What if that pit in your heart was not a lack but a wellspring? What if desire were not a drive to fill a painful bottomless pit of lack but a channel for the unimpeded outpour of this overwhelming wellspring at the heart of your heart? What if that open space feels empty only because you block yourself from receiving what the wellspring of your own being has to offer? What would happen if you went out of your own way, and let yourself receive that sacred gift?
In Process Buddhism, the ultimate “immanent transcendental” principle Open/Emptiness refers to how things do not exist as they seem (they are empty), how they are more than our sense of them can contain (they are open). Buddhists masters like Nāgārjuna and Śāntarakṣita demonstrate that when things are analyzed as to whether they exist as a singularity or a plurality, they are found to be incapable of existing in these ways, and so cannot be said to exist inherently since singularity and plurality are the exhaustive mereological modes of being any real entity could possibly have.
And yet, although things do not exist as they seem and are more than our sense of them can contain, things do in fact incessantly seem to arise, abide and pass away. Hartshorne called Whitehead’s concept of “prehension”, the transmission of feelings from the settled past to the novel being to come, the greatest metaphysical generalization ever accomplished. Dialectically entangled with this concept is the concept of “conscrescence”, the pattern by which the “many become one and are increased by one”, where “entities are disjunctively many in process of passage in conjunctive unity”.
So insofar as things do seem to arise, abide, and pass away, they do so following this principle of “inclusive-transcendence” where the many of the past act as necessary but not sufficient conditions for the arising of the creatively synthetic novel occasion or event, an event which immediately perishes into the extensive continuum of the past to function as condition for future successors. Since this miraculous display of creatively-experiencing process is incontrovertible and undeniable (which is to say, that the dialectical deconstruction of the mode of existence of entities, their purportedly inherently existent nature, does not actually obstruct their being directly experienced as sensory appearances or prehended as feelings), the process principle of Inclusive-Transcendence is enshrined within Process Buddhism as a co-ultimate immanent transcendental.
Open/Emptiness and Inclusive-Transcendence are co-ultimate features of all actual and any possible experience: that experience is never experience from a position of subject separate from its object, and is always-already creatively purposive guided by a subjective aim towards synthetic unity. These are the two interdependent aspects of what may otherwise feel like a painful pit in your heart registering as a sense of lack. This incompleteness within you bears the dual mark of being a space that allows for the wellspring of your being to flow unimpeded. The greater the stability of your awareness of this fact, of the non-dual interdependence between Open/Emptiness and Inclusive-Transcendence, between the open space in your heart and the overwhelming wellspring of energy that issues from it, the closer you come to embodying your truth, to realizing your destiny, to unleashing your core potential.
Those who realize a mode of being that is reflexively aware of its own nature as open/empty inclusively-transcending becoming fall under the category of the “Divine” in Process Buddhism, as beings who unsurpassably exemplify all transcendental principles. These are the beings who, having unleashed their own core potential, stand as radiant beacons of light for those who wander in the darkness of ignorance and lack, luring them to realize the same light within themselves, to allow the wellspring of their being to issue forth without impediment.
