Subsistence

Continuing the autopoeisis of the OOO thread, from long ago in the thread there was a link to some of Wilber's works. I opened that version of SES and searched for subsistence. The following is from footnote 360 (p. 809), which is sounding a lot like what I'm intuiting lately. And which sounds like a version of virtual proper being and local manifestation. I'm coming full circle. More later as I contemplate this further.

"The totality of all manifestation at any time—the All—subsists in the low causal, as the sum total of the consequent and primordial nature of Spirit (in roughly Whitehead's sense), and this Totality is the manifest omega pull on each individual and finite thing: as such, it is ever-receding: each new moment has a new total horizon that can never be reached or fulfilled, because the moment of fulfillment itself creates a new whole of which the previous whole is now a part: cascading whole/parts all the way up, holons endlessly self-transcending and thus never finally self-fulfilled: rushing forward ceaselessly in time attempting to find the timeless.


"And the final Omega, the ultimate and unmanifest Omega, the causal Formless, is the magnet on the other side of the horizon, which never itself enters the world of Form as a singularity or as a totality (or any other phenomenal event), and thus is never found at all in any version of manifestation, even though all manifestation will rest nowhere short of this infinite Emptiness.Thus, from any angle, there is no ultimate Omega to be found in the world of Form. There is no Perfection in the manifest world. Were the world of Form to find Perfection and utter fulfillment, there would be nothing else for it to do and nowhere else for it to go: nothing further to want, to desire, to seek, to find: the entire world would cease its search, stop its drive, end its very movement: would become without motion, time, or space: would become the Formless. But the Formless is already there, on the other side of the horizon, which is to say, the Formless is already there as the deepest depth of this and every moment.This Deepest Depth is the desire of all Form, which cannot itself be reached in the world of Form, but rather as the Emptiness of each and every Form: when all Forms are seen to be always already Formless, then dawns the Nondual empty Ground that is the Suchness and the Thusness of each and every display. The entire world of Form is always already Perfectly Empty, always already in the ever-present Condition of all conditions, always already the ultimate Omega that is not the goal of each and every thing but the Suchness of each and every thing: just this. The search is always already over, and Forms continue their eternal play as a gesture of the Divine, not seeking Spirit but expressing Spirit in their every move and motion."

I'm still critical of the traditional metaphysical framing. And have yet to see any change in more recent works like Integral Spirituality, which I've criticized at length. Still, aspects of the above can be framed within OOO, and add something to it per my recent ruminations. If we see our known universe as an immanent, material hyperobject instead of an ontotheological ground it makes sense to see the endo-structural autonomy of the universe as a "pull on each individual and finite thing," with those things as its local manifestations. As I said above, no thing can escape differance. I also appreciate Wilber's version of iteration, in that "each new moment has a new total horizon that can never be reached and fulfilled." His Omega doesn't have to be the be All and end All but can be more like the virtual eternal hyperobject, always at least partly withdrawn, never entering into local manifestation in its entirety. It "is already there...as the deepest depth of this and every moment.... Not the goal of each and every thing but the[ir] Suchness."

Now a major OOO concern which I share is how to articulate this groundless ground without turning it into the kind of metaphysical substratum no longer acceptable. I think what I'm suggesting goes a long way toward that. It's a kind of re-framing of the emptiness of emptiness doctrine, since differance is the anarchic foundation or transcendental condition for this universe, and yet itself remains withdrawn from the metaphysics of presence despite being present in every manifest suobject.