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I somehow relate eternal objects with what I have learned from Quantum theory. it says energy is not released in a continuum. but rather, it’s released in “packages”, that is, “quanta”.

I guess it’s similar with actual entities, or drops of experience. They evolve through prehension. However, in the process of their evolution, they have to be organized in particular forms or possibilities, but not any possibilities, that is, eternal objects.

maybe that’s why all human beings look basically similar in their anatomical features?

Hi George, I have read two books (Chinese translation) of Fritjof Capra: The Web of Life and The Tao of Physics. Both are fascinating to me.

and I have also read about complexity science and the Santa Fe Institute, which focus on the emergence of order out of chaos.

Both the system theory and complexity science have shed much light upon the emergence of life and consciousness. However, I think process philosophy is more radical as it begins with an ontological hypothesis, that is, the ultimate reality of the Cosmos is, in the very beginning, drops of experience which seek novelty, which, as I understand, is nothing other than the endeavor of an actual entity to achieve its intrinsic connection with all the other actual entities, and the Cosmos as a whole.

just some random thoughts.

I love this statement:“Philosophy begins in wonder and in the end when philosophic thought has done its best, the wonder remains.”

I have practiced meditation for more than 10,000 hours in the past 12 years and the more I practice, the more I wonder about the unfathomable potential of human nature and its connection to the whole cosmos. Thanks to the Whiteheadian philosophy, I can say this experience of wonder is not naive and pure imagination, but is based the most sophiscated and profound survey of human experience and intellectual legacy.

I would like to make a little addition to the statement of Whitehead: Philosophy begins in wonder and in the end when philosophic thought has done its best, the wonder remains and intensifies.

Hi George, thank you for your interest in my workshop in collaboration with Thandeka. I think there will be new workshops after this one. Yes, as process philosophy claims to provide a general framework for all our experiences, it has to be applied and tested in our empirical life. and I would argue the practice of meditation is the most direct way for that purpose. I hope someday we can explore this area together.

Hi Kaeti, I so much enjoy your works of animation. the evolution of life and cosmos is so vividly presented.

I’m glad to know that you play Baduanjin Qigong. I’m a meditation teacher, with my approach of meditation mainly based on Taoism and Confucianism, while integrating thoughts from Buddhism, theology, process philosophy and different branches of science. I’m going to give an online workshop in collaboration with Thandeka, a process philosopher and theologian. it will feature an integration of Taoism, Confucianism, theology, process philosophy and neurology. just for your information. In case you’re interested, that would be great:https://meditationtaoist.com/2025/03/16/east-connects-with-west-in-this-meditation-philosophy-and-dialogue-workshop/

Hi Dennis, I am basically the same with you. I took the program last year. I enjoyed it very much, only it was challenging for me to finish the project. so I’m taking the program this year again. there is so much to learn and to understand. and talking with the classmates is no less important than the courses themselves. It’s great to find old friends again here in this year’s program.

Hi Christie and George, I totally agree with both of you. I think the experience of wonder/awe is not simply aroused by the world around us, but is also an indication of our internal status. That is, it’s the quality of relationship, the relationship between us and the world outside. And it’s dynamic. it can be intentionally cultivated. I believe this is the task of education and the goal of life.

Hi George, is your book: the systems view of life, published yet? I’m keen on the scientific view of process thoughts.

Well done, Daryl. even a small sip of beer involves such a vast reservoir of vivid and colorful experience. This is a very beautiful interpretation of actual occasions.

Hi Jay, thank you very much for this detailed explanation. I think the distinction between creativity and God is also culture-conditioned as God has been too much endowed with a tone of morality, that God is moral and is teleological, as generally believed in the Abrahamic tradition. Hence there is so much questioning about the origin of evil and its compatibilit with God.

But then it’s natural to come up with the question of Alexandre: if creativity is completely neutral from a moral perspective, then where does this experience of morality come? if we invent the concept of God as the ultimate origin of morality, what’s the relationship between God and creativity? would this cause another form of dualism?

From the perspective of Taoism, Tao is at the same time creative, bringing forth evolution and all forms of life. Indeed it’s beyond any sense of morality, but simply morality as too much toned with the limited experience of human being. Tao is the only source of goodness, beauty and truth and thus the single and ultimate principle of the cosmos. and it calls for the human being to keep on reflecting upon their limited experience with goodness, beauty and truth so that a more sophisticated level of evolution can always be expected.

I hope such a comparison might be interesting and helpful.

Hi Christie, thank you for starting this discussion. You question is powerful: how can such a gentle and loving approach, guided by relational, rather than unilateral power, hope to grow and thrive in such a harsh climate? particularly when this way of thinking is so difficult to articulate?

I do think the new vision of process philosophy is indeed very liberating and enpowering and has the hope to spread fastly throughout the whole nation and the whole globe. Why? it provides a very optimistic and life-affirmative understanding of the nature of human being and the cosmos at large. as made clear by Bob, we are the cumulative flow of experience. it means, in principle, we, each of us as individual, has the potential to develop and evolve infinitely, if our experience could be so organized and further developed in a far more conscious way than before.

Yes, we are the cumulative flow of experience. the problem is, as we grow, our capacity to digest and integrate our experince, and accordingly, our capacity to make new experience for our continuous development become weaker and weaker. then there is diseases, cancer, aging, and death. I think Taoism, Confuciansim and Buddhism have all been focusing on the possibility that this curse of disease, aging and death can be broken. Process philosophy provides a new and very important perspective confirming this possibility from the western tradition of intelligence.

