As I research and design Process Buddhism, I’ve come to understand the unity of the two ultimates of open/emptiness and inclusive-transcendence in three different ways, where the two ultimates are different aspects of a “third” ultimate: holopoiesis (my own novel concept), power, and love.
I came to these different results from different angles, but there is an important sense in which holopoiesis, power, and love are synonymous in the sense that they instantiate the same pattern: the dynamic unity-in-difference and reciprocal entanglement of self and other. Each term describes different aspects of the “third ultimate” in Process Buddhism: holopoiesis refers to its structure as a self-organizing yet metabolically open totality that changes itself as it changes the totality in which it is embedded; power refers to its capacity to influence and enact change, and love refers to its unified and unifying character.
Of the three ultimates, the two ultimates of open/emptiness and inclusive-transcendence are purely virtual, meaning that they don’t have a reality of their own independent of the actual entities which instantiate them. The third ultimate is the only one that is fully actual, but it can be actual in two modes: a “nescient” dormant mode, and an “omniscient” awakened mode. Whether it is nescient or omniscient, its structure is always constant, always holopoietically organized. Increase in power and love brings the third ultimate from dormancy to wakefulness, though power is only a necessary but not sufficient condition for complete omniscience because power always has an ancillary role to the fulfillment of love, which at its core is a spontaneously arisen force that dispels tension and consummates harmony.
The most basic atomic constituents of reality, the fundamental microscopic quanta of experience—actual occasions—are in their most primitive state instances of the third ultimate in its nescient, dormant state; we can call these “minimal ultimates.” All actual occasions are dipolar, physical and mental, and the characteristic feature of minimal ultimates is that their concrescence (their integrative process of becoming or coming-to-be) is driven primarily by the reproduction of the physical pole at the expense of the mental pole.
A maximal ultimate would be a complex instantiation of the third ultimate in its omniscient, fully awakened state, which is a qualitatively rich and affectively intense mode of experience constituted by a “society,” or temporally enduring pattern of nexuses, of actual occasions that also instantiate the same maximal character. The characteristic feature of maximal ultimates, beyond that they consist of a complex hybridization of physical elements prehended from the past and conceptual possibilities ingressed from the primordial potency of open/empty space, is that their subjective aims are primarily based in love.
The gradation between minimal and maximal ultimates is defined by the degree to which subjective aims are guided by love. Due to the ultimate principle of open/emptiness, “minimal” and “maximal” are relative terms; there is no predetermined absolute maximal ultimate (this is why in Process Buddhism, the Buddha-Bodhisattva replaces God as the Divine element, but this is not to suggest that they are equivalent either). Due to the ultimate principle of inclusive-transcendence, every maximal ultimate is itself a constituent aspect of the concrescence of a greater ultimate; the inclusive being and the included being are ontologically distinct but functionally co-emergent.
Ordinary human beings are somewhere between minimal and maximal ultimacy. From an anthropocentric perspective, humans tend to consider themselves maximally ultimate beings. Relative to divinity, humans are considered minimally ultimate beings. It remains to be said if humans can only ever be a liminal state between minimality and maximality, or if a human can instantiate maximal ultimacy. Perhaps at this point, it is just a matter of semantics because the great sages of the past, although embodying human form, have often been considered, even if just mytho-poetically, as more than human, even if incarnated in human form. Jesus and the Buddha are perhaps two exemplary instances of maximally ultimate beings who have incarnated in human form.
Holopoiesis 