AMMDI is an open-notebook hypertext writing experiment, authored by Mike Travers aka mtraven. It's a work in progress and some parts are more polished than others. Comments welcome! More.
Pervasive agency means various tropes and techniques for imagining that agency is diffused throughout the entire universe or some large subsystem of it. Such theories date back to classical times and are referred to as hylozoism, a sort of near-mystical vision of the universe as shot through with desire, practically bursting at the seams with the energies of self-creation.
We are engaged in a constant project of self-creation. It's inescapable.
It sounds pretentious and maybe it is.
There are people who are doing this in a grand self-aware way, but ordinary people just do it, crafting their folk-selves. It's just what you do.
Emphasis on the creation part, not the self. That sounds so much more healthy.
Here's an experiment: refactor Self into Created, Creator, and Creation. Corresponding to past, present, future.
You are always making things, if only by structuring your mundane activities. There are ways to do this that are more or less spiritual, and more or less artistic (in the sense here of conscious creation).
Longing to be an artist – obviously wrong. Create or don't, and try to transmit or sell it if you want, or don't.
See autopoiesis which is the same idea but from a technical scientific view, or as much as those crazy cybernetics guys could manage. I'm talking personal experience here.