendent negativity is just a shadow cast by its constructive role in the advance of creative becoming.
In this greater sense, the negative does not oppose, for it is what helps each thing preserve and extend its value through ever more contexts. Power may seem to destroy, limit, or compel, but any appearance of transcendence serves the creative movement within all and the preservation of all that is created, even if the gods of creation and preservation also serve the god of transcendence and an ultimate freedom from any one form or limit.42
Therefore, the transcendent is not the highest most eminent realm or value in a ladder of comprehensive generality. It is not an abstraction in the sense of a reduction from or in opposition to the concrete realms of unique things.
It is not some foundational or basic determination, or some generic void of pure being without meaning or any determination, but rather the law of absolute freedom and relative relation, or in another sense, the law of relative freedom and absolute relation. It is a dependence of freedom on connection and relations on an ultimate freedom from any final determination. It is the implication of the finite to the infinite and the infinite to the finite.
All things are free, even as they subject themselves to the creative essence of life, to the process and possibilities of reciprocal determination, of what is ultimately a cooperative explication of the meaning of their relations, even if the differences affirmed in meaning’s expansion may appear like destructive conflict in limited contexts.
The truth or essence of things, then, should ultimately only ever be considered foundationally as an abstraction, but a foundation of abstraction nonetheless—any particular limitation or distinct determination is a selection, but some limitation, or at least, some relational distinction, is necessary for there to be anything at all. Some abstraction from the infinity of possibilities frames every context, but the content of this foundation is determined by an infinity of things, as each thing’s being is implied and partially determined by every other.
Yet a determination by an absolute infinity also means an essential opening to the relatively undetermined, so all are ultimately free from each other’s limitations, as well as their own, at least in the most abstract sense—thus completing the necessity of abstract contradiction and opposition: ultimate freedom, ultimate servitude; so freedom is service.
The paradox of the negative—as both an abyss of confinement in endless limiting conditions and the spacious liberation of transcendence from them—is really in both instances the ultimate freedom of each thing from an eternal subjection to its own or other’s limits, even as it takes them on within the limited contexts involved in the becoming of their mutual being.
Each thing is ultimately free from all limits except in the sense of the bounds it takes on in the universal quest for greater being, in what amounts to an expansion from each thing through a continuous connection to the rhythm of relation, a connection that forces every idea or thing to return in ever-changing ways, but always in such a way that serves to help it explore its singularity and infinity, its multiple realities of compounding implications to other ideas, contexts, and relations.
For while things may be singular in essence, their reality is in how they relate, how they can add context and determination to other things. Yet, this process of determination need not be thought along the lines of enclosure, since it always on some level also extends or relays into other processes—expanding, not just contracting, the things it relates into the spheres where they relate. Relations only function as barriers when they are conceived as such, when they are conceived as bound not to the plane of infinite relations, but to limited things and aims, or to some totality that definitively determines or defines them.
So relations as limits embody the ironic essence of truth as the limit that forces meaning to overcome its imposed limits, to face a greater reality external to it, and ultimately to face its attachment to bounded things, its entrenchment in a world of beings precariously extended over an abyss of eventual disintegration or a timeless and abstract negation.
The great limit of death forces all limited things to face the meaning of their imposition of a static identity on the life of infinite relations and difference, and through the course of experiencing that difference, surrender this self-imposed suffering and isolation, not simply into a greater truth that subsumes all meaning and relations, but into a more connected creation of meaning and its truth.
And since no limit or end, value or purpose, is sovereign or definitive, none can finally be excluded. Every single value implies all the others, more or less. The only thing empty of reality, or doomed to ephemerality, is the illusion of separate or sovereign identity.
Yet, as discussed, this is no exception to the logic of inclusive relativity. Identities are not outside reality; in fact, the boundaries of identity dimly reflect that abstract or negative essence of all things as transcendent of any particular relation or relations, and a more constructive essence as transcendent of some relations more than others within some third set or track of relations. The problem with thinking in terms of identities is simply in the conflation of a thing’s relative transcendence of some contexts and relations and an absolute transcendence of absolutely definitive relations, with an identity that transcends all relation.
For discrete identities are just bundles of relations whose constitutive links have been warped into the subsuming logic of enclosure, mistaking their infinite reality beyond any collection of contexts for an unchanging truth that contains them. They are a more or less deluded attempt to capture the truth of something. But since truth is determined by connection, by transformative links in the relays of relation, any self-contained truth, or some relations within one, cannot help but obfuscate others.
Of course, identifying things, for us, is inevitable. When knowledge is built on an understanding of the inevitable problems of complexity and obfuscation, however, we are less likely to be deluded. We can keep in mind the structure of implications that runs through any form, with an awareness that much will remain hidden.
We can remember that it is the essence of discrete identity to serve to hold back the infinite to allow some finite perspective to get a more or less deluded but more or less stable grip on an infinite cosmos—even if that grip is always slipping away, making possible a pressure to change or expand as every discrete form is made to confront its limits and contrasts.
Admittedly, there is no guarantee this pressure will be productive. Nor is there some singular direction from the finite or determinate into some infinite or larger determinate being. As discussed, the finite is already the infinite and the pressure to confront its limits can go in many directions within the infinite sea of selections.
The selections available to any process depend on the situation of course, but also on the often underestimated factor of the relative speed or timing in the rhythmic connections between things, a rhythm that determines how much of the resonant continuity hidden to the discrete vision of limited thought and things is carried through into them.
The Game Of Time (and timing)
“You get what you focus on. There is no other main rule”.
-Jane Roberts43
The hidden layers in the space of possibility surrounding and relative to everything are infinite. Nonetheless, there is still some logical—or, in some worlds, explicitly temporal—sequence of succeeding layers, which lends some structure of reason to every process, even if that structure is always being partially determined from within the unique context of each situation, and therefore incapable of complete generalization, and always being partially determined from other contexts, and therefore incapable of complete control.
