Bill Gayner
In meditation just now, I fell back into the repose of God’s consequent nature. Without leaving this deepening ease and restful empowerment, God’s primordial nature emerged too pregnant with and intimating the day and life to come, the beauty, joy, truth and love we can share together. And if your truth is different than mine, all the better, more enriching, may our truths cross in mutually enriching ways.
All the ways that have inspired me enriching me in this, for example, remembering Thich Nhat Hanh’s community chanting the Heart Sutra — so beautiful! Thich Nhat Hanh tried to convey the Heart Sutra’s heart with the word “interbeing.” He was initially going to use “togetherness” but someone thought it was too strange. Avalokiteshvara is the bodhisattva of compassion. His friend Sariputra was a monk close to the Buddha, known for the depth of his teaching. They are practicing together, come out to play together. What a joy to meditate and to share meditation experience with friends!
The Insight that Brings Us to the Other Shore
Avalokiteshvara
while practicing deeply with
the Insight that Brings Us to the Other Shore,
suddenly discovered that
all of the five Skandhas are equally empty,
and with this realisation
he overcame all Ill-being.“Listen Sariputra,
this Body itself is Emptiness
and Emptiness itself is this Body.
This Body is not other than Emptiness
and Emptiness is not other than this Body.
The same is true of Feelings,
Perceptions, Mental Formations,
and Consciousness.“Listen Sariputra,
all phenomena bear the mark of Emptiness;
their true nature is the nature of
no Birth no Death,
no Being no Non-being,
no Defilement no Purity,
no Increasing no Decreasing.“That is why in Emptiness,
Body, Feelings, Perceptions,
Mental Formations and Consciousness
are not separate self entities.The Eighteen Realms of Phenomena
which are the six Sense Organs,
the six Sense Objects6,
and the six Consciousnesses
are also not separate self entities.The Twelve Links of Interdependent Arising
and their Extinction
are also not separate self entities.
Ill-being, the Causes of Ill-being,
the End of Ill-being, the Path,
insight and attainment,
are also not separate self entities.Whoever can see this
no longer needs anything to attain.Bodhisattvas who practice
the Insight that Brings Us to the Other Shore
see no more obstacles in their mind,
and because there
are no more obstacles in their mind,
they can overcome all fear,
destroy all wrong perceptions
and realize Perfect Nirvana.“All Buddhas in the past, present and future
by practicing
the Insight that Brings Us to the Other Shore
are all capable of attaining
Authentic and Perfect Enlightenment.“Therefore Sariputra,
it should be known that
the Insight that Brings Us to the Other Shore
is a Great Mantra,
the most illuminating mantra,
the highest mantra,
a mantra beyond compare,
the True Wisdom that has the power
to put an end to all kinds of suffering.
Therefore let us proclaim
a mantra to praise
the Insight that Brings Us to the Other Shore.“Gate, Gate, Paragate, Parasamgate, Bodhi Svaha!
Gate, Gate, Paragate, Parasamgate, Bodhi Svaha!
Gate, Gate, Paragate, Parasamgate, Bodhi Svaha!”Thich Nhat Hanh, The Insight that Brings Us to the Other Shore, Plum Village. Retrieved from:
https://plumvillage.org/about/thich-nhat-hanh/letters/thich-nhat-hanh-new-heart-sutra-translation on May 3, 2024.If They Ask You
(Gospel of Thomas, Logia 50-1)Jesus said to his disciples,
“If they ask you,
‘Where have you been?’ or
‘Where have you come from?’
tell them:
‘We are coming out of the light,
where the light is always existing,
where by its own hand
the light comes to its feet
and appears as the images
and forms we see around us.’
If they should further ask,
‘Are you this light?’
tell them:
‘We are the radiations of it,
the children of light,
those named and chosen
by the only father really living.’
If they should ask you,
‘Where’s the evidence
of this father in you?’
tell them:
‘It is movement and repose.'”His disciples asked him,
“When is this day of repose coming,
when the dead will be raised and
we see a new world?”
