In the Beginning

Is the Listening

A Whiteheadian Approach to the World’s Religions

And to Peace between the Religions

What I am concerned with is my readiness

to obey the call of truth, my God, from moment to moment.

MK Gandhi

No world peace without peace between the religions.

       Hans Kung

Introduction

As people study and learn from the world’s religions, they can be enriched by philosophical roadmaps.  We might call these maps “philosophies of world religions,” because they present the general contours of the many religions and simultaneously interpret the traditions they present.  My aim in this essay is to present the general outline of one such map, based on the philosophy of Alfred North Whitehead.  Already numerous Whiteheadian scholars have used Whitehead’s thought to help interpret particular traditions: Christianity, Judaism, Islam, Buddhism, Confucianism, Taoism, and others.  I want to add to their work by providing aspects of an overview of the world’s religions, which might then be filled in, and corrected, by more detailed study.  

A Whiteheadian roadmap, like any other map, is but a travel guide. The world’s religions are best understood, not simply by studying them in an abstract way, but by meeting and listening to the serious followers of the religions, each of whom tries to express his or her tradition as a living truth.  In so doing the follower simultaneously extends and changes the tradition at issue, however slightly. The cumulative effect of these slight changes over long periods of time is the evolution of the religion itself.  The fact that religions evolve means that there can be no final roadmap.  At their best, then, philosophies of the world’s religions are but tentative guides for the journey, helping prepare travelers for surprises they will encounter, and encouraging them to be good listeners along the way.

The value of Whiteheadian approach is twofold.  On the one hand, it offers a unique opportunity for students of the world’s religions to consider the bigger picture of the religions, with attention to how they are related to one another to and the larger community of life.  On the other hand, it offers a way to appreciate many of the particular insights to which religions give rise, without reducing religions to a least common denominator. The guiding principle of a Whiteheadian approach is not that The Truth is One and the Path is One or that The Truth is One and the Paths are Many.  It is that The Truths are Many and All Make the Whole Richer.  This more pluralistic approach offers people the opportunity to celebrate the commonalities of religions where they exist, but also to delight in the differences, trustful that each religion has something unique to offer the world, not precisely paralleled in any of the others.  

With its emphasis on uniqueness, a Whiteheadian approach is an “ecological” approach.  Just as ecological thinking invites us to appreciate the diversity of species in an ecosystem, cognizant that the whole is made richer by the differences, so a Whiteheadian approach invites us to appreciate the diversity of religions, cognizant that the whole – God – is made richer by the differences.  In Whiteheadian thought God is not so much a One-over-many as a One-embracing-many, whose very life is enriched by the many that are embraced.[1]  The “many” include much more than human beings.  They include the many stars and galaxies in the heavens, the many plants and animals on earth and, when freed from violence, the many philosophies, cultures, and religions to which humans give rise.  All contribute to a living tapestry which is, in its deeper dimensions, the divine life itself.  The title of Marjorie Suchocki’s Whiteheadian approach to the world’s religions, Divinity and Diversity, captures the spirit of this ecological orientation.

Who, then, are the students of the world’s religions who might appreciate a Whiteheadian approach?  Perhaps some of them are philosophers and theologians who are developing philosophies of world religions along the lines of complementary pluralism as presented by David Ray Griffin; perhaps some are spiritually-interested people who are seeking to learn from other world religions even as they may be grounded in particular religious traditions; and perhaps some are college students, religiously affiliated and otherwise, who are taking courses in the world’s religions.  I am writing for each of these groups, but I know the students especially well, because I teach world religions to them five days a week, nine months a year.

In introducing the world’s religions to my students, I always need to begin where many of them are, and I ask you, my reader, to let me begin in the same way.  Many of my students arrive in class with a curiosity about religion, trustful that it contains some wisdom relevant to human flourishing; with a complementary trust in the powers of science, trustful that it, too, possesses wisdom relevant to human flourishing; and with a recognition that, in the best of worlds, religion and science might jointly contribute to a more peaceful world.  The more ecologically-minded among them also begin with the assumption that the earth itself is a larger context for understanding the wisdom of science and the wisdom of religion.  These students are interested, not simply in human flourishing, but in the flourishing of life on the planet.