Still, even in the most jarring jump into unexpected novelty, or the seemingly random imposition from the unknown, there are meaningful connections to be found and formed, a continuity to be constructed, and—in worlds like ours, dominated by a vast unknown we call the future—a path to be paved, not, as in systems of control, by extending the known into the unknown, or subjecting the future to the past, but by embedding ever-more of time into a resonating rhythm of simultaneous transformations.
While no vision can contain the infinite, the vast expanse of time and its endless recursions and revisions can become increasingly replayed and re-envisioned in a more revealing light. Every linear development from every direction of possible time and its spaces can be subjected to every other, extended into all, so that all melodic lines of influence curve into the orbit of mutual motion, and all disparate motion increasingly collapses into the communion of an omnipresent rhythm and simultaneous harmony.
Of course, though much can be revealed within such a divine harmony, it is not a mere combination of the perspectives it integrates. There is always a difference. There are not only worlds upon worlds whose infinity eludes any single vision, there are also niche realities embedded even in the most familiar landscape of time, the details of which are lost in the overview.
The seeds of incompatible difference loom at the margins of any view, and even within them. Within even the most harmonized spiritual view of time, lurk the soulful shadows of disparity, which make another round of descents into the details of the journey a continual horizon.44 The aborted developments that have failed to connect, the myriad versions of both future and past and all manner of illusions and falsehoods contain important lessons and repositories that can serve as new developments for diverse aims.
A vision of the eternal that excludes the dynamics of becoming is a shallow vision indeed, and one can imagine how even attempts to incorporate and account for difference can delude and cover over the reality of the niches as they are actually lived. Nonetheless, one can also imagine how the infinite details of existence can be sounded with greater ease when couched within, or at least, when capable of, connection with a dynamic and open integration.
Excluding nothing and forcing nothing into the limits of a final vision, one can continuously create—and by so doing, sustain—an immortal becoming, in a way vitally linked to all, allowing incompatible versions of everything to freely recede into the background while maintaining a link to them through their more flexibly reiterated counterpart in the harmonized system.
The infinite depths of unknown realities must surely remain, even in the most singular divine vision, serving as deeper layers of a present that embraces all of time and possibility. Even the dark corners of recalcitrant isolation—whose links with the all are less accommodating to a broad synthetic vision—can become a portal to an ever-greater harmony when the soulful spirit of adventure is integrated with the spirit’s soul of harmony. All may increasingly undergo transformation within the timescape of a more harmonically-inclusive horizon of experience.45
A hidden harmony always already exists, however, moving through even in what seems the most chaotic context (as viewed from within the limits of a dominant harmony). Every identity, no matter how broken its rhythms or short its vision, every specific and seemingly limited context of time’s structure is a process rooted in some exploration and modification of other ideas and contexts from which it has differentiated, and others towards which it draws—both of which with it must, at some level, and in some sense, connect.
And while identities and especially ideologies can sustain their illusions and seeming separation from any greater sense, sometimes indefinitely within their own borders, the larger processes they are part of are busy transforming their meaning and relations, eventually forcing even the most obdurate ignorance to face and redeploy its limits in some way, realizing its singularity within the uniqueness of its connections (perhaps a far cry from the nature of its discrete self-representation).
The exact nature of an identity’s encounter with its relational essence, however, will be determined not only by predictably relevant and neighboring contexts and relations, but contexts within contexts without end. There therefore cannot be some kind of overarching framework of absolute meaning or destined purpose dictating or compelling the detailed course of events.
There is, however, a kind of knowledge that works not to expand the limits of precise control and exact prediction, but rather to sense and track the spirit of novel emergence, as well as to expand its possibilities as they ride on the rhythms of relevant factors that frame every event, ideally capable of foreseeing the spirit of even the most singular event by tapping the vital thread of its momentum and manifestation from contexts beyond control.46
For nothing happens without reason, just a reason determined by everything. Nothing happens without some kind of connection to each thing and the themes of that thing’s exploration of its presuppositions and conditions, the adventure of its implications to every other thing, everything being both an infinitely iterable idea and singular event.
And though which exact thing or event will play out in any hypothetical situation is often difficult for even the most connected vision to predict, and even the most predictable event always exceeds any vision in its relevant values, consequences, and connections, this does not mean we live in an arbitrary universe, or that the horizon of knowledge is mere statistics.
That is, although the relevant and emerging conditions of things—at least outside the artificial simplicity of a closed or controlled system—are seldom tied strongly enough to a past along a single contextual or temporal line to conform to detailed determinations, averaging out the variations into preformed probabilities takes knowledge down a dangerous road of increasing enclosure.
So much hangs in the balance of how humanity handles this core crisis in the structure of knowledge. Continuing to extend humanity’s old habit of thinking in terms of laws, or closed, predictable systems, and finding ways of subjecting everything to them—even as we are forced to confront the great open system that is the universe—not only sets society on a course of increased subjection to laws, it makes even the self-understanding of the individual increasingly difficult.47
Time and subjectivity are made derivative of space and objects. Or they are set adrift, with nothing to guide them but decontextualized platitudes like freedom, or romanticized concepts that merely signify a difference from the system, but do not really chart an alternate course, nor make an effective determination.
Subjectivity and culture, time and change itself, indeed, have already become considerably reduced to mere probabilities in a preformed system. And without a different kind of knowledge, a creative knowledge not confined to static objects and their probable variations—not confined to the choice between an overdetermined system of objects and an unmoored subjective reaction—the possibilities will continue to dwindle as the knowledge-power nexus of control increases its dominion.
In contrast to this prison of predetermined knowledge, it is the rhythmic variations in time, not the uniformity of time, which is the grounding concern of a knowledge aiming to amplify this variation along optimal lines.
