The Philosopy

This page hosts the working text of a thesis-length project I’ve been rebuilding over the past few years. It began life as my MA dissertation in Myth, Cosmology and the Sacred; that original document promptly vanished into the digital void, which felt awful at the time but turned out to be an oddly fitting metaphor for what the work is about. This is a  more grown-up version: rewritten from the ground up, less constrained by academic conventions, but still a serious, carefully argued piece of philosophy.

In plain language, the thesis asks a very simple question with very big consequences:

What if reality is not made of “things” at all, but of relationships – and what if consciousness, matter, imagination and meaning all arise together from that relational field?

What the thesis is doing

Most of us in the modern West have inherited a picture that goes something like this: there’s a physical universe made of matter and energy; inside it, brains produce minds; inside those minds, imagination spins fictions; anything “spiritual” or symbolic is either superstition, psychology, or fraud.

This project argues that that entire picture is too small, and that many of our current crises – from mental health to politics to ecology – are symptoms of trying to live inside it.

So the thesis does three main things:

• It dismantles “substance ontology”. That’s the technical term for the idea that reality is made of basic stuff (whether “matter” or “mind”) with properties attached. I show why this framework keeps generating the same dead-end debates (materialism vs idealism, mind vs brain, faith vs science) and why it can’t actually account for either lived experience or contemporary science.

• It develops a “participatory ontology” of the Relational Field. Instead of starting from bits of stuff, I start from relationship and participation. The Field is my way of naming the dynamic, patterned, relational “medium” out of which both world and experience arise together. You are not a detached observer looking at a world “over there”; you are an in-the-midst participant in the same field you’re trying to understand.

• It traces the consequences. Once you take the Field seriously, a lot of previously awkward phenomena look different: imagination, symbol, synchronicity, religious experience, so-called “paranormal” events, psychedelics, near-death experiences, collective movements, even AI. The thesis explores how all these can be understood without either dismissing them as nonsense or turning them into naïve supernaturalism.

What’s genuinely new here

Philosophers have of course talked about relation and participation before, and I’m very open about standing on the shoulders of others (thinkers like Jean Gebser, Owen Barfield, Iain McGilchrist, Jorge Ferrer and Bernardo Kastrup are in the background of the work).

What’s new in this project is the particular combination of moves:

• Participation is put at the metaphysical ground floor. I’m not just saying “relationship matters socially” or “we’re all interconnected” in a vague way. I’m arguing that participation itself is more basic than either “subject” or “object”. You don’t start with two separate things that then relate; relation is what gives you “things” in the first place.

• The Relational Field is derived, not just asserted. There’s a worked-through, step-by-step argument (a kind of transcendental derivation) that shows why some form of Field must be presupposed for any experience, science, or communication to be possible at all. It’s not a mystical slogan; it’s a piece of conceptual scaffolding.

• Imagination is upgraded. Instead of treating imagination as “the bit that makes stuff up”, the thesis recasts it as a mode of participation – one of the ways the Field discloses itself. This has big implications for how we understand myth, symbol, ritual, art, and even everyday intuition.

• “Weird” experiences are brought into the centre of the picture. Rather than treating synchronicities, near-death experiences, psychedelic states and other “high-strange” phenomena as embarrassing outliers, I use them as stress-tests for the ontology. A good account of reality should be able to say something sensible about them without hand-waving.

• It stays hospitable to actual life. This isn’t just abstract metaphysics. The final movement of the work is about orientation and practice: what it might mean to live as if the Relational Field is real, in our attention, technologies, politics, communities and spiritual lives.

How the thesis is structured

The full text is long, and it’s written as a proper argument that builds, so you don’t need to read it all in one go. Very roughly, it unfolds in four arcs:

Clearing the ground – a demolition of substance-based frameworks and a diagnosis of why the “mental-rational” way of seeing is exhausted and over-stretched.

Introducing the Relational Field – a careful derivation and characterisation of the Field and of participatory ontology.

Working through the implications – chapters looking at consciousness, imagination, religious experience, “anomalous” phenomena, AI, and the evolution of structures of consciousness in light of the Field.

Living in a participatory cosmos – an exploration of practice, ethics and orientation: what changes if we take participation seriously, and what might an “integral” way of seeing and acting look like in very ordinary human terms.

Who it’s for (and how to approach it)

This is, unapologetically, a serious bit of work. It’s not a quick blog post, and it does ask you to think along with it.

That said, I’ve written it for curious, intelligent readers rather than for a thesis committee. You don’t need a philosophy degree to follow it, just a willingness to sit with some new ideas and a tolerance for me occasionally saying, “this bit is subtle; stick with me”.

If any of the following resonate, you’re probably in the right place:

• You have a sense that “reality” is more than either materialism or vague spirituality allow, but you don’t want to abandon rigour.

• You’ve had experiences (through art, nature, crisis, ritual, psychedelics, prayer, synchronicity, whatever) that don’t quite fit the standard story, and you’d like a framework that doesn’t pathologise them.

• You’re interested in the evolution of consciousness, in the future of culture, or in how to keep your bearings in a world that feels increasingly fractured.

If you’re that sort of reader, my invitation is simple: take what’s useful, argue with what you disagree with, and see whether the notion of a Relational Field helps you make better sense of your own experience.

Click the button below to read it.