From a Whiteheadian perspective, the ecologically-minded students are right to begin with a hope that religions and science might serve life on earth, and not just human life, because all living beings, not just human beings, have intrinsic value.  The earth is indeed home to many religions, even as some religions are not at home on the earth.  If we looked at the world’s religions from the moon, we would see them as part of a larger community of life that is inter-connected and changing at every moment, filled with plants and animals as well as people.  In this respect, the world's religions are similar to other human activities such as music and art, science and philosophy, pottery and plumbing.  All are evolving traditions within a larger life community, and all are expressions of, not exceptions to, a deeper creativity from which the universe emerges, moment-by-moment.

This does not mean that religions are inevitably good.  All human activities, including science and philosophy, can yield violence as well as peace, horror as well as beauty.  Even the continuous creativity of the universe is violent in its way, as manifest both in the continuous explosions of the stars and in predator-prey relations on earth.  Considered in itself, the continuous creativity is non-teleological.  It need not be divinized as "good" or demonized as "evil."   It is the pure happening of what happens as it happens, new at every moment, whether beautiful or horrible.  Buddhists sometimes call it the “suchness” of things.

Of course, humans cannot live on pure happening alone.  They seek ideals on the basis of which creativity can be directed in healing and healthy ways.   For the sake of a flourishing life community, the hope in our time, shared by many people across the globe, is that people in the world's religions will feel called toward peaceful forms of creativity.  

On the prospects of peace, the philosophy of Gandhi is especially helpful.  He believed that there is more to life than continuous creativity, because the universe also contains an indwelling and divine lure toward truth, to which all religions are partly responsive.  The need in our time, said Gandhi, is for religious people to realize that this indwelling call to truth – God --  is simultaneously a call to non-violent living, which itself is the highest of human adventures.  Gandhi called the power of non-violence Satyagraha:  the power of truth and love. He believed that humans add to the creativity of the universe, not by walking in violence, but by walking in love.  In walking in this say, Gandhi said, they realize their earthly potential and take steps in an ongoing journey, continuing after death that is fulfilled when the soul finds oneness with the divine Truth that inspires life in the first place. (IST 65).

Needless to say, religious people have not always walked in love.  The history of religion is filled with violence as well as beauty, and this history goes back a very long way.  We are naturally tempted to ask, not only "When did the universe begin?" but also "When did religion begin?"

Scholars differ on when, where, and how religion began.  Some trace religion to fear, some to hope, some to awe, some to confusion, and some to sex.   In order to consider a still wider perspective, Islam offers a particularly helpful proposal.  It suggests that religion began with creation itself, since all creatures are surrendered to God, thus exhibiting that "islam" which is the heart of religion.  If Muslims are right to say this, then their view has implications for understanding the nature, not only of the universe, but also of God.  Their view implies that some of the creativity in nature, even when violent, may itself be responsive to, not divergent from, a divine eros at the heart of creation.  This places the Gandhian option in a larger perspective.  It means that Satyagraha may be what God willed and continues to will for human beings at this stage in human history; but that it may not be what God willed for earlier humans struggling to survive, or what God wills for foxes chasing rabbits.  This means that God is omni-adaptive, and that the divine will is relative to the situation at hand.  Satyagraha may well be a divinely inspired idea relevant to our time, but not to all times.  It is a distinctively and somewhat new way for humans to contribute to the ongoing history of the universe, the path for which was prepared by billions of years of creative evolution.  

This idea that Satyagraha is a new option for humanity, perhaps emerging sometime after the age of the hunters and gatherers, need not mean that the whole of evolution conspired toward the creation of humans.  Other creatures, too, are ends toward which creation strives, and their well-being is not less important than human well being.  Instead the idea that Satyagraha is a form of adaptation can mean that humans, along with all other living creatures, are inspired, not only by God, but also by the whole of evolution.  The African proverb that “it takes a village” can then be expanded.  In order to create a single act of love, and in order for love to become an ideal relevant to the whole of humanity, it took and still takes a universe.