Naturally, knowledge based on exact repeatability is rooted in set limits and so its horizon also has severe limits, even if it could somehow entrain the whole universe to its basic beat. But even knowledge tracking the variations of complex systems can still be oriented towards containment or entrainment, attempting to make everything adapt to it, even as it adjusts its probabilities with an openness to the new.
If knowledge merely expands the general to cover ever more particulars, merely adding new arbitrary constants and dependent variables rather than opening its structure to harmonically or structurally resonate with ever-more singular things—if it does not harmoniously adjust its structure to the pressures of ever-expanding exposure to difference, but rather, simply adds new confounding layers—such knowledge and the systems that use it, despite every seemingly new technique or technology developed, are only really exploiting novelty to extend or extrapolate their ultimately static structure.
To avoid this, knowledge must reach out to contrasting possibilities, not to refine an abstract eternal law and thus annul time, but rather, to find thematic connections with the most intense connections across otherwise divergent streams, thus making, or more accurately, seeing and understanding, increasingly more of time as synchronous.
Synchronous connections must be understood, however, not as some mysterious synchronicity, not some process opposed to or outside the flow of sequential time, causes, and consequences; nor is the synchronous merely the present, merely what happens to happen at the same time, with wholly independent lines of causation that are merely analogically related.
There are no wholly independent lines. The analogical resonances that formed the backbone of esoteric sciences were a fledgling form of dealing with the complexity of entangled processes. Every analogy, every archetype, every generic identity, covers over even as it expresses and partially reveals a multitude of more detailed connections that need not remain a complete mystery or a proto-science.
The simultaneous is not simply the convergence or unity of the multiple, but its secret sense, its eternal music of creation. It is the rhythm and rhyme of its relations, which not only connect every line but form each line out of others ad infinitum, rendering every “cause”, even multiple or complex chains and circles of concomitant causes, as merely handy entry points into the rhythm of the simultaneous song, as melodic modifications expressing the underlying harmony in the event of endless improvisations.
What happens at the same time does so not without reason, nor because of some overarching reason defining or molding all time. The infinite reasons for anything, the myriad abstractions possible for explaining why something happens, as well as the great mystery of what will happen, are determined between all. This vast game, despite its niches and sub-genres playing with the relatively closed and controlled, is connected enough that no corner escapes the music made by each other.
But this means that, while no imagined connection is beyond some kind of truth, with the right rhythm of approach, there are definite paths to making more and better connections. While the music of the all can be turned down to a low background hum or averaged out in the equations of control, domesticated or mapped into predictable variations, or romanticized as mere subjective freedom or coincidence of meaning, it can also be tuned into and made the kernel of knowledge with a living soul and ever-new meaning for all.
The crux of such a knowledge is the process of the infinity within and the infinity without finding their specification and co-determination in a beat formed by the horizon of their interface, a horizon shared and determined by all, but modified by the limits of any context’s extent of structural harmony or harmonic inclusivity.
From that interfacial plane of ramifying relations, knowledge can pick up on even the most seemingly distant reasons for things, on the cycling signs of a greater being riding on rhythmic correlations; it can divine novel opportunities and contexts out of the unique combinations of what cannot help but be a variation on the themes of its own related instances.
Only through such an open system—only through such a divinizing science of the spheres of influence surrounding and ensouling every event—can knowledge escape the trap of its own machinations, ensuring no path of development is doomed to the dead ends of bluntly determinate beings.
Conclusion: Foundations for an Alternative Path of Knowledge
“To render thought so forceful that it acquires something of an occult power is the task which has been given us. This task must be fulfilled, so that we may be able to take our place in the future.”-Rudolf Steiner48
In any discussion of the spirit or oneness of things, even when the foundation is rendered thoroughly relationally, it can be difficult not to give the impression that there at heart is really only one story, some basic beat or universal drama preordained, if not in detail, then in basic themes or outline—that the only source of knowledge and meaning is the tragic drama of lessons learned from individual limits, and perhaps the heroic side where those lessons lead beyond one set of limits to the greater law of cooperation, beyond the illusions of limited beings and the futile game they play for unlimited control. Is it all just the same ubiquitous journey into some universal vibration of sympathy?
It can indeed often seem as if all stable patterns and continuity in the universe concern some polarity with this “karma” of control and its drama concerning the rectification of some initial fall, some “ascension” out of the universe’s divergent rhythms. But while the cliched tragedies of ignorant beings coming to know and accept their limits must occasionally make for some good cosmic entertainment, they are not the essential meaning(lessness) of life, as some spiritual traditions make it seem.49
The spirit’s fall and liberation may be an important story, but so is the soul’s creative adventure, which has its own complex continuity. This may overlap with the basic drama of rising and falling (or expanding and contracting) illusions and identities, but it is never limited to such things.50
The soul’s journey may ride on the mythic cycles of the spirit’s rounds, but soul life is lived in the gaps of infinite diversity that grow continuously within the relative novelty of its relations, making even the most harmonically inclusive horizon of simultaneity a pattern rich with diverging implications. The hum of the one may seem like a grounding drone, but it is only a rhythmic sign of harmony as a portal to the infinite.
Just as even the most integral convergence is a divergence from some possibilities, every divergent stream converges upon another—an ever richer other if that convergence and divergence can be folded into ever more intricate geometric harmonies.
Even in the complete absence of stable symmetry, even devoid of regular spatializable structure in the way the relative meanings and intentions of beings interact, or some regular temporal pattern which plays it out—and more essentially in this absence, where an unrepresentable simultaneous harmony and creative unfolding reign—a continuity exists whose complex patterns maintain their coherence and consistency not by some foothold in static identities, or by reference to known things or definitive meanings, causes, or reasons, but by their ability to continually connect their relations to the unmediated (and therefore immediate) experience of the creative pulse and living tone, or sense, of existence.