Jesus said to them:
“What you look for outwardly
is already happening, but
you don’t recognize it.
The new world you look for
is here right now.”Neil Douglas-Klotz. (2016). Original Meditation: The Aramaic Jesus and the Spirituality of Creation. Edinburgh, Scotland and Columbus, Ohio: ARC Books, Pages 181-182.
Waking up this morning, it follows logically and in my heart that none of us are alone, we are all in it together in God’s consequent and primordial natures. I can feel it too in how the earth feeds us with every breath we take and every sip of water, just as the earth and the sun feeds the plants with soil, rain and light. How nourishing the marriage of heaven and earth for all of us every moment. And how miraculous these transformations of world into food for our body and soul is, how we are born from heaven and earth in each moment.
We are all invited to celebrate how we are already in this together in every moment by coming out to play, both serious and light-hearted play. Play too is transformative. If play is optimally born of loving, attuned, empathic parenting, we can find this in the transformative love that births and returns us home in each moment. We are the sap of the living vine, photosynthesizing in the light, caressed by the wind: the bread and wine of life.
Thank you so much, Christie, for your warm, appreciative words, they mean so much to me.
I love what you wrote:
I think what I am really trying to get at with this subjective aim question is some kind of clue about how life-purpose develops, perhaps some kind of initial yet continuous divine endowment, a thread of meaning we continue to notice and may choose to follow because of who we are, how we are lured, how we respond, the environment we grow up in, how we develop our gifts and medicines we might offer. In my writing, I call it a shimmer thread. I wonder how this idea of a shimmer thread might relate to Whitehead’s subjective aim.
Yes! “A shimmer thread”! I love that. One so deeply embedded in you, the life you are living, the choices you have made. That brings us to life, our whole being singing. That is what I meant by “felt GPS.” We are talking here about what I encountered last year in my courses in the Cobb Institute, and continue to cultivate. I met God as a companion in daily life, interwoven into my becoming, and my becoming interwoven into God and with all our relations. All of us already interwoven this way.
God orienting and inspiring me into coming alive to creative togethering with all our relations that is continually birthing us and inviting us into deeper participation and co-creation. It has helped me reconnect with my very young childhood natural spirituality and to pick up and deeply value a thread that has run through my whole life in a way that is life affirming, empowering, and life forwarding. Our becoming interwoven with God who brings us alive to what matters most to us in each moment and in our whole life. The actual occasions birthing us might be brief, but God hold us in her heart and gifts us with continuity, illuminating values and meaning that when we come alive to feels like one’s whole being is singing with it, with wonder, gratitude, beauty, love…
Hmm, that what I meant by “felt GPS” — a living singing shimmering path that opens in front of us, with Jesus turning and beckoning, inviting me forward. And we also turning behind us as ordinary folk and preparing a way for those following us. In Aramaic, it is an illuminated path, ruha d’srara. The actual occasions may be brief, but God is eternal, our “names” (the felt signature resonance of our becoming) written in heaven in each moment for eternity and cherished and carried forward by God through us.
What I was sharing in my example is something I have come to deeply trust in both deep darkness and in lovely light. The Buddha said, you can have a cavern that has been dark its entire existence and you only have to light a candle. I love what Whitehead says about beauty as the highest value, I can feel the truth of it, and perhaps we are also all each called to serve a particular thread into beauty, and for me that thread seems to be love including friendliness, compassion, appreciation (for example wondering) and being welcomed home by all our relations through all the pores of our body and lifeworld, so that sometimes it feels like navigating life already home. A path for someone who had to develop big emotional defences. Also, how the heart of this is how not knowing is most intimate, letting go of what we already know and opening into creative togethering birthing us, trusting god to illuminate the path, that shimmering thread, with deepening trust and coherence.