Evolutionary biology adds to this more universal point of view by proposing that the precedents for human religion, whether peaceful or violent, lie in other animals, many of whom exhibit impulses to which religions also give expression: impulses to dance, to play, to seek, to struggle, to explore, to rest, to live with satisfaction relative to the situation at hand.   A recognition of the evolutionary character of religion need not negate the Gandhian proposal that religions are, or can be, inspired by an indwelling and divine lure toward truth and non-violence.  Just as science can be inspired by a lure toward truth even as it is also a form of evolutionary adaptation, so religions can be inwardly inspired by a lure toward truth.   And just as science can fall short of responsiveness to this inwardly felt lure, so religions can fall short.   Divine inspiration is persuasive, not coercive.

Nevertheless, an evolutionary approach to religion does imply that, if a divine reality is present within religion as well as science, then its inspiration is consonant with, not contradictory to, the workings of nature itself.  In this sense religion is not so much a supernatural activity as it is a deeply natural activity, a way of participating in the wider rhythms of life and death.  Perhaps this is what Jesus had in mind when he enjoined his followers to consider and learn from the lilies of the field.  Perhaps he was inviting his followers to recognize what members of many other religions likewise sense: that whatever inspires religion at its deepest and best level also inspires the whole of creation.

Whitehead and the World's Religions

How many religions are there?  If by "religion" we mean the human versions of religion, then at one level there are as many religions as there are people, because each person plays and dances, seeks and finds, in a slightly different way.  But the religions do indeed fall into general groupings, representing multi-generational communities of people who share common beliefs, attitudes, and practices, and who extend and change their traditions in their very participation in them.  The groupings include the various world religions described in standard textbooks: Hinduism, Buddhism, Jainism, Sikhism, Confucianism, Taoism, Shintoism, Judaism, Christianity, Islam, Bahai, Zoroastrianism, new religions, and numerous indigenous traditions representing the ways of First Peoples.

In order to view these various traditions as a whole, we might imagine them on the analogy of trees in a forest.  Each tree, each religious community, would have its distinctive characteristics; and no tree, no religious community, would be reducible to the others.  And yet the characteristics of each tree would be best understood, not simply by looking at the tree in isolation, but also by comparison and contrast with the other trees.  Just as we learn something about cedars by looking at pines, then, so we learn something about Christianity by looking at Buddhism.  The comparisons illuminate the distinctive features of each, giving the viewer a larger perspective.

If we extend this analogy, we might also recognize that the very existence of each tree depends, not only upon its own internal resources as contained within its cells, but also upon the energy it receives from outside sources, light from the sun, water and minerals from the ground; and upon on its relations with other organisms the forest, including other kinds of trees.   The relations to the surrounding environment are “internal” to the tree, even as relations within the body of the tree are “internal” to the tree.  Even if a given tree sought to dominate a habitat, it would be odd for that tree to try to eliminate all things other than itself.  It would be odd for it to say "I am the only tree worth surviving; let all others be exterminated."  It would be more realistic for it to say, "I am one among many. I cannot fully understand myself without reference to the others.  Let all flourish that I may flourish, too."

Up to this point in world history, many religious people have not thought in this more ecological way.  Many have presumed that they could understand their respective religions without reference to the other religions.  And they have presumed that, if they needed to make reference to the other religions, they could make passing references to those religions without knowing very much about them.  They have thought atomistically rather than ecologically.

Indeed, many advocates of the two most active missionary religions -- Christianity and Islam -- have insisted that their religions provide the exclusive means of salvation, without taking the time to see what kinds of salvation the other religions provide.  It would be like a cedar tree saying to all the other trees: "In order to become a perfect tree, you must become a cedar."  The pine tree would rightly respond: "But have you considered the wisdom of the pine?"

