John I. Mackay
Author and ontologist
Black and white self-portrait of the author and ontologist: John I. Mackay seated at his kitchen table in 2026. This photo is dedicated to the public domain under CC0 1.0. No attribution required.
My work begins with a simple, unsettling observation: for all our technological wizardry, we remain fundamentally ignorant of ourselves. We can manipulate particles and code algorithms, yet we are baffled by our own capacity for creation and destruction: of things, of meaning, of life itself.
This question has been the compass of my life. My formal journey began in the late 1980s at James Cook University, where I learned to see the mechanisms beneath human behavior. That foundation led to a decade of practical work as an accredited mediator with the Dispute Resolution Branch of the Queensland Justice Department, where I learned firsthand how conflict and cooperation operate at the human level.
But life has a way of diversifying your education. At the dawn of the commercial web in 1998, I built ChinaDeli.com, one of China's first online grocery platforms, and later spent 12 years as Web Coordinator for the Great Barrier Reef Marine Park Authority. These experiences across psychology, conflict resolution, and ecology converged on a singular obsession.
In 2016, having retired to Thailand with my wife and 2 of our 3 adult daughters, I committed to understanding and explaining what I believed to be the greatest unanswered question: not the what of existence, a question Western philosophy has spent millennia cataloging, but the how of existence—the question everyone avoids.
In time, I came to observe everywhere what I coined as the conference of difference i.e. the 'condition of bearing together', transforming the 'condition of bearing apart'. This was, in effect, a discovery of the process primitive of existence itself. This realization, of the constant expression of existence, has informed my thinking and writing ever since.
In 2024, I published the Gospel of Being, a compendium of 70 koans and expositions each derived from the first principle: the conference of difference. In 2026, I am completing an independent academic treatise: The conference of difference: an ontology of existence, which aims to account for everything from elementary particles to cosmogony i.e. existence in its entirety.
My work aims to contribute a common interdisciplinary ontological model—a shared language for communicating across the physical, vital, psyche, and social domains of existence.
— John Mackay, 2026
