In Buddhism there is a critical emphasis on the cessation of craving due to its inextricable link to "duḥkha" or suffering, but there is no direct correlation in Whitehead’s thought pointing to the necessity of ceasing appetition. In fact, appetition is built into the processive universe, for according to Whitehead “all physical experience is accompanied …
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For me, at their best, Process philosophy and Buddhism engage in the "project of ontology", not in order to try and construct a perfectly itemized, categorical reflection of reality, but to reconstruct experience in service of some greater praxis: the path to awakening in Buddhism and the adventure of civilization in Process. Since both DE-construct …
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 …
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 …
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 …
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 …
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 …
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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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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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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Holopoiesis 