The forces of globalization, immigration, and worldwide education now force a change in this more isolationist way of thinking.  Increasingly philosophers and theologians from given religions are realizing that they must take into account the other religions of the world in order even to understand themselves, and that in order to do so, they must know something about those other religions.  The need is not simply for theologies of pluralism, which determine in advance the approach they might take to other religions; but also for philosophies of world religions themselves, in which these philosophers attend to, and perhaps also learn from, the claims of other religions.  

The effort to develop these philosophies of world religions might be easy if the claims of the various religions were reducible to verbally articulated beliefs.  The creeds could then be placed on a table and compared by scholars at an academic conference.   But the "claims" of the various religions are not reducible to verbally articulated beliefs, which means that this scholarly approach is insufficient.  The religions of the world point typically point to three kinds of truthfulness: (1) truthful beliefs, as articulated in, but not reducible to, verbal propositions; (2) truthful awareness, as expressed in feelings of awe and wonder, empathy and humility, compassion and attention, serenity and courage, and (3) truthful living, as expressed in willing responsiveness to the call of the moment.  In many religious traditions the second two kinds of truthfulness are more important than the first.  For example, in many forms of Buddhism, mindful attention to what is happening in the present moment is more important than having a philosophy of consciousness by which such awareness might be interpreted.  A philosophy can be important, but the truth is in the awareness itself, not the philosophy.   And in monotheistic traditions, an intuitive sense of reverence before the mystery of God is more important than having a philosophy of God by which that mystery is allegedly mastered.  The wisdom is in the wonder, not the mastery.

Moreover, many traditions emphasize that the most important truth does not lie in what one believes or even in what one feels, but rather in how one lives, day by day and moment by moment, in relations to others.  Truth, says the Taoist, does not lie in having answers to questions, but rather in having a way of living -- a tao of living -- in which a person can live gracefully with questions that can never be fully answered.

In the long view, it seems to be Christianity more than other religions that has been uniquely preoccupied with beliefs, and more specifically with verbally articulated beliefs that are displayed in prosaic rather than narrative form.  This is one reason why some Christian-based theologies of pluralism and world religions focus inordinately on questions of "belief" and "truth claims" at the expense of attending to truthful awareness and truthful living.  And it is one reason why people in other religions can be impatient with Christian-based theologies of pluralism and world religions, insofar as these theologies can seem more interested in "positions" than in truthful awareness and truthful living.  At a deeper level, however, many Christians realize that the most important forms of truth – the truthfulness of empathy and humility, for example -- are non-propositional, and that these forms of truth have more to do with living relationships than with ideas.  Christians believe, and a Whiteheadian can agree, that some forms of truthful awareness and truthful living can be gifts from a divine Thou, rather than products of human endeavor; and that these forms of truthfulness emerge out of a relationship with the Thou in which initiative is taken by the Thou.   For the Christian, Jesus himself is such a gift: a person with whom one can have a relationship, through which a profoundly intimate relationship with God is established.  In a Whiteheadian perspective, no form of truthfulness emerges apart from relationship, including relationship the whole of creation, with God, and, for the Christian, with Jesus.

What is clear, though, is that in our time philosophers and theologians of world religions need to be sensitive to all three kinds of truth, neither to the exclusion of the others, and that they need to be aware of the many different ways in which these three forms of truth are enfleshed in the many religions.  However, the very possibility of keeping the many religions in mind, each with its unique insights and oversights, can seem especially daunting.  It would be as if, in developing a responsible approach to the questions named above, a theologian or philosopher is asked to have mastered the contents of the encyclopedia of religion.  It would take a lifetime of research before a person could even use the word "religion" or conclude, as some might, that the word "religion" is too western to be used.

A solution to this problem lies in finding a philosophical point of view that can interpret the diversity in ways that are sensitive to the uniqueness of the various traditions, including their various ways of living out the three forms of truthfulness; but that can simultaneously facilitate meaningful generalizations about the world's religions in a tentative way.  What is needed is a philosophy of world religions, which can be corrected over time, but which helps provide perspective for interpreting the many religions.