This pulse, this felt or fusing tone, this vitally rhythmic sense, is always and forever forged out of—even as it fosters—new possibilities and relations with every beat of its heart, emerging and growing through every heart, allowing each heart and soul—every new opening—to grow and affirm its value in ever-new forms and clusters of beings and relations.
What returns, then, what persists, is not significantly the discrete identities that appear in and reflect the generic limits of assumed contexts, since these lose much coherence outside their contexts. It is not so much the bare essence of things either, not the abstract negation of discrete identity in universal singularity, then paradoxically identified as both general spirit and individual. (Though, in some sense, the one does exist in the many, and the many in one.)
What more essentially returns is rather the relational becomings of every identity, the true meanings of its singularity. It is the creative innovations, or “souls” of the “spirit”, which flesh out the structure of meaning in things, since what is called the spirit is more akin to their eternal sense.
This spirit does not so much return, does not effectively change or stubbornly persist within its suffering selves and meanings—not passively enclosed within their contexts anyway—as much as its enduring and eternal substance was always already laid down by every change that happens and could ever happen, which is not to say in a past we merely impotently repeat, but in the now that is all time simultaneously.
The spirit, then, which is every spirit, seems to impassively support every soul’s endless expressions of its infinity, living through and yet beyond the changes that are more or less creatively signified and embodied by every singular soul and meaning, meaning more or less poorly reflected in identities.51
And since the structure of meaning and its becoming is determined between and within all things—within their implications relative to other things—it only appears to be imposed from an absolute law outside them because we fledgling souls impose a law on our relations by entering the womb of a limited or controlled context.
What seems to come from without—or from some abstract rule—is what emerges from the interface between some set of things and a context for framing their recurring relations. Some sample of the complex rhythms between things is used to abstract out of the edgeless continuum a standardized cycle for an assumed reference for change—like the regular movements of the stars created by the fixing of our earthly point of view.
And like the movement of the stars, the seeming regularity of our physical world says more about our system of sampled and repeated rhythms than the greater cosmos or stars themselves. Yet there is still a connection, still a logic even to astrology, for instance, when it claims some meaningful patterns of correlations have something to do with the arrangements of the heavens at various times.
In fact, with a lens like that of astrology, or other esoteric sciences, one can easily see that the patterns they study are signs of an interface, rather than a representation of a static universal rule. Simple predictable systems traditionally studied by physics, like those of basic planetary motion, tend to be rather tightly tied to the reference frame of an idealized spatial position—or at least a universal space—which fixes the relations of perspectives and so seem to follow something like a causal law. Yet, the reality outside this niche of conditions cannot effectively be approached in this way, not without a subjection of everything to the limits of our abstractions.
Nonetheless, these limits and abstractions should not be negated. It isn’t that we are too abstract, but rather, that our abstractions must creatively grow beyond the womb in which they arose. The fire of creative expansion and abstraction must not shoot past its embodied ground and become empty, or burn through its earthly fuel in an uncontrolled blaze of destructive passion. It must tend to and nurture the limits that have birthed and nurtured it; it must reground that ground of earhthly discreteness within the continuity of eternal transformation, upon the open sea of time and the ever-refreshing gusts of its changing rhythms.
In certain traditional metaphysical systems, such elemental metaphors helped ground thought in the open relational nexus of nature, understanding discrete earthly forms as products of endless relational processes. Within any process, the earth element merely stands as an element of relative stability, modifying things with a vital mediation characterized by a generally more discrete structure, or distinct focus.52
While traditional symbolic systems have their limits, grounding modern science and knowledge in a similar relational understanding of process can guide culture and life out of their natal niche of linear time and the blunt beginnings inherent to our creaturely conceptions of causality.
For even as we shed all absolute distinctions, even those between the past and future, there still exists, within and between every context and process, an eternal sense in which everything is modifying—and thereby becoming—other things; and within that sense, an unlimited knowledge can be built and grown indefinitely.
While the eternity of this sense may transcend particular meanings and temporal lines, and be inviolate to time’s processes of degradation, this transcendence is not complete in any determinate way, not divorced from time, since nothing is foundationally disconnected from anything else, only beyond the illusory boundaries framed by discrete generalizations and their oppositions.
Likewise, time, considered as such a discrete generalization, some kind of pure change opposed to the generic concept of position or space (which can also be extrapolated into the simplistic concept of a separate changeless eternity), is only a sign of the infinity of life and possibility in the universe. It does not negate the enduring substance of the real, which is only opposed to change within the limits of these rigid divisions.
The eternal sense of things is what is defined through all change even if it is not essentially changed through the process (since nothing is essentially changed or defined by anything else). The eternal is not the frozen foundation or set goal of things, not an eminent power over or essential identity within them, but their structure of connections. This infinite structure is timeless only in the sense that its portions are not lost to time, that selected relations can be experienced in stable abstraction, not that these eternities are prior to, separate, or more important than the flux of things that contextualize and incarnate, as well as produce and ramify their meaning and further relations.
The eternal is not prior to time because priority requires time, requires the seriality of a limited context. There is, then, no overarching view of some single pattern of a “whole”, yet every view is some more or less distorted view of a whole that is complete only in its sense as the ultimate paradoxical abstraction away from all abstraction and selection, away from not only discrete patterns and representations but all rhythm and relation.
Since a complete whole would not be an “all” without an active side of infinity, without some capacity for growth—even if it is only within distinct things and relations that it changes, preserving and explicating all its connections through their changing forms—that which is complete cannot be integrated with what changes in some final structure of simultaneous presence.
Full presence is an absence, the absence of absence necessary for patterns, for distinct things and their inherently unbound relationality. A complete presence may be a true experience of completeness perhaps, but a revelation that the complete negates the incomplete and so is only complete in a paradoxical sense that includes the incomplete as a background implication, pointing a way beyond the paradoxes of opposites to more subtle contrasts and fuller harmonies.
