Replies

Thank you for sharing that the Whiteheadian concepts of objective immortality and the consequent nature of God have complemented the Buddhist philosophy that you’ve studied, and have helped you to come to terms with impermanence. It’s my opinion that process thought can do this for a great many people.

I think that you might enjoy Ross Thompson’s book on Buddhist Christianity. He’s an Anglican priest whose spirituality is also Buddhist. (Reading it through my process lens I thought that he might have been influenced by process thought even though he never mentions it, but when I exchanged emails with him he told me that he wasn’t familiar with process theology.) You can read a description of the book on its Google Books page.

Here’s a link to my EPUB copy of the book:
Buddhist Christianity: A Passionate Openness

Here’s a link to my scanned copy of Nobo’s magnum opus, Whitehead’s Metaphysics of Extension and Solidarity.

Whitehead’s Metaphysics of Extension and Solidarity

I just read a brilliant essay that’s relevant to this topic, here’s the link:

Does Religion Cause Violence?

In the course of critically analyzing the popular clash of civilizations narrative, the clash of the rational and benign West with the fanatical and violent religious cultures of the Muslim world narrative, the author explores the topic of the category of religion, and how it was largely invented in the era of colonialism to help construct a chauvinistic narrative in which the victims of Western colonialism were backward “religious” peoples who needed to have our more advanced Western liberal civilization and Enlightenment values force fed to them for their own good. He also explores how the category of religion still functions in the same way today in the rational secular us vs. the irrational religious other binary opposition that legitimates our violence and villainizes the violence of Muslim others. (The author’s object is not to defend, deny, or downplay the violence perpetrated by people of faith; rather, his basic argument is that the nice, harmless, secular liberal West-dangerous, violent, religious cultures dichotomy is rubbish, both because “religion” is an artificial construct; and also because religion isn’t really any more prone to toxicity than secular ideologies, secular isms such as nationalism and fascism having amply demonstrated that secular folks aren’t necessarily rational and harmless.)

This quote from the Cobb Institute’s Actual Occasions email, written by Richard Livingston, is very relevant to this conversation:

“Even more challenging, though, is whether measuring things in relation to achieving success even makes sense when it comes to the things that matter most. By what measure could we definitively determine whether one’s soul has been successful? Is there a calculator that could be used to compute one’s capacity for creativity or compassion?”

I can relate to, and I think that many of us can relate to feeling manque, feeling that we aren’t doing justice to our potential. Perhaps we’re simply being too hard on ourselves. At any rate, maintaining our commitment to self-actualization remains, in my view, the fundamental and general divine call forward to human beings that we should never give up on trying to answer.

I don’t think that your comments are off base at all. I agree with all of the perspectives you’ve articulated. I would just clarify that my concept of self-actualization is in fact processive. I think of an individual’s self-actualization as a process that’s coterminous with her life. In my Whiteheadian view the existential enterprise of exercising self-creative freedom and realizing authenticity, which is a human life, is a closureless process of coming to embody axiological and meaningful possibilities, with an aim (supplied by God) at ideal possibilities—as long as we’re alive and responsive to divine lures there’s always the possibility of our coming to enrich ourselves with new possibilities. An individual’s ongoing adventure of self-actualization will feature highlights, instances of its satisfaction, as a Whiteheadian would say; i.e. the fulfilling attainment of the goals of various life projects, such as becoming a published author, or earning an academic degree or a black belt in Aikido, etc., but self-actualization doesn’t aim at a climactic terminus ad quem, or the attainment of laurels upon which one can rest. Nor, btw, does self-actualization for me mean individualistic and self-absorbing self-actualization. Authentic self-actualization is achieved relationally. And, as I believe Maslow eventually came to think, self-actualization has what can be termed a spiritual dimension, self-transcendence (not in the sense of self-annihilation, but rather in the sense of metanoia, a profound and transformative conversion to the perspective of interdependence) being its highest form.