In the twenty-first century, the philosophy of Whitehead, as developed by process philosophers and theologians, offers one of the most promising examples of this kind of philosophy.  It offers:

q       a multi-faceted cosmology that can help people interpret and appreciate many different insights from the world's religions, ranging from insights concerning the non-substantiality of all existence as espoused in Buddhism, through insights on person-in-community as espoused in Confucianism and kinship with creation as espoused in indigenous traditions, to insights concerning the guidance of God as espoused in theistic traditions.

q       a philosophy of experience that helps people appreciate the pre-verbal and sometimes non-conscious forms of religious experience, including forms of truthful awareness found in mysticism, meditation, and prayer, and which suggests that the human mind, as distinct from the brain, may undergo a continuing spiritual journey after death.

q       a philosophy of education that helps people appreciate two forms of learning that occur in the world religions: learning from body-to-mind (as illustrated in meditation, worship, ritual, manual labor, and social service) as well as from mind-to-body (as illustrated in a reading of sacred texts).[2]

q       a philosophy of listening that inspires confidence that, with empathy and imagination, people from one religion can truly listen to, and learn from, the wisdom of other religions, including the pre-verbal wisdom.

q       a philosophy of science that shows how insights from religion can be integrated with insights from science in a way that is consistent with the insights of both religion and science; showing how divine presence is a continuous presence that works with, not against, the causal influences of physics, chemistry, and biology; and appreciating how scientific methods can be applied, not only to non-human nature, but also to mind and consciousness.

This kind of philosophy, with these five features, can be especially helpful to people of many different religions as they seek to understand, interpret, and learn from the world's religions in ways that enhance wisdom.   Of course, as noted at the outset, it is not for the sake of wisdom alone that people of the different religions need to listen to one another.  It is also because there is too much unnecessary violence against creation, committed by religious people themselves, sometimes in the name of religion.  One Christian Whiteheadian thinker, Marjorie Suchocki, speaks of this violence as “sin."   What is needed, then, is a philosophy that can help make sense, not only of religious wisdom, but also of religious sin, offering possibilities for growth beyond violence.

Peace Between Religions

Hans Kung says that if there is to be peace on earth, there must be peace between religions, and his reasoning is obvious to most of us.  The majority of humans are guided by religious outlooks on life, whether Hindu or Muslim, Jewish or Buddhist, Christian or Confucian, Sikh or Jain, Bahai or Bantu.  When expressed in daily life, these outlooks can give rise to great beauty but also to great tragedy.  Religions become evil when the tragedy outweighs the beauty.

In saying this, I do not mean to suggest (1) that all religions are committed to peace between religions or (2) that peace itself is the highest ideal of all religions.  In some religions, for example, being wide awake in the present moment, or being at one with God may be more important than peace.  My proposal, undoubtedly influenced by spiritual mentors such as Jesus and Gandhi, the Buddha and Mahavira, and also by the way of thinking about life and God found in process thought, is that religions should be committed to peace between religions, even if this peace is not their most important aim, and that peace should be an ideal of all religions, even if not the highest ideal.  These are normative assumptions I must make at the outset, in order to lay out a Whiteheadian approach to religion.

The tragedy of religious violence is discussed in Charles Kimball’s When Religion Becomes Evil.   As the author of three books about religion in the Middle East, Kimball is well acquainted with religious violence in many parts of the world.   In his most recent book he identifies five warning signs that tip the balance toward evil.  Religions become evil when: (1) they claim to have the only path to God; (2) they claim to have the only way to read a sacred text; (3) they encourage blind obedience to religious leaders; (4) they focus on apocalyptic ends to history, which they themselves will help bring about; and (5) they are willing to use destructive means to achieve religious goals.

