The Inclination of Reality: Potential as Readiness: 1 Readiness and the Relational Field

The language of potential has always seemed quiet — a background hum beneath the bright insistence of actuality. But when potential is understood not as absence but as readiness, the hum becomes a pulse. The relational field itself vibrates with a leaning, a directed openness: not toward a pre-given outcome, but toward becoming actual at all.

In the systemic terms of relational ontology, potential is the theory of the instance — the structured possibility from which any construal can be cut. But this potential is not inert. It is not a frozen map of what might happen. It is a living configuration of inclination — a field of readiness to construe.

This readiness is what makes the metaphenomenal real. It is what allows a system to lean toward instantiation without collapsing into actuality until a construal completes the cut. In other words, potential is not the opposite of actuality but its directional condition: the vector by which the system inclines toward eventhood.

Physics once captured a faint echo of this idea in the concept of energy. But energy, too, was reified — treated as a substance or quantity rather than a posture of relation. The relational ontology reclaims that lost sense: energy as readiness, as the inclination of the system to actualise a construal.

We can see this inclination in every scale of reality.

A particle’s field does not “contain” potential; it is potential, poised to resolve into coherence.

A biological organism does not “have” abilities; it is a dynamic configuration of readiness to act.

A mind does not “hold” meaning; it is a readiness to construe.

Readiness, then, is the ontological ground of responsiveness. It is the system’s orientation toward its own possible coherence — not a will, not a cause, but a leaning into relational alignment.

To describe potential as readiness is to give up the fantasy of a neutral world waiting to be known. The universe is already postured, already leaning — a field of relational dispositions that invite construal.

What we call reality is nothing more (and nothing less) than the resolution of readiness into coherence.

The world is always about to become.