Hi Christie,
My understanding is God’s initial aim for us at the beginning of concresence lures us towards fulfilling transformation. It’s important to remember how short a duration an actual occasion is. So this is God acting as our situated GPS orienting us into a next fulfilling step we can choose, adjusted within the total situation of each emerging moment.
God’s consequent and primordial nature can take in the whole moment for us and participates in our fresh becoming along with all our relations in birthing us into the next moment. God’s initial aim is part of the disjunct among all our relations birthing us in creative togetherness, intimating and luring us into the next fulfilling becoming. It is a disjunct because it is implying something new we would not have felt otherwise. We pick up the resonance of this total situation in our bodily feelings and felt sense. the more alive we are to this the better. Conceptual prehension combines with this (our external sensing, thinking and imagining) to make sense of what physical prehension is implying including God’s initial aim.
Say we are trying to resonate with frozen suffering within us in a friendly way. God picks this up, loves it, and in the next moment inspires and lures us with compassion emerging to help us pick up a fuller sense of what the suffering is implying, and then conceptual prehension helps to identify the compassion and the pain, e.g., lonely anguish and the unmet need of a young self aspect within us for a hug, and the compassion’s action tendency moves us to imagine hugging that inner child and helping to sort out her feelings and letting her know she is safe at home now with you in 2025. This transforms the old frozen anguished loneliness, replaced now with relief and gratitude — the initial aim of God in the concresence of the young self part within us, with a perhaps a shot of inspiration for us to really take in that relief and resonate with it.
God is our inner, felt, GPS.
Hi Dr. Davis,
Thank you I would like to write a book like that, about the community of practice approach I have developed and am exploring called Touching the Earth involving meditating, exploring meditation experience with fellow practitioners, and reflecting on this together. I am actively exploring this in the little nonprofit I founded with friends and colleagues, Touching the Earth Mindfulness Ontario (www.ttemo.ca).
I wonder about focusing my paper for your course on this. Perhaps a paper on how to communicate this philosophical orientation in contemplative practice in community in practical, accessible ways.
Touching the Earth emerged out of the therapy modality I developed emotion-focused mindfulness therapy, but since it is oriented for fellow peer practitioners rather than therapists serving clients, it is oriented to philosophy rather than a therapy modality. I am orienting it to Gendlin’s philosophy of the implicit, Whitehead’s process philosophy, and EFT emotion theory. It includes transformational experiential, emotion-focused and phenomenological methods in meditation and how practitioners explore meditation together.
Warm regards,
Bill
Hi Dean,
I love your question! I would also love to hear more about your spiritual practice/discipline. I wonder if metaphysical speculation is not emphasized in the form of spirituality you practice. For example, I was deeply influenced by the secular Buddhism of Stephen Batchelor who was influenced by post-Christians and eschews metaphysics, so I can easily imagine a range of modernist forms of spiritual practice that do not see the value of metaphysics.
These days I am inspired by experiential and emotion-focused forms of therapy (I’m a therapist), Whitehead, Gendlin, various forms of Buddha dharma, and the Aramaic Jesus.
For myself, as I found my spiritual practice deepening, I found myself opening into new (to me) forms of participatory experiencing (e.g., see Ferrer, Jorge N.; Sherman, Jacob H. (2008) The Participatory Turn: Spirituality, Mysticism, Religious Studies). I found myself needing new ways of understanding life and cosmos to make sense of and encourage what was opening to me in meditation and when exploring with friends. I find Whitehead helps me better reflect on experiencing in ways that deepen and carry forward life cultivation. It also has helped me integrate and deepen my dialogue with the various influences on my practice in ways that fill me with wonder. My practices include meditation and phenomenological/experiential exploration, both alone and sharing and exploring with fellow practitioners. This has not only helped to transform how I experience self and lifeworld, it also has enhanced how I engage in life in more fulfilling ways. For example, I find it has deepened how I am able to show up for and engage with my therapy clients, how I prepare presentations, and committee work; and deepening my appreciation of time with loved ones and friends. It is also turning everyday life into a practice, for example, exploring external sensing alive to causal efficacy (i.e., the body’s felt sensing).