Of course, these five warning signs are not sufficient to produce violence.  They must be stirred by other conditions, such as economic marginalization and political frustration, inordinate resentment and excessive pride.  But when the other conditions are in place, the warning signs become kindling for the fires of violence, as expressed in violence between religions, violence committed in the name of religion, or violence inflicted on others with the implicit sanction of religion.  This violence can be overt and physical, as when Hindus and Muslims fight each other in India; or it can be covert and cultural, as when Christian missionaries promote prejudice against non-Christian cultures in the name of a great commission to win souls for Christ.

The preferred alternative to this violence, then, is peace.  Not just peace between religions, but more generally peace on earth as embodied in local communities that are democratic, socially just, ecologically sustainable,  non-violent, and spiritually satisfying.  By “peace” I mean all of these values taken together.  Another name for it might simply be “the fullness of life.”  However, not all people understand “peace” in this more inclusive way.  I am reminded of a student who came up after class and declared to me, half teasingly but half seriously, "peace is boring."  He was struck by the fact that many images of peace picture it as a state of affairs that is calm, predictable, and lifeless.  “One thing about violence,” he added, “is that it gets your attention.”

He was right.  The power of violence is that we are forced to take it into account, even if that "taking into account" means only that we try to hide our eyes from it.  Additionally and unfortunately, the infliction of violence can also elicit a sense of adventure, thrilling in its own right, among those who engage in it, particularly among young men ages eighteen and thirty.  This is why some men find war so intoxicating.   This raises the question: Can peace be intoxicating, too?  Can it ignite the hearts of people in ways that are creative and adventurous, but that are healing rather than harming in their effects? This is the challenge faced by the world religions today.  The challenge is to provide images of peace that liberate rather than stifle the deepest human capacities for adventure, and to embody this peace in their relations to one another.

Here as well, the philosophy of Whitehead is especially helpful.   Recall the five features of Whitehead's philosophy as named above, all of which contribute to a philosophy of world religions: (1) a cosmology that can help interpret insights from the world religions, (2) a philosophy of experience, (3) a philosophy of listening, (4) a philosophy of education, and (5) a philosophy of science.  In addition to these five features, all of which lend themselves to a philosophy of world religions, Whitehead's philosophy simultaneously lends itself to a philosophy of peace between religions by offering:

q       a  philosophy of peace,  which emphasizes the dynamic and adventurous qualities of peace, understood as a form of beauty-in-the-making.

q       a philosophy of violence, which shows how unnecessary violence diverges from, rather than conforms to, a divine will toward peace, and how it unfolds from the continuous creativity of creation itself, which partly transcends the divine will.

q       a philosophy of inter-religious dialogue, which stresses the importance of listening in humility as a foundation for meaningful interchange, and which opens the possibility that dialogue can be facilitated by body-to-mind learning as well as mind-to-body learning.

q       a philosophy of textual interpretation which shows how religious traditions can responsibly interpret sacred texts without presuming that the revelations of the texts are reducible to the words of the text, or that the revelations can occur apart from wholesome inner conditions on the part of readers and listeners to those words.

q       a philosophy of complementary pluralism, which recognizes that different religions can yield different from complementary forms of salvation, and different but complementary intuitions concerning what is "ultimate" in the nature of things.

Of course, these are very bold proposals concerning the value of Whiteheadian philosophy, and each proposal merits a book in itself.  My aim in this essay cannot be to defend each of the claims in depth.  Many Whiteheadian scholars have already defended most of them, and I can only hope that my essay might spur people to turn to the work of these many scholars.  My aims are more modest.  They are to present the core ideas in these proposals as a single, mandala-like whole to the general reader in a way that might be helpful for students of world religions (philosophers and theologians included) and advocates of peace between religions.  As I attempt to satisfy these aims, I will be introducing aspects of Whitehead's philosophy along the way, presuming that some of my readers are unfamiliar with his way of thinking.  Because the essay covers a wide range, it may be helpful to outline its sections at the outset, enunciating and adumbrating some of the key proposals.  Readers are then encouraged to turn to the particular sections that seem most relevant to concerns.  

