Philosophers have long sought a generative method to support personal change, a process driven not by the logic of pathology or dysfunction, but propelled by inherent human capacities for symbolization and transformation. These capacities comprise the primordial sources of human resilience, but the path to evoking them to support creative adaptation and development is obscure.
The conceptual and methodological breakthroughs required to do so have been a long-time coming. Beginning with research for a Harvard PhD, decades of theoretical and practical work ultimately discerned an algorithm for human transformation, the DNA of personal change, which this method deploys in a game-changing procedure.
Two contrasting realities provide the background for this project. Contemporary media-driven culture — characterized by fracture, fragmentation, and formlessness — undermines personal development and collective cohesion to devastating effect. Meanwhile, new technologies and new understandings of what it means to be human offer powerful resources for an innovative approach to integration and development.
From this fraught background, a new method for identity and transformation has emerged. The process it incorporates is sufficiently nuanced to evoke
The method’s extraordinary fertility spawns a wide range of applications for contexts ranging from education and personal change to corporate consulting and social networking.
In the past, an embodied, image-based medium for integration and transformation of the sort we’re establishing would have faced overwhelming conceptual and logistical obstacles. Whether employed for individual experience or professional practice, in self-help contexts or in institutional settings, the burden of space, materials, and equipment required by such a method, combined with the intricate logic of formative process which drives the procedure, would have posed insurmountable barriers.
A radical new solution was required. To overcome these obstacles we’re building a virtual reality implementation which promises not only to make such a method widely practical but to create a new category of experience and a new experiential medium. We call it the Ontosphere — the sphere of being and becoming.
The method introduces a paradigm shift in both procedure and theory with far-reaching implications in many areas. A new procedure based on virtual life-space mapping provides access to the DNA of personal transformation. By accessing an innate ontogenetic sequence, the process bases itself on nature’s own program for development and deep learning.
A profound transformational algorithm embedded in a three-fold human interface leverages embodied reality. An inherently pleasurable experience with deep neurological, sociological, and cognitive roots establishes a new model of personal change.
The Ontosphere elicits the life drive. This immersive milieu provides palpable access to the intangible dynamic of life renewing itself by expressing its founding cognitive program.
A unitary generative perspective centered on the roots of vitality re-integrates the confusing welter of mental health and related fields within a broad theoretical and methodological conception. An immersive, connected milieu solves the problems of both practice and distribution. The Ontosphere will enable wide dissemination of this transformative procedure for use in professional practice, self-exploration, and identity formation in educational settings.
We have coined a name for the experience on which the method is based. We call it Ontokinesîs, the movement of being. We envision it as a resource for transformation, a unique post-modern rite of passage, to be invoked as needed.
Ontokinesîs combines the particularity and concreteness of one’s own lived reality with the abstract path of individuation, virtualized in a milieu that is palpably real, the sphere of being. Occurring in a transitional space which only now becomes technologically feasible, this application could quite plausibly become the killer app for VR itself.
It’s a symbolization machine which transcends the distinctions between entertainment and education, therapy and recreation, game and course of study. In such a milieu, as in the human nervous system, everything is taken inside where it is metabolized, while the inside is connected to the outside from which it draws sustenance.
