The Play of Worlds — Toward a Plural Ontology of Relation: 2 The Genesis of a World — From Potential to Pattern

Every world begins as a modulation within a shared medium of potential. Before there is coherence, there is field — a relational expanse in which possibilities interpenetrate, not yet distinguishable as entities or systems. The genesis of a world is thus a movement from undifferentiated potential to patterned stability, from relational flux to sustained articulation.

Yet this transition is not creation ex nihilo. It is selection through resonance. Certain relations begin to stabilise because they reinforce one another, generating feedback loops that consolidate coherence. These stabilisations — perceptual, symbolic, ecological — form the scaffolds from which a world can emerge. What we call “origin” is therefore not a singular event, but a threshold of recurrence: the moment when repetition becomes rhythm, when pattern begins to hold.

From the perspective of relational ontology, genesis is always immanent. Worlds are not imposed upon matter by external design; they self-organise through constraint, interaction, and amplification. Material processes, cognitive schemas, and symbolic grammars co-evolve, producing strata of coherence. A world takes form when these strata align sufficiently to sustain mutual intelligibility — when meaning, materiality, and agency interlock.

Crucially, each world’s genesis presupposes others. The scientific world is born out of the mythical, the economic from the ethical, the digital from the social. New ontologies are never isolated inventions; they differentiate themselves from prior relational patterns, inheriting both affordances and constraints. Genesis is therefore genealogical: each world reconfigures its ancestors’ potentials while introducing new modes of organisation.

Temporality enters here as the memory of prior coherence. A world inherits traces of what it transforms, embedding them in new configurations. The Renaissance world retained medieval cosmology even as it inverted its centre; the Enlightenment preserved theological order while secularising its logic. Every genesis is thus palimpsestic — the inscription of new relations upon old alignments, the continuation of potential under altered constraints.

To speak of genesis in this way is to replace the question “What caused the world?” with “How does coherence emerge and sustain itself?” It is to treat reality as an ecology of alignments, each poised between stability and transformation. A world is a temporary resolution in the ongoing play of potential — a pattern that endures by modulating what exceeds it.

In this light, creation is continuous. The world is always being born, not as repetition of the same, but as reiteration of possibility under evolving conditions. To perceive genesis is therefore to perceive relation itself — the field in motion, selecting, constraining, and sustaining the dance of worlds.