Those are some excellent musings. The kind of manque individual you describe, i.e. someone who isn’t doing anything toward creative self-actualization and fulfillment of potential, is, in my opinion, and I would say from the perspective of process ontology, an ongoing tragedy. According to process ontology the fundamental raison d’etre of all actual entities is creative self-actualization. Elementary actual occasions may exercise little creativity in terms of originality and pursuing novelty, they mostly just recreate the past, but even in their case there’s a process of concrescence, and there’s a capacity for choice which is the essence of creativity. I seem to recall a couple of our instructors in the program mentioning that primitive entities, such as electrons and viruses have been discovered by scientists to have the power of choice. Biologists who’ve studied phages say that “What they found was not unlike the decision-making process of humans” (Decision-making process of viruses could lead to new antibiotic treatments). And we have physicists saying things like “Quantum chance is better framed as quantum choice—choice, not chance, at every level of nature” (Electrons May Very Well Be Conscious). Self-creative choice, i.e. creativity and responsiveness to the call forward to realize ideal creative possibilities is a property and purpose of all entities, and in the case of complex entities such as human beings self-conscious creative self-actualization is not only a possibility, it’s our species-essence, our most human of needs, the universal human vocation. There’s a line from a sci-fi novel (Station Eleven) that sums it up, for human beings “survival is insufficient”. Human beings who just pass the days of their lives merely surviving, either because of poverty which forces them to focus all of their energies on making a subsistence wage, or because they’ve been raised in a materialistic culture in which making a living and engaging in consumerism is the whole meaning of life, are getting it wrong. Their kind of life is indeed pathological. It’s a harsh word, and I don’t mean to be judgmental by using it. In both cases, people living in poverty, and individuals programmed with materialism, we’re looking at innocent victims. But a human life that isn’t aimed at flourishing is a miscarriage of a human life, and a tragedy from the perspective of God as conceived by process theology. It’s something that profoundly pains the process God. The billions of human beings who are living Thoreau’s “lives of quiet desperation”, unfulfilled lives, lives not geared to self-actualization arguably then aren’t even pointed in the right direction. Their lives have very much taken a wrong direction. And here’s where “rituals, stories, and a community” come in. Religious traditions and communities orient life to more than mere survival, making money, and consumerism. Religion, for all of its faults, is also the great orientator of human beings to higher purposes and answering God’s call forward. And yes, I think that this is certainly something that process thought can help people to better understand.

Those are some excellent musings. The kind of manque individual you describe, i.e. someone who isn’t doing anything toward creative self-actualization and fulfillment of potential, is, in my opinion, and I would say from the perspective of process ontology, an ongoing tragedy. According to process ontology the fundamental raison d’etre of all actual entities is creative self-actualization. Elementary actual occasions may exercise little creativity in terms of originality and pursuing novelty, they mostly just recreate the past, but even in their case there’s a process of concrescence, and there’s a capacity for choice which is the essence of creativity. I seem to recall a couple of our instructors in the program mentioning that primitive entities, such as electrons and viruses have been discovered by scientists to have the power of choice. Biologists who’ve studied phages say that “What they found was not unlike the decision-making process of humans” (https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2017/02/170206130405.htm). And we have physicists saying things like “Quantum chance is better framed as quantum choice—choice, not chance, at every level of nature” (https://nautil.us/electrons-may-very-well-be-conscious-3-238269/). Self-creative choice, i.e. creativity and responsiveness to the call forward to realize ideal creative possibilities is a property and purpose of all entities, and in the case of complex entities such as human beings self-conscious creative self-actualization is not only a possibility, it’s our species-essence, our most human of needs, the universal human vocation. There’s a line from a sci-fi novel (Station Eleven) that sums it up, for human beings “survival is insufficient”. Human beings who just pass the days of their lives merely surviving, either because of poverty which forces them to focus all of their energies on making a subsistence wage, or because they’ve been raised in a materialistic culture in which making a living and engaging in consumerism is the whole meaning of life, are getting it wrong. Their kind of life is indeed pathological. It’s a harsh word, and I don’t mean to be judgmental by using it. In both cases, people living in poverty, and individuals programmed with materialism, we’re looking at innocent victims. But a human life that isn’t aimed at flourishing is a miscarriage of a human life, and a tragedy from the perspective of God as conceived by process theology. It’s something that profoundly pains the process God. The billions of human beings who are living Thoreau’s “lives of quiet desperation”, unfulfilled lives, lives not geared to self-actualization arguably then aren’t even pointed in the right direction. Their lives have very much taken a wrong direction. And here’s where “rituals, stories, and a community” come in. Religious traditions and communities orient life to more than mere survival, making money, and consumerism. Religion, for all of its faults, is also the great orientator of human beings to higher purposes and answering God’s call forward. And yes, I think that this is certainly something that process thought can help people to better understand.

I agree with your perspective that the spiritual “quest” is about better understanding the ontology and meaning of our individuality, not diminishing or transcending it. I would say that from the Whiteheadian perspective the aim and task of religion and spirituality isn’t to eradicate the ego, the self. Rather, the fundamental process and telos of all actual entities is actualization; actualizing themselves as instances of creativity and novelty; effecting the differentiation of creativity into new syntheses of the data and possibilities of the universe, the many becoming one and being increased by one. Our raison d’etre is becoming a new one and thereby enriching the world’s diversity, not destroying the one, the ego or self that we are. Egoism becomes problematic for spiritual individuals when it’s nonrelational, when it gives us to think ourselves to be separatist selves rather than interconstituted selves; when it has us take ourselves to ultimately be our ego selves; when we fail to realize that our ego selves are emergent, emerge from the processive creativity and sentience and relationality of the whole universe and that the creative, processive, sentient, and relational universe is our deepest identity. It’s such a superficial and excessive egoism, one that draws us into folly such as seeking to derive fulfillment from money and power, that needs to be overcome. This perspective, that the goal of spirituality is self-actualization not the annihilation of the ego, is a significant difference between a Whiteheadian and various mystical forms of spirituality.

