"Whitehead's Process and
Reality is a very tough book, so as a graduate student thirty years ago, I
took a break and walked over to Lake Michigan, trying to understand what
"process" was all about. The weather was gray and the lake, choppy.
"What is the alternative?" I asked myself. What if the world were not in
process? Would Lake Michigan somehow be sitting there waveless in the
future, waiting for waves to break on it? Suddenly, the world jolted, as
if it had been ajar and unexpectedly dropped into place with a snap.
The future does not exist. There is no
future Lake Michigan waiting for water to fill it or waves to lap at its shores.
The future does not exist, the future is not
actual. I looked at the world around me with wide amazed eyes.
My eyes did not exist in the future. The sidewalk did not exist in the
future. The foot that I was going to set down on the sidewalk in a moment
did not exist yet. Only the foot in the present existed. I
practically skipped home, watching the sidewalk and my feet (and my watching
itself) become. At Morry's Deli, I looked in the window (becoming)
and watched the pastrami becoming, and the people becoming.
How could I explain this to my wife?"
- C. Robert Mesle, Process-Relational Philosophy, 2008, p.5
"I am the dust in the sunlight, I am the ball of the sun . . .
I am the mist of morning, the breath of evening . . . .
I am the spark in the stone, the gleam of gold in the metal . . . .
The rose and the nightingale drunk with its fragrance.
I am the chain of being, the circle of the spheres,
The scale of creation, the rise and the fall.
I am what is and is not . . .
I am the soul in all."
- Rumi
it is the closest one can come to being present at creation."
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