Warm regards,
Bill
Hi Bhavana and Dr. Davis,
I love how you put it, Bhavana, how your lifeworld encounter with Whitehead and others is itself a creative, decolonial process. And what you wrote, Dr. Davis:
Another way to speak of the systematic togetherness of things is simply to speak of how things are intimate to each other. Reality is based upon intimacy and intimacy signals the way in which things are together in the process of becoming. This way of speaking of togetherness is emphasized in David J. Temple’s recent book, First Principles and First Values, which you may enjoy.
In the last week, I have been feeling into and explicating how creative togetherness “intimates” the next step into fuller exemplification. I like how the etymology of “to intimate” involves “announcing itself” and is so closely linked to “intimate” which in its etymology includes “inmost.” Something about how deeply interrelated creative togethering is with sacred ingression in the marriage of heaven and earth birthing us in each moment, like a flower opening rather than ingression. But I also hope that “creative togethering” might provide a way of talking about these processes that will allow nontheists and theists to share their phenomenological exploration of these processes creatively together.
I look forward to reading David J. Temple’s recent book, First Principles and First Values, perhaps after I catch up with our course reading, lol.
Warm regards,
Bill
Hi Johannes,
What a great photo! Love it! So much more than a thousand words, especially the shared love and gentle welcoming humour. I enjoyed your self and project description as well.
I share your interests in cultivating life in a way that transforms how we experience self, others and lifeworld and engage in life, and articulating this for others.
Warm regards,
Bill
Lovely, Robert, thank you.
I have long followed Matt Segall, read his books, and took his science course last year here in the Cobb Institute. All wonderful, although I still find quite a few of his conversations on Youtube over my head, lol. No doubt, as my understanding deepens, so does his, so he is always ahead of me, and I suspect he is giving himself freer rein to go deep with people who can meet him there. Although he is also gifted in meeting people where they are.
I remember how strange and oddly appealing process relational philosophy sounded to me initially when I encountered it through him, especially feelings all the way down.
Hi Dean, Nelson and Robert,
Dean, what a delight to learn that you too have had this surprising epiphany with a bush whom you see everyday! And thank you for pointing me to our reading in Hosinski, which I am just now catching up on, rereading from last year.
It strikes me that our conversation here concerns the heart of Whitehead’s method. First of all, that our exploration is grounded in direct subjective experiencing:
One of the overriding convictions of Whitehead’s thought is that we participate in actuality in our experience as human subjects. It is in our experience as subjects that we find the “stubborn facts” which together constitute the actuality of our lives. The purpose of philosophy—indeed, the purpose of all thought—is to “elucidate” our experience, to cast some light on it, to help us make some sense out of it, to help us understand. This, as Whitehead says, “is the sole justification for any thought.” (PR 4) It is a justification because in bringing clarity, thought can bring a deeper appreciation of all that is involved in our living, and it can help us to make our living “better” (however one chooses to define the “good”).
Hosinski, C. S. C., Thomas E.. Stubborn Fact and Creative Advance: An Introduction to the Metaphysics of Alfred North Whitehead (p. 34). (Function). Kindle Edition.
Hosinki says in a nearby footnote that Whitehead describes his method in Part 1, Chapter 1 of Whitehead’s PR. Hoskinki is drawing directly from this section. In it, Whitehead tell us there that his method includes rational and empirical/experiential sides. In describing the experiential side he even emphasizes its felt texture:
The adequacy of the scheme over every item does not mean adequacy over such items as happen to have been considered. It means that the texture of observed experience, as illustrating the philosophic scheme, is such that all related experience must exhibit the same texture. (p. 4)
My sense is that many readers do not notice the vital role our body’s felt resonance plays in experiencing and in Whitehead’s method. We may not observe actual occasions visually, but we feel them in the felt textures of our experiencing enacting us as us. My sense is that this felt bodily resonance is our most direct access to causal efficacy in immediate experiencing, i.e., physical prehension (those “stubborn facts”). We discover ourself mentally prehending in our thinking and external sensing. Subjective experiencing is not me as an x having a felt experience of a separate actual occasion y. My subjective experiencing now is an actual occasion concrescing in dipolar prehension, the latest in a stream from my past, my whole life, the creative togethering of all the societies of societies of my body, and of the cosmos, flowing as “my” direct, immediate, embodied, ensouled, subjective experiencing now. (“My” does not imply a separate person who owns this experiencing.)