The eternal presence of everything that has ever happened in the universe can be brought increasingly if never completely into view by not dividing the world so starkly into the discrete bits and binaries that assume absolute presence or absence, truth or falsity.
One can instead layer more and more of the cosmos into a simultaneous becoming, branching out from some rhythm, forming and fusing with some continuum of various degrees in intensity of relation to that becoming, with relevant and relative eternities framing the cosmos in nested hierarchies, in realms upon realms of what was and is forever haunting what apparently is and what is coming to be.
For while everything is eternal in some sense, what matters more than the rather abstract question of what lasts—since everything lasts within the abstract—is what maintains a more relevant presence in what other things.
All things have unlimited numbers of contexts in which they can be understood or expressed, and so may precede every beginning and outlast every end. Yet within any specific frame, they have a beginning and therefore an end—that is, unless the frame can be extended or connected with others, unless it can be made to overlap with and include more and more of the expanse of eternal things and the frames in which they become each other in meaningful relation.
Every thing or moment is an event, a unique coming together of elements that is preserved forever but only ever approached or replayed within different contexts and events. The duration of the event is the process of one event becoming a more significant part of other events, but its depth is the degree to which it already uniquely harmonizes the infinity of versions of the one event, that is, every conceivable event growing ever more fleshed out and individuated in its connections to every other.
Each singular thing or event is always inscribed within processes of recurring and returning relations generated by the depth of its harmonization of difference into simultaneous experience. But these recurring relations are never the return of the same. Each returns in its incomparable singularity as a vital pulse of living, ramifying relations between other singular things, which being unique modifications of an infinity of others, transcend any kind of fixed eternal relation.
Each thing or event, then, is a relation of relations. And every single one is eternal. But what they relate is never the same because, as relations as well, they can only relay any determination to other relations, to a bottomless base of ever-burgeoning being; nothing is ever the same, even within itself, except as the one self—again, the ultimate abstraction from abstractions and relations, and so a sameness whose peace eternally arises out of—even as it sustains—the infinite machinery of difference and relation.
Likewise, every relative sameness, that is, all that serves to stabilize and ground change, is also a product of that change, that process of learning how to better and better release the living continuum of singular events from the cage of isolated identities, from the wrinkle in time’s tapestry imposed by the limited frames separating the subject and object of change.
But the eternal spirits of everything, the beings which more or less haunt the presencing of every event with their ambiguous quasi-presence, are never really only present or absent, never fully sidelined, and never really captured in any frame or relation. For each thing and event is a relation to all, and only faintly represented by the abstract dependencies modeled by the logic of the discrete intellect.
Eternity, then, to reiterate the inexhaustible and ungraspable truth is not the timeless but the simultaneous, not an abstract point of an unchanging now, but a “spacious present”, that which is seemingly generated by and negotiated within and between each thing’s value environments, a coherence created now and always, as all things learn to make an increasing array of contexts and scales of the universe part of a connected and continuous process.53
A certain logic of recurring themes and cycles within cycles is bound to result within the boundaries of limited contexts and spaces, as the incompatibility of events experienced as separation in time or space in one context, compels a return in arrangements that press the logic of their connection. This is not to say that their differences are submerged. On the contrary, by forcing the seemingly disconnected and bluntly separated into relation, their unique differences are given greater chance to find value in increasingly more contexts and levels of description.54
In other words, the slant of all processes, when seen in a continuous light, does lean towards a kind of convergence as well as an expansion, since it is a convergence into a plane of greater and greater differentiation. This slant of creative evolution, however, is not the same as the slant of time, since it has no inherent direction in time. Indeed, a single line of time in a restricted context can even be little more than the burning up of potential, little more than fuel for some creative process, a process inevitably obfuscated when viewed from within its engine of interfering and collapsing differences.
Or one could say that our linear sense of time cuts through the process of creative evolution, breaking up its infinite spirals of interpenetrating progressions into static cycles and limited lines of entropic degradation. The greater process which conserves all connections and builds forever on their innovation, can only be inferred through its traces in the short spurt of life’s evolution in time (that is, as long as things are merely tied to the degrading oppositions of incoherent systems traversing linear time).
Often, the greater process is simply conflated with our narrow line of time, imaginatively projected into some false future as a destined progression. Such projections merely combine opposed generic concepts or intuitions—like the lines of limited development and cycles of history unified into some spiral of progressive destiny.
Such naive faith can prevent those caught in its wake from achieving their higher destiny, from bending life and history’s inevitable downward spirals up into the larger realm of possibilities, from tapping into life’s periodic gradients of autumnal intensity, opening up the lonely, looping lines of linear life, and its lower destiny of death, into the infinite overlapping pattern of everlasting purpose.
Within that pattern, everything that spirals down under the weight of a rhythm it cannot hold, still, is destined again to rise, to be exposed again and again to the order connecting every seemingly discrete life, pushing every being to at first just envision, and then eventually embody the complex continuity running through and resonating with disparate lives, as the contrasting beats and oscillating notes are not just lifted into the melody of a single song, but a harmony whose distant notes resound simultaneously together in the beating heart of creation.
And while the process is not inherently about overcoming limits or negating differences, but rather, expanding and connecting differential relations, the explicit negations and oppositions inherent to the reification of the sides of this process—the separation of space and time, subject and object, and especially, act from its intent—do tend to be the most immediately replayed and potentially redressed in the slant of recurring rhythms.
Yet, this is because these generic identities, as necessary as they are in the beginning, are ultimately what thwart our creative goals and individuation, not because the soul’s adventures are mere distractions from some unilateral convergence. And since these personal karmic lessons always exist within, or rather, overlap with a multitude of soul dramas at various scales, they can often take a backseat to, or are even displaced by, larger collective dramas.
There is much more to life and the universe than learning some essential lesson, even though every event is an opportunity to learn and grow. Even when one karmic line or one life is cut short by a tragedy that seems arbitrary, or a collective event that has little to do with any individual’s journey, there is always still a lesson to learn in the greater goal of becoming ready for, and ultimately making use of, the seemingly unexpected.