I myself have been focusing on the healing effect of meditation in the past 12 years. based on an approach integrating Taoism, Confucianism, Buddhism and the latest development in science and philosophy, as well as testing it with my personal experience and the experience of my students, I’m now very optimistic that such an integrating approach of meditation can make magic healing effect upon healing and as a way to meet the challenge of aging.

what’s more exciting is that, in our day, with the support of internet and AI, such healing can occur in a way far more convenient than the mainstream way of medicine. it can simply occur through deep communication and meditation in group. When people can talk about their sufferings, trauma and challenge, express their anxiety, fear, depression and concerns, the energy will flow. when this is followed by properly instructed practice of meditation, the healing will occur automatically.

and finally it’s not simply about healing. it’s also about achieving the highest potential as a human being.

I’m now also working with Thandeka, a process philosopher and theologean and her team to develop online workshop to test this approach. I think that will be a very promsing project.

Hi guys thank you for your interesting discussion. I echo with Andrew’s concern about the possibility of a stable and constant consciousness and assuredness of an “I”. Without such consciousness and assuredness, we don’t know how to maintain our existence and how to relate with our beloved ones. When the body is vulnerable, easy to get sick, old and decay and thus transient, then by our intuition and eagerness for meaning of life, there should and must be an unchanging soul that is “me”.

However, such reasoning leads to a difficulty now we know basically can not be solved, that is, the problem of dualism. Thus the possibility that there is no soul as separated from the body and the soul as we intuit is nothing else but the cumulative flow of experience we have gathered in our life, which literally dates back to the origin of the cosmos, is far more intelligible. The point is, although we are the manifestation of such a flow of vast experience, we are not conscious of it. we don’t know that we are one with the whole cosmos and we panic for our finite life and its decay and end.

So I see there is a call in this assertion that we, body and soul, are nothing else but a cumulative flow of experience, a call for us to become more and more conscious in our life, that we are composed not of fixed bits of substance, but of vast experience that keeps flowing. This makes it possible that our very being, as a structure of complex experience, keeps evloving and developing and thus invites a new understanding of “soul”.

sorry for this very brief proposition on such a fundamentally important question. I’m still trying to improve my way of participating in such discussion.

Hi George and Daryl, thank you for this interesting discussion. I think Whitehead did aim to provide an ontological interpretation of the true reality that the ultimate building blocks of the cosmos are drops of experience, which are processes and interrelated to each other. was he justifed for such assertion, as Kant argued that we could only know what we experience through our senses and the neumenal world or thing-in-itself is beyond the reach of our cognition? I think yes as Whitehead provided us the epistemological way to test his assertion, which he summarized in his famous metaphor of the flight of an airplane: 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. Bob has further interpreted how this method of imaginative rationalization works in his book. But I think so far it is not sufficient for this epistemological process to work. as what is involved here is not simply theoretical speculation, but indispensably a practice, a practice of trying to be more conscious of what our experience is in our life. And this will lead to transformation, lead to diving deeper into our experience of being and becoming. In this way, I believe we are actually making effort to directly experience the true reality, the ontological dimesion of our existence, which will then provide the basis of a higher level for our epistemological work. So the ontological question and the epistemological question in philosophy are just two sides of the same coin and they lead to ongoing transformation.

Hi George, thank you for raising this fascinating question. And the comments are inspiring as well. In response to George’s opinion that actual entities are a type of models that, albeit useful perhaps, are wrong, I think Whitehead would not say that, as he made it very clear: actual entities are the final real things of which the world is made up. Of course, they are not “real” in the sense that they are unchanging substance, but they are “real” as they experience and can be experienced. So an actual entity is not a model as it has no content. it’s simply emptiness, but emptiness that experiences.

so is actual entity concret or abstract? it depends. Like when I describe an experience that is concret for me in words. These words are normally abstract to another person, unless somehow he gains the same or similar experience because of the consciousness my words have evoked in his psyche. In this sense, the concept of actual entiy is actually an invitation, an invitation to experience the final reality. That means, it’s different from any model in statistical sense, which has a particular content.

I think the cosmos can be understood at two levels, one is the phenomenal level and one is the ontological level. they represent the physical pole and the mental pole of the cosmos, just like an actual entity has the physical pole and the mental pole. a mountain, or the sun, as a relatively separate entity of the Cosmos, also has the physical pole and the mental pole, but its mental pole is very primitive and can not really maintain itself as a separate, enduring and consciously self-evolving identity.

The living organism, like a cell, a plant, an animal, and finally, the human being, is the result of the infinitely evolving process of the cosmic consciousness, which strives to be more and more awake, with the intensity of the consciousness keeps developing. with that we human being comes to gain the sense of “personhood”, or self-centered identity.

as a result of this process, we have developed sophisticated system of language. the language is a double-edged sword. it makes it possible for us to share our experience at infinitely bigger scale of time and space. This is never achieved before the human being appears in the play of the cosmic evolution. with the language our experience of our existence in the world has been greatly intensified, including all those fancy inventions. but on the other hand we are easily misled and confused with our language, with those concepts of god, nation, race, good and evil, etc. When this goes extreme, our experience of our existence in the world is limited and depleted, even threatening our own survival. as now we no longer experience, we no longer feel. we are driven by different stories and believes and start to fight each other. So now it’s time to deepen our understanding of the role of language in affecting and shaping our experience and to learn from plants and animals and even rocks.