Yes, both process and Vedanta are living and growing traditions, and Dr. Long’s original synthesis of Whitehead and Advaita is an enriching contribution to the growth of both heritages, not an attempt to outgrow or break from either.

I like, and share your interpretation of salvation/redemption. Thanks for sharing that. I would just add, apropos of the next class on Hinduism, and the mention of avidya in the reading, that my understanding of salvation has also for some time now been shaped by that concept. I think of sin/missing the mark in terms of our plight of egoistic nescience; our missing the fundamental mark of our transpersonal metaphysical identity, of the meaning or telos of our lives being the interrelational actualization of creativity, the beauty and joy of creativity; our going through life repeatedly missing the mark in the sense of failing to decide for and actualize the best socially self-creative possibilities available to us, and offered to us in divine initial aims, due to our ignorance of our interconstitutive ontology. Salvation then, from this perspective on “sin”, is coming to metaphysical self-awareness; the process of metanoia, inner transformation from living in the misperception of ourselves as separate substantial personal selves for whom it makes rational sense to be anxiously and dominatively selfish, and insatiably materialistic, to instead living from the perspective that we’re instances of the mutual arising (as Buddhists put it) of the world’s entities, and that therefore psychological egoism is utter existential folly, and interdependent self-actualization the real name of the game.

Well, that’s my understanding of salvation in a nutshell. I know it’s more Vedantic than Christian; and even resonates a bit with ancient Gnosticism, which also viewed sin as ignorance and salvation as knowledge of our real metaphysical identities (it’s unfortunate that Gnosticism got that right but suffered from some deplorable ideas, such as its belief that the material world is evil, and its demonization of the God of Judaism), but such an understanding makes more sense to my mind than the whole substitutionist and Augustinian soteriological and hamartiological scheme, its conceptualization of salvation as redemption, being reclaimed, by the blood of a sacrificial victim, from death and damnation understood as the consequence of original sin.

(Btw, my own hamartiological and ponerological thinking does agree with Augustine’s in one regard. In my view [moral] evil is not a thing in its own right, its fundamental cause is the benighted perversion of our metaphysical urge for self-actualization and the expression of creative power into selfishness and a drive for dominative power.)

Iqbal is definitely Whitehead-influenced, and there’s much value in his conceptuality. However, it doesn’t align with the process perspective entirely. For instance, I noted that Dr. Shah referred (in his talk) to Iqbal subscribing to the notion of God’s “self-limitation”, that that’s how he rationalized rejecting classical omnipotence. This isn’t quite Whiteheadian. The Whiteheadian view is that God is by nature not possessed of all of the power in the universe, that all actual entities are quanta of creative freedom and power and therefore God can’t have all of the power or control the other actual entities that populate the world. This is a significantly different idea from voluntary self-limitation, and to my mind is much more cogent. And I recall that in the reading Shah mentions that Iqbal limits creative self-determination to humans, that he considers lower-order entities to be deterministic, this is also not at all Whiteheadian. These are not trifling differences. It seems to me that Shah is considerably more process than Iqbal.

I think that the reason that the Trinity complicates matters for Trinitarian Christians, the reason that they’ve never really been able to work it out perfectly and have had to resign themselves to it being a mystery and something to be taken on faith, goes back to it’s having originally been conceptualized in substantialist Platonic categories. Whiteheadians also have our own divine trinity, as it were, of primordial, consequent, and superjective natures, but since we don’t suffer from a substance-based metaphysics we can simply take these natures to be aspects of God in God’s concrete reality and we don’t create an artificial insoluble mystery for ourselves, we don’t have to rationalize holding God to be simultaneously one unified substance and three discrete actualities. If mainstream Christian theologians were ever to come over to the process perspective and reconceptualize the Trinity with the help of Whitehead it would arguably simplify matters greatly for them, enable them to de-paradoxicalize the Trinity, and perhaps dispose of the criticism from the other Abrahamic religions that Christianity is insufficiently monotheistic (Joseph Bracken might be a pioneer in this). (Hindus, btw, also manage to believe in divine incarnations, called avatars, without generating an overcomplicated incarnational theology.)

I’m happy that it was helpful.