For many of the most creative soul-projects and complex explorations of the universe’s ideas require some confrontation, if not cooperation with, other contrasting and seemingly contingent ideas and projects.
On the other hand, some do not. One can imagine that, as mystics have reported, there are endless adventures that can be sustained in relative isolation or within the shelter of realms where any aim can be entertained without interruption from contrasting realities. These need not imply just dreams of control, or solitary delusions, but densely populated worlds of harmony, where beings may “for a time” avoid the tireless journey of individuation, and the pressure of expanding differential relations.
However, again, eventually, a limit is reached. At the limit of every system, more or less related beings or successive events exhaust their mutual momentum and interesting differences, eventually falling back into some divergent streams. However, what appears as a divergence from the shelter and constraint of a relation run its course, is, in a larger context, a deeper convergence upon a greater shared being.
From the spiritual perspective, a split on one level is on another a homecoming of simultaneity. Whether in liberating conflagration or joyous rhapsody, every end reveals a fresh collective horizon, or in the case of an explicit continuous expansion, all ever opens onto a greater gradient of relational being.
At some point in every soul’s adventure, every individual story must dovetail with the collective karma, must understand and incorporate its most immediate differences, its surrounding context, medium, and objects, as not just tools to be used or contrasts to define itself against—towards some aim abstracted from them—but relations crucial to the formation of its identity.
Eventually, what is opposed or repressed into the background of one context, emerges into the foreground of another consequently related one. Conversely, what is exalted or emphasized in one environment, must find a way to harmonize with a greater horizon, with the rhythmic onslaught of returning otherness. Otherwise, it is destined to fall into the recursive cycle’s underworld journey through the layers of intervening and transfiguring realms or contexts.
Yet, even if the inevitable return can be manipulated or delayed, or alternatively, all delay deleted in the symmetrical harmony of simultaneous existence, even beyond the separation of an action from its intent, beyond even what we think of as time—even before the distribution of the everlasting event into separate actions, or within the horizon of their ever-higher integration—there is always still a rhythm, an infinitely modulating hum in the engine of difference powering eternity.
Consequently, beneath even the highest harmony, on the other side of every simultaneous sounding of the deep, time’s infinite revisions rumble on, generating endless events from the eternal’s engine of novelty. Regardless of the level of relative harmony, there is always more to explore. The most successful act of reconciliation becomes a seed in a new context; every harmonization of one tension opens into or even provokes dissonance within another, even when part of a path to greater synthesis.
Even so-called “good karma” has its price. There is no act of compassion or creation, no increase of power or freedom that is not also an increase in responsibility. And there is ultimately no hiding from anything, and no rest for the wicked—or for humanity if we continue down the path of exploitation and unilateral power.
For, as suggested before, this path becomes increasingly difficult, not only because of cosmic-scale competition, but because it becomes an increasing strain or stretch of the will to maintain enclosed identities in the face of ever-expanding and interpenetrating relations.
The paradox of growth without letting go, without a change in foundations, becomes, as we can see already in our culture, exhausting. It becomes a considerably more complex and contradictory task to maintain control, or to avoid shifting to coherent cooperation when limits are reached. As more and more dependencies and limits are added to the structure of such a knowledge and power, increasing entanglement and responsibility becomes almost inevitable.
Attempting to maintain control in a changing world may force growth into new domains and the subtle secrets of power, but it also forces the expanding regime of control to become one of ever-more vigilant and subtle predators, or at least pretty problematic gods. The demonic predator especially has quite the task, for its continued evolution necessitates a rigorous riding of the incoming tide of the others’ karmic comeuppance, reaping the return of the seeds of the universe’s ignorance.
Like a natural predator, who does not lay waste to its prey’s population, but rather works within the bounds of the ecosystem, predatory power is similarly motivated to compete for the rights to play the reaper, to trigger its prey’s inevitable loss of power—thus serving a vital function in the occult economy and ecology, re-deploying the waste of the weak, and “helping” them face the fate their limits made necessary.55
However, such a regime cannot last forever; sooner or later it will be forced to clamp down too hard, or otherwise lose its control; either way, the subsequent ripples in the larger karmic ecosystem will inevitably disrupt the established rhythm which serves as the base of its leverage, polarity, and power.
And while all power and polarity can be set aside, and one may rest for a time within, or rather as one of the seemingly still nodes made between the waves of change that make all things, just as there is no absolute limit, there is no final negative freedom anywhere, and no positive path beyond the karmic machinery, not until one can rise through its gears into its frontiers, rise through an ever-more inclusive consolidation of any path’s compounding connections.
Despite the complexity, even when these patterns become a convoluted conjunction of ever-more lines and loops of time, even if they approach an ever-more expansive coherence, it is still the same song as always, still the same dance of difference, even if every beat of its journey is rooted in a new nest of the now. It all starts by patiently building upon and along the lines in which we find ourselves—not only with a mind to expand their limits, but also their foundations, and so always reaching back to revisit them in a new light—thus ensuring we expand in all directions, ensuring we do not fall into an ever-more detailed determination of our most basic beliefs, and our foremost fears.
Notes
- Roberts (1972) Pg.119
- Feyerabend (1993) pg.13
- Proponents of Theosophy claim there were previous prehistoric eras that did not share our mode of thought centered on representation; yet even if thought had a similar power of manifestation in these eras to what we are now approaching, it would have been decidedly different than our era of technological simulation.
- This question of essentialism, as it is sometimes called in philosophy, will be addressed throughout this text.
- When this happened is up for debate, and it all depends on what one means by “rational”. Theosophical authors sometimes claim the rational intellect has its roots far back in a prehistoric era which had its own highly developed mode of cognition. Most would agree, however, that the period beginning around three thousand years ago, what Karl Jaspers calls the “axial age”, was a significant point in its rise.