Actual occasions are not abstractions that only happen in a tiny microscopic world beyond the reach of our immediate experiencing–our immediate experiencing is the concrescing of a stream of actual occasions. We experience actual occasions as our most intimate self happening.
Dean, it was so interesting for me to discover rereading this passage that Whitehead emphasizes the role of “immediate experience” and “the play of a free imagination, controlled by the requirements of coherence and logic” (p. 4) vs a rigid empiricism as exemplified in the Baconian method of induction:
The difficulty has its seat in the empirical side of philosophy. Our datum is the actual world, including ourselves; and this actual world spreads itself for observation in the guise of the topic of our immediate experience. The elucidation of immediate experience is the sole justification for any thought; and the starting-point‡ for thought is the analytic observation of components of this experience. But we are not conscious of any clear-cut complete analysis of immediate experience, in terms of the various details which comprise its definiteness. We habitually observe by the method of difference. Sometimes we see an elephant, and sometimes we do not. The result is that an elephant, when present, is noticed. [7] Facility of observation depends on the fact that the object observed is important when present, and sometimes is absent.
The metaphysical first principles can never fail of exemplification. We can never catch the actual world taking a holiday from their sway. Thus, for the discovery of metaphysics, the method of pinning down thought to the strict systematization of detailed discrimination, already effected by antecedent observation, breaks down. This collapse of the method of rigid empiricism is not confined to metaphysics. It occurs whenever we seek the larger generalities. In natural science this rigid method is the Baconian method of induction, a method which, if consistently pursued, would have left science where it found it. What Bacon omitted was the play of a free imagination, controlled by the requirements of coherence and logic. The true method of discovery is like the flight of an aeroplane. It starts from the ground of particular observation; it makes a flight in the thin air of imaginative generalization; and it again lands for renewed observation rendered acute by rational interpretation. The reason for the success of this method of imaginative rationalization is that, when the method of difference fails, factors which are constantly present may yet be observed under the influence of imaginative thought. Such thought supplies the differences which the direct observation lacks. It can even play with inconsistency; and can thus throw light on the consistent, and persistent, elements in experience by comparison with what in imagination is inconsistent with them. The negative judgment is the peak of mentality. But the conditions for the success of imaginative construction must be rigidly adhered to. In the first place, this construction must have its origin in the generalization of particular factors discerned in particular topics of human interest; for example, in physics, or in physiology, or in psychology, or in aesthetics, or in ethical beliefs, or in sociology, or in languages conceived as storehouses of human experience. In [8] this way the prime requisite, that anyhow there shall be some important application, is secured. The success of the imaginative experiment is always to be tested by the applicability of its results beyond the restricted locus from which it originated. In default of such extended application, a generalization started from physics, for example, remains merely an alternative expression of notions applicable to physics. The partially successful philosophic generalization will, if derived from physics, find applications in fields of experience beyond physics. It will enlighten observation in those remote fields, so that general principles can be discerned as in process of illustration, which in the absence of the imaginative generalization are obscured by their persistent exemplification.
Whitehead, Alfred North. Process and Reality (Gifford Lectures Delivered in the University of Edinburgh During the Session 1927-28) (pp. 4-5). Free Press. Kindle Edition.
What a wonder!
