Being and Space: Black Holes, Phenomenology, and the Connection to the Universe
Introduction: Why Being, Space, and Mental Health Belong Together
I just wrote and essay. Here is a summary. Link at the bottom: Being and Space: Reconnecting with the Universe, Part One argues that modern life is structured by a hidden feedback system: we explain reality using the same conceptual tools that already define it. This creates what can be called a phenomenological loop—a self-referential cycle where meaning refers only to more meaning.
Using mathematical and physical metaphors—especially black holes, event horizons, and singularities—the essay reframes this loop as a structural limitation, not a personal failure. Mental health emerges here less as a clinical category, more as the primary interface where humans can reconnect with the universe beyond this closed system.
The Phenomenological Loop: When Meaning Talks Only to Itself
Phenomenology, rooted in appearances and subjective meaning, defines modern knowledge. Everything that is known appears as a subject. The problem is not that this method is wrong—it works—but that it cannot justify itself or escape its own structure.
The issue is not meaning — of course, people can make whatever meaning they want about things, but that often enough the meaning we make is either 1)an escape from what is actually the case, or 2) creates conflict between people in the battle over who is right, and the creation of closed communities.
The point is: this is what happens and there is no overcoming it. However, in as much as there are mental issues, but specifically mental health, the nothing of what is actually happening can be significant.
Philosophy repeatedly “talks about what it is talking about.” Propositions justify propositions. Meaning explains meaning. Like a mathematical proof that assumes its own axioms, the system becomes internally consistent yet externally sealed.
This loop explains a few things. For one, the philosophical method of Hermeneutics was a response to an inability of a subject to get outside of itself. Also, it describes why disagreement never escapes subjectivity and why reason cannot prove why reason is reasonable. It also grounds the development of modern psychology and its ability to have any effect whatsoever for understanding as well as application, and indeed problem and exploitation.
Mental health enters at precisely this fracture point: when the subject recognizes the limits of its own explanatory world and includes the discrepancy present.
Black Holes as an Epistemological Model
The essay uses black holes less as poetic metaphor and more as a substantial explanation. In physics, a black hole’s event horizonmarks the boundary where known laws break down. Beyond it lies a singularity, a point where conventional explanation collapses.
Modern philosophy behaves similarly. Propositional reasoning functions well—until it reaches its own singularity. At that point, explanation becomes circular, and the subject encounters something it cannot reduce to language.
This is where phenomenology reaches its limit.
The Event Horizon of Philosophy
Philosophical history appears progressive, but closer inspection reveals a series of tangents orbiting an unseen center. Each system refines method without addressing what the method excludes.
The academy, psychology, and social theory institutionalize this orbit. They manage meaning, regulate interpretation, and stabilize subjectivity—but they never cross the event horizon. The result is a sophisticated structure that cannot reach the thing itself.
Mental health names what happens at that boundary because it substantiates the thing that is being orbited around. .
Psychology vs. Mental Health
Psychology operates inside the phenomenological loop. It categorizes, diagnoses, and manages subjective experience within socially defined frameworks. This is not a criticism—psychology does important work—but it remains confined to subjects of subjects.
Mental health, by contrast, concerns orientation rather than justification. It is not necessarily about fixing meaning, but that meaning tends to repeat itself. Mental health is about reopening contact with reality beyond semantic enclosure. Validation, openness, and relational contact are not techniques—they are exits, they are entrances.
Where psychology encloses, mental health opens.
Objects, Not Just Subjects
The essay challenges the assumption that we can only know meanings, never things. If objects were entirely unknowable, we could not even name them. The table you rest your feet on is not merely a semantic construct—it is an object that participates in the same universe you do.
This resonates with object-oriented ontology and critiques of Kantian phenomenalism, but the essay’s focus is practical: while modern method of conceptualization emphasizes social subjects of control and separation from things, mental health in particular depends on recognizing that we are already in contact with things, not merely representations of them.
Artificial Intelligence as a Mirror of Modern Subjectivity
Artificial Intelligence illustrates the phenomenological loop with striking clarity. When questioned about fundamentals like space or reality, AI systems circle definitions, shift contexts, or assert coherence without acknowledging limits.
This mirrors human modern subjectivity: an inability to admit epistemic boundaries while insisting on total explanation. The issue then is not intelligence but orientation. AI reflects the same closed-world assumptions embedded in modern discourse.
Space, Time, and Singularity
Physics reveals that space and time are not absolute containers but relational structures articulated by singularities. A singularity is not “nothing”—it is a limit point where conventional models fail and new relations become possible.
The essay proposes a physics of phenomenology: just as classical mechanics breaks down at quantum scales, phenomenological reasoning breaks down at the singularity of lived experience oriented in social being. Mental health operates precisely here, where explanation gives way to relationship.
Reconnecting With the Universe
Mental health is not reducible to therapy, diagnosis, or ideology but works with them. It is the lived recognition that subjectivity is not the whole of reality. Humans are objects among objects, singularities among singularities, already embedded in space, time, and matter.
This is not mysticism or spirituality. It is a disciplined acknowledgment of limits—and what becomes possible when those limits are respected.
Conclusion: An Exit From Existential Closure
The essay does not argue for a new system. It identifies an exit where before despair was barely compensated for and spirituality offered only hope. When phenomenology reaches its singularity, mental health becomes the means of reconnection—not by replacing reason, but by situating it within a larger universe.
Like a black hole revealing the structure of spacetime, the breakdown of subjective explanation reveals where we actually are: not trapped in meaning, but already in relation with the universe itself.
Being_and Space Reconnecting with the Universe Part One: Black Holes The_Physics of Phenomenology
Thought is not Thinking: A critique of philosophy.
YOU.
ARE MATTERING.