- By particular physical experience I mean to suggest that there is not some universal or uniformly experienced physical world, but rather, different arrangements of consciousness and its vehicles, however one conceives of them, physical or otherwise. This is central to much esoteric thought, as well as the conception that human history has not been confined to the present arrangement.
- De Jouvenal (1976)
- Noble (1997)
- Scofield (2022)
- For an interesting history of the war of the Church against other forms of Christianity see the many books by Laurence Gardner.
- Though there was a kind of continuity of power and expansion of its growth from the middle ages to modernity (de Jouvenal, 1976), the Renaissance saw a period of metaphysical experimentation and vital exchange between not only different cultures, but between the academic and counterculture of the West, exemplified by the popularity of astrology (Scofield 2022), and made possible by the fascination of academic philosophers with the nature of the sign (Deely, 2001)
12.Deely (2001)
- Bains (2006)
- I am of course here taking aim at Hegel and his dialectic of opposition and negation (Somers-Hall, 2012), as well as the logical hierarchies of set theory, in favor of the relational approach of category theory (Gangle, 2016).
- Much of the text here has been inspired by the pioneering work of and on Gilles Deleuze and his embrace of not only the history of relational thought (Bains, 2006), but an embrace of the esoteric (Ramey 2012). To Deleuze and Guattari, philosophy is essentially creative (1996).
- If a set-theoretic approach leads to an atomistic approach to matter, then the relational approach of category theory (Gangle, 2016), should, in my mind, lead to an alchemical approach to matter, or one based on ratios of intensity, as developed in my text “Creative Coherence: From Political Physics to Psychic Politics in Hypermodernity”
- Deleuze and Guattari (1996) pg. 130
- While this may not be what Heidegger meant by being as “thrownness”, or how many people think of divine incarnation or human reincarnation, I think all these themes take on a more revealing light with the trajectory of recent technology in mind.
- Conspiracy theory has become full of claims of this sort, with many accounts putting science fiction to shame with its level of synthesis of mythical, metaphysical, and political themes relevant to our culture.
- This is a basic esoteric concept, that the important parts of our being correspond to levels of reality. And it is on the “material plane”—where the relation between these various parts is the most diverse and unstable—that they can mix more creatively and be formed into a potentially novel line of integration.
- See my essay “Creative Coherence: From Political Physics to Psychic Politics in Hypermodernity”
- I mean here to bring to mind Gilles Deleuze’s critique of the tree-like structure of traditional logic, where everything is captured by more or less general categories that often obscure the important relations forming everything.
- Deleuze and Parnet (1987) pg. 55, as quoted in Bains (2006) pg.15
- The myth of the “open society”, was popularized by Karl Popper and others, but critiqued by many, including (De Jouvenal 1945/76).
- While the model of the atom has dissolved into a completely unvisualizable mess of math, the lack of any conceptually coherent alternative to the most basic elements in the hierarchy of scientific ontology, and the disciplines that study those levels, has stalled humanity from finding a postmodern metaphysics fit for our times.
- Ho (2008)
- Deleuze (1968)
- A paraphrase of various defenses of so-called postmodern approaches to knowledge, especially of Feyerabend’s famous claim that in science “anything goes”.
- While I am sympathetic to certain versions of this argument against any prior decision, like in the work of Francois Laruelle (Galloway 2014), I am obviously here attempting to argue for the benefit of certain metaphysical systems over others when it comes to building understanding; though having some kind of science of different systems also does have its appeal.
- Steiner (2019)
- While there are various ways of normalizing and managing infinities in science and mathematics, this can give a false sense of understanding and control that becomes exposed as discoveries and unexplained phenomena point the way toward a reality that cannot be contained.
- In the esoteric tradition, the view tends to be that human consciousness is always changing and reality along with it. But even in more standard historical accounts, it is increasingly difficult to maintain the liberal tendency to view the mind or human subject outside of or passively determined by history, especially when faced with the seemingly radical otherness of ancient cultures’ very perception of reality. Instead of the common cultural relativism, and narrow view of objective reality that are the standard in academia, I argue that standards should arise from an understanding of the overlapping realities tied up with the subjects that apprehend them. There is continuity but also radical differences between any two people but especially between the realities of people today and people in ancient times. All the more so, the further you go back. This contrasts with the mainstream view that human consciousness has changed relatively little until the recent advent of civilization, especially modern civilization.
- The concept of emergence, as helpful as it can be, also tends to reify certain hierarchical structures, especially the hierarchy of knowledge which privileges a kind of atomistic physics of fundamental causes. See Thalos (2013).
- While this metaphor of fallen light might seem like antiquated Gnosticism, it becomes less metaphorical with certain readings of physics. See Young (1976), and my “Creative Coherence” text.
- Traditional accounts, like the Bodhisattva vow of Buddhism, sometimes make eventual collective liberation seem like an impossible goal down a temporal line, rather than a simultaneous reality of harmonized lines; this can lead to an obscuration of the soul and other connecting links between poles of the universe, something Sri Aurobindo was trying to address in his work. See Aurobindo (1950).
36.See Aurobindo (1950), and Roberts (1972).
- For the physics behind why unproportionally rendered relations obscure the nature of all as light, again, see my “Creative Coherence” text.
- Kierkegaard (1985) pg. 25
- In the cosmology of Rudolf Steiner, this legend about Lucifer ruling over his own separate reality, is described as a possibility in the future if humanity falls victim to not only Lucifer’s temptation away from matter toward disembodied mind, but Ahriman’s temptation away from spirit, specifically towards materialism and technology. Steiner warned that these two demonic forces were working together to form a separate reality in order to trap us there. This was discussed decades before the first computers, and almost a century before movies like “The Matrix” gave us a concrete vision of what being trapped in our bodies and minds by disembodied beings or “programs” might look like.