Warm regards,
Bill
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I want to echo Robert — what beautiful, profound words, Andrew, thank you so much! Your words highlight how this transformation in orientation is not only intellectual and behavioral, but one that transforms how we experience and engage with our lifeworld, opening our hearts and minds into embodied, participatory co-creation with all our relations.
Warm regards,
Bill
Hi Dean,
I wonder what you mean by “imaginative” here? “Imaginal” rather than “imaginary” (e.g. daydreaming) seems to me most relevant here. For example, the way how we unconsciously imagine our world structures our experiencing, and how bringing these unconscious presumptions to awareness and exploring them, transforms our lifeworld, and opens into more coherent, effective, fulfilling ways of experiencing and life engagement. For example, decades ago, inspired by a talk by a meditation teacher about how everything is one, when I stepped outside I stood in front of a bush and thought to myself hopefully, this bush and I are one. But try as hard I could, I was not experiencing the bush and myself as one. We seemed clearly separate. So I turned towards and brought this clear sense of separation into awareness. More fully acknowledging and experiencing the separation, rather than resisting it, it fell away, and a new way of experiencing the interrelationship between the bush and myself opened, free of this assumption of separation.
Also, the powerful role imagination plays in science. For example,
James Watson had a dream in which he was walking up a spiral staircase. He and Francis Crick had been working on the structure of DNA at the Cavendish Laboratories in England, but were stymied by the problem, until Watson had his dream. The vision of the spiral staircase was the key to determining the double helical structure of DNA.
https://www.mcgill.ca/oss/article/history-general-science/molecular-structure-dna-and-dream-staircase-wasntOr consider Einstein’s thought experiments (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Einstein%27s_thought_experiments#:~:text=A%20hallmark%20of%20Albert%20Einstein,mentally%20chased%20beams%20of%20light.)
Or the role the imaginal plays in transjective, transpersonal experiencing. The work of diverse people such as Carl Jung, Henry Corbin, and John Vervaeke come to mind.
Also, the role metaphors play in explicating feelings in helpful ways, standard in psychotherapy and self-help processes for deepening experiencing.
Imagination plays a key role in mental prehension explicating and helping carry forward what the creative togetherness of physical prehension is implying through us conveyed through the felt resonance of our body. How experiencing is our direct participation in the world. But that thinking, gestures, and our external sensing also play vital roles in mental prehension. We are after all discussing all the processes that constitute our daily lives as well as the many fields of more specialized human activity.
Or can we imagine the imaginal in a way that pervades all of the mental prehension in our dipolar concresence?
Hi Nelson,
I found myself returning to your question above rereading a key passage in Process and Reality. Your question was:
Perhaps taking the metaphor far beyond what Whitehead and others intended, if these merging streams of experience carry both their objective past and their subjective possibilities of the future, how does that work if we encounter streams that merge from vastly different starting points? In the process of processing, do these differing pasts and possibilities merge together? What if the possibilities conflict? If we believe, as Whitehead posited, that all of the past and all of the possibilities are retained in the universe, how does that happen in a universe that includes diverse streams of experience?
Whitehead responds by pointing it is not if there are significant conflicts, but that the creative togetherness of the many birthing the new always contains conflicts and works through disjunction:
‘Together’ is a generic term covering the various special ways in which various sorts of entities are ‘together’ in any one actual occasion. Thus ‘together’ presupposes the notions ‘creativity,’ ‘many,’ ‘one,’ ‘identity’ and ‘diversity.’ The ultimate metaphysical principle is the advance from disjunction to conjunction, creating a novel entity other than the entities given in disjunction. The novel entity is at once the togetherness of the ‘many’ which it finds, and also it is one among the disjunctive ‘many’ which it leaves; it is a novel entity, disjunctively among the many entities which it synthesizes. The many become one, and are increased by one. In their natures, entities are disjunctively ‘many’ in process of passage into conjunctive unity. This Category of the Ultimate replaces Aristotle’s category of ‘primary substance.’
