The slogan "We are the 99%" emerged during the Occupy movement, thanks in large part by David Graeber, to point to the extreme disparity in wealth between the elite and everybody else. Increasingly though I think the notion of the 1% v.s. the 99% should be imbued with a sense that the issue is not …
Blind Spots in Process and in Buddhism
I tend to say that both Process and Buddhist traditions are relatively self-sufficient, and therefore they have no inherent deficiency that would require synthesizing them both in a co-dependent way. They come together in my synthesis of Process Buddhism as relatively autonomous partners in solidarity, integrated yet differentiated based on the functional roles they can …
On Modes of Creative Synthesis
The mode of creative synthesis that Process Buddhism both deploys and exemplifies is not sublation or Hegelian-style reconciliation of contradiction. It is rather what we can term "asymmetrical interdependence," where oppositional contrasts are affirmed to be both mutually or symmetrically implicated at the level of conceptual thought (each depends on the other notionally), but asymmetrically …
Do Process Buddhists Believe in ‘God’?
Sometimes I use the word 'God' in my reflections and I use it both sincerely and ironically. It's ironic because I'm a Buddhist and Buddhists have always criticized and deflated the notion of a monotheistic creator or absolute supreme being. But it's also sincere because I understand what the concept of 'God' is supposed to …
Pan-Experientialism of the Heart-Mind
Perhaps implicit in the original formulation but made explicit through Process Buddhism, the Whiteheadian Process notion that all actual entities in the entire universe feel some level of experience — from the tiniest quantum fluctuation to the most complex organisms and everything in between — resuscitates a more ancient and pre-modern understanding about the nature …
Is Class Society Historically Necessary or Contingent?
The question of whether class society first emerged in ancient times as a necessary historical function of economic development predicated on surplus production, or a historically contingent imposition through voluntary force, seems to implicitly assume a mind-matter, subject-object distinction, one in which the physical conditions of life and life as a living experience are treated …
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On The “Queer Realism” of Trans Experience
Trans people tend to be either "realist" or "idealist" about their gender identities: the realists tend to try and ground their identities on an essential, objective substratum (the most popular form being a neuroessentialist reduction of transgender identity to supposed "brain-sex" differences) while the idealists appeal to the socially constructed nature of gender to divorce …
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Democratizing Divinity with Process Buddhism
One of the "innovations" of Process Buddhism is a certain democratization and pluralization of the function of "God" in Whitehead's original articulation of his process-relational metaphysics. Rather than there being a single divine element offering the value hierarchies by which we can drive our own development, there is a continuum of divinities which can inform …
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Notes on The Third Ultimate in Process Buddhism
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 …
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On The Contradictory “Practical Ontology” of Capitalism and the Paradoxical Ontology of Process Buddhism
I think there is an implicit ontology baked into capitalist social relations, and it's a contradictory "practical ontology" that simultaneously upholds a dualism between subject and object, self and other, the intensive and the extensive, mind and matter, etc. while unfolding through time as a tendency towards a monist subsumption of the former (subject, etc.) …
Holopoiesis 