This manuscript offers a cross-scale framework for persistent formation in which dissipation-enabled capture, functional boundary, and coarse-grained inheritance jointly explain how stable higher-order units emerge from prior-scale dynamics under differing local mechanisms. The framework is interpretive and organizational, grounded in established physics—nonequilibrium thermodynamics, coarse-graining, and effective description—rather than proposing new fundamental laws.A central contribution is a functional boundary criterion combined with the concept of resolution-shifted identity. The paper argues that boundary appearance is systematically observer-relative due to timescale separation: systems may appear sharply localized or effectively diffuse depending on whether their characteristic recurrence dynamics are resolvable within the observer’s temporal window. This is formalized through a causality-normalized participation ratio, β* = L/(cτ), used to compare recurrence-governed participation across atomic, planetary, and galactic domains without invoking a universal scaling law.The aim of the manuscript is to clarify how persistent structure can be understood consistently across domains while remaining fully compatible with thermodynamics and effective-field-theoretic reasoning.