Thus the ‘production of novel togetherness’ is the ultimate notion embodied in the term ‘concrescence.’ These ultimate notions of ‘production of novelty’ and of ‘concrete togetherness’ are inexplicable either in terms of higher universals or in terms of the components participating in the concrescence. The analysis of the components abstracts from the concrescence. The sole appeal is to intuition.
Whitehead, Alfred North. Process and Reality (Gifford Lectures Delivered in the University of Edinburgh During the Session 1927-28) (p. 21-22). (Function). Kindle Edition.
This disjunction is reflected and carried forward with all its novelty and fresh possibilities through the dipolar prehension we enact in fresh becoming.
Hi Bhavana Nissima,
I love your reference to “reading in bliss” in your first post above. It reminds me of the wonder and bliss I felt reading the passage in Process and Reality that “The many become one, and are increased by one” is drawn from. Beautiful, sublime! Here it is:
The Category of the Ultimate
‘Creativity,’ ‘many,’ ‘one’ are the ultimate notions involved in the meaning of the synonymous terms ‘thing,’ ‘being,’ ‘entity.’ These three notions complete the Category of the Ultimate and are presupposed in all the more special categories.
The term ‘one’ does not stand for ‘the integral number one,’ which is a complex special notion. It stands for the general idea underlying alike the indefinite article ‘a or an,’ and the definite article ‘the,’ and the demonstratives ‘this or that,’ and the relatives ‘which or what or how.’ It stands for the singularity of an entity. The term ‘many’ presupposes the term ‘one,‘ and the term ‘one’ presupposes the term ‘many.’ The term ‘many’ conveys the notion of ‘disjunctive diversity’; this notion is an essential* element in the concept of ‘being.’ There are many ‘beings’ in disjunctive diversity.
‘Creativity’ is the universal of universals characterizing ultimate matter of fact. It is that ultimate principle by which the many, which are the* universe disjunctively, become the one actual occasion, which is the universe conjunctively. It lies in the nature of things that the many enter into complex unity.
‘Creativity’ is the principle of novelty. An actual occasion is a novel entity diverse from any entity in the ’many’ which it unifies. Thus ‘creativity’ introduces novelty into the content of the many, which are the [32] universe disjunctively. The ‘creative advance’ is the application of this ultimate principle of creativity to each novel situation which it originates.
‘Together’ is a generic term covering the various special ways in which various sorts of entities are ‘together’ in any one actual occasion. Thus ‘together’ presupposes the notions ‘creativity,’ ‘many,’ ‘one,’ ‘identity’ and ‘diversity.’ The ultimate metaphysical principle is the advance from disjunction to conjunction, creating a novel entity other than the entities given in disjunction. The novel entity is at once the togetherness of the ‘many’ which it finds, and also it is one among the disjunctive ‘many’ which it leaves; it is a novel entity, disjunctively among the many entities which it synthesizes. The many become one, and are increased by one. In their natures, entities are disjunctively ‘many’ in process of passage into conjunctive unity. This Category of the Ultimate replaces Aristotle’s category of ‘primary substance.’
Thus the ‘production of novel togetherness’ is the ultimate notion embodied in the term ‘concrescence.’ These ultimate notions of ‘production of novelty’ and of ‘concrete togetherness’ are inexplicable either in terms of higher universals or in terms of the components participating in the concrescence. The analysis of the components abstracts from the concrescence. The sole appeal is to intuition.
Whitehead, Alfred North. Process and Reality (Gifford Lectures Delivered in the University of Edinburgh During the Session 1927-28) (p. 21-22). (Function). Kindle Edition.
Reading this passage now, again, I feel such wonder and have learned something new, how the inevitable disjunctiveness of all the occasions gathered in togetherness produces “a novel entity, disjunctively among the many entities which it synthesizes.” How the creative togetherness is disjunctive, reflected in our dipolar prehension, inspiring new transformation and fulfillment.