- This concept of iterability is a key component of poststructural philosophy, especially the work of Jacques Derrida.
- This is not necessarily to take sides in one of the central debates of Eastern philosophy, but to render the debate in a light where both sides make some sense, to flesh out the relations between their extreme abstractions, rather than just affirming some non-dual paradox of self and no-self, emptiness and immortality.
- I mean here, of course, to hint at the trinity of deities in Hinduism: Brahma, the creator, Vishnu, the preserver, and Shiva, the destroyer.
- Roberts (1972)
- This is best described by Jane Roberts in her book Seth Speaks (1972), but in various fascinating ways throughout her work, often referring to the universe as the “museum of time”, where the past can be revisited as seeds to new soul adventures.
- Harmonic inclusivity is a key concept in the culture of alternative science, popularized by YouTube personalities like Dan Winter.
- It is tricky to describe the process of legitimate divination and intuitive vision without falling into naive concepts of predetermination. This is one problem with Rudolf Steiner’s framing of “spiritual science”, which often appears to downplay the formative or creative role of the occult “researcher” and his knowledge in what they divine. Though Steiner sometimes acknowledges this formative aspect, calling what he does “science” necessitates a continual reframing of what science is, and I would argue a metaphysics of science not beholden to common concepts of it. While Steiner and his hero Goethe tried to develop this, I would argue Bergson, Deleuze, and the physics detailed in my text “Creative Coherence”, help update spiritual science to the postmodern age.
- I would argue that postmodernism as a stage in philosophy started in the 19th century, as Deely (2001) argues as well—as the modern way of ideas as representations fell short, and Nietzsche, Pierce, Heidegger, as well as the revolutions in physics and language theory of the early 20th century, eroded any believable concept of the world as mere objects for a subject, a world without an open-system of relations to mediate it.
- Steiner (1907)
- This is one of the weaknesses of Eastern philosophy that Sri Aurobindo attempted to correct, but one could argue, following Theosophy, that the soul’s creative adventure and open-ended development was just hidden in the esoteric texts of the East (Joscelyn Gowin argues that Blavatsky’s claim that much of what she was writing could be found in secret Tibetan texts has been somewhat vindicated (Godwin 2007 citing Reigle 1983)). In Rudolf Steiner’s revision of Theosophy, however, the Eastern teachings were meant for an earlier age, while it was the West’s spiritual mission to build upon these great spiritual traditions, an even greater knowledge of the soul’s development beyond what was possible in earlier times.
- This spirit/soul dichotomy has a simple upward/downward meaning in some post-Jungian works, but I prefer to see the two movements as overlapping narratives that depend on each other. The rising and falling of the spirit is itself a kind of spiritual bias, since it is most concerned with that rise. The spirit’s descent into the soul is not just so that it can rise again as spirit, but because of the great rhizomatic journey of creative soul adventures. The spirit is a tree, the soul a rhizome, to use Deleuze and Guattari’s terminology.
- Deleuze uses the term “impassive” (1969) when discussing the nature of “sense”, in a way I wanted to invoke here.
- In the five phases or “elements” of ancient Chinese Taoism, the earth element is associated with Yi, our distinct focus of awareness, the “earthly pivot”, or midpoint between the yang elements wood and fire (associated with our “yang soul” and spirit respectively), and the yin elements of metal and water (associated with our “yin soul” and will power respectively) (Mitchell 2013, pg.110). Likewise, the earth season follows the wood and fire seasons of spring and summer, before the earthly pivot to the autumn and winter seasons of metal and water (or in some contexts the pivot between each season). The elements are actually the names for the five visible planets in Chinese, the earth element being what the West calls Saturn, often associated in Western esoteric thought with limits and karma. Though, in the four-element system of Western astrology, the planets are not associated with just one element, even if they are said to “rule” certain signs with definite elemental associations, with Saturn traditionally ruling one of the earth elements, Capricorn, as well as the “fixed” air sign Aquarius. In the Western system, the four elements cycle three times over the course of a year, giving 12 signs and three modes of each element. All the elements of Western astrology have a stable or “fixed” mode, which stabilizes the initiating “cardinal” sign of the sign/element which precedes it, before becoming transformed by the “mutable” sign/element that follows. So Taurus, the fixed earth sign is naturally considered the most stable, and it must be to properly mediate between the most strongly initiating sign of fiery Aries, and the most strongly mutable sign, the airy Gemini. This is all to say that, despite the differences in systems and their varying contexts, the ground is always relational. Even the metaphor of a fixed sign or earthly elemental ground is not some fundamentally defining substance or elements, but the more or less stable distinctions made between them. Likewise, the idea of a cardinal or causal sign may stand for the initiation of new developments, yet every cause or change is still just another kind of sign relative to another, and therefore not a ground of meaning. In any proper symbol system, all signs and elements can be understood as mediating modifiers of other signs and elements that depend on context for meaning, not fundamental substances or even fundamental qualities exactly. Context is always king, or should be.
- “Spacious present” is a term used by Seth (Roberts 1972). One could say the text you are reading here is all a kind of connecting thread from Seth to earlier esoteric texts, like those of Aurobindo and Steiner, updated with the concepts of academic philosophy, complexity theory, and alternative physics.
- Levels of description is a term borrowed from (Vrobel 2011), where it plays a key role in her vision of how simultaneity is constructed, turning temporal length into the temporal depth and density of layered levels of description.
- New Age culture, especially conspirituality adjacent subcultures, talk often of free will and magical laws of karmic consent, yet struggle to reconcile these concepts with their dark vision of cosmic exploitation. But what they are talking about falls right out of the concepts discussed here, where this need not be understood with reference to transcendent laws and free subjects, so much as the implications immanent to certain ideas and their relations. However, I admit I found the treatment of these subjects as a “law of one” in the RA Material quite illuminating when not taken too literally (Elkins, Rueckert, McCarty, 1982-1998).
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