Whitehead's philosophy offers an "acoustic vision of reality" in which the universe is envisioned on the analogy of mutually dependent sounds in a live musical concert, rather than mutually isolated items in space.  All things are present in all other things.  The peace toward which people of different religions rightly strive can itself be seen on this analogy as well, as akin to an improvisational jazz concert that is fragile, participatory, and creative, dependent on its participants for its continuation.  

2.  Whitehead and Gandhi.  A Whiteheadian approach to dialogue extends the spirit of Gandhi by offering four foundations for interreligious dialogue: a covenant with mystery, a recognition that God is a lure toward truth within all religions, a recognition that different religions are inspired toward different kinds of truth, and a recognition that all the world's religions fall short of this inspiration, insofar as they are conduits for violence against creation, another name for which is "sin."   The idea that different religions are inspired toward different kinds of truth can be called complementary pluralism, in contradistinction to the idea that religions are inspired toward the same truth, which can be called unitive pluralism.

3.  Three Forms of Truth/Two Forms of Learning.  Although complementary pluralism has advantages over unitive pluralism, there is wisdom in unitive pluralism in that it points to common motivation within all religions to seek truth in the three forms named above.  These three forms are sought through two forms of learning: mind-to-body learning and body-to-mind learning.  A distinctive feature of Whitehead’s thought is that appreciates both kinds of learning, and sees both kinds as conducive to interreligious dialogue.  Mind-to-body learning begins with ideas and then applies them; body-to-mind learning begins with voluntary and bodily activities (including meditation, manual labor, liturgical worship, and service to others) and allows insights and awareness to "rise up" out of these activities.  

4.  A Continuously Creative Cosmos: Lessons from Confucianism.  The peace that religions seek has two sides: an inner dimension and an outer dimension.  The outer or public dimension can be enriched by insights from Confucianism, many of which enrich and complement a Whiteheadian point of view.  These include Whiteheadian and Confucian emphases on widening the circles of empathy, beginning with family and moving to community and the earth; on practical rituals – “li” – that facilitate empathy through body-to-mind learning; on interconnections between humanity-earth-heaven; and on the fact that all humanity-earth-heaven are expressions of a universal, continuous creativity.  

5.  The Continuing Journey: Salvation and Life-after-Death. The inner side of peace is a journey toward peaceable selfhood, another name for which is salvation.  In the world’s religions at least three images of salvation appear: salvation as personal integration; salvation as harmony with others (family, tribe, nation, earth, heaven); and salvation as the dropping away of ego-attachments.  These might be called wholeness, heaven, and nirvana.  A Whiteheadian can appreciate all three images of salvation and also help make sense of a doctrine of hell, not as a final state, but as a purgative state toward peaceable selfhood.   In addition, a Whiteheadian approach, as developed by David Ray Griffin in various works, will find plausible the possibility that the journey toward peaceable selfhood can continue after death until all forms of salvation are realized. (PPS 191)

6.  The Missionary Religions: A Clash of Civilizations?  In seeking peace between religions, the missionary religions – Christianity, Islam, and Buddhism – have a special role to play, because they more than others have sought converts across cultures.  One reason peace between religions is so important in our time is that it can help offset what some call a "clash of civilizations" between the secularized Christian west and revivalist Islam.  In this context two thinkers --- John Cobb and Muhammad Iqbal -- show how a Whiteheadian approach to religion can help Christianity and Islam grow toward greater ecumenism and dynamism.  Cobb shows how Christians can embrace pluralism without giving up mission; and Iqbal shows how Islam can be understood as a dynamic tradition, capable of growth and change, and offering three distinctive gifts to the world: a spiritual vision of nature, an emphasis on spiritual democracy, and a recognition of the spacious infinitude of the divine reality, understood as a unity (tawhid) in which differences are embraced.  Their ideas can contribute to a holistic philosophy of world religions.

7.  Whitehead and the Benedictines: Christian Vocation in an Age of Pluralism.  Whereas Cobb offers forms of truthful belief that can help Christians embrace pluralism, the question emerges: What kinds of truthful awareness and truthful action can simultaneously contribute to this welcoming approach to other religions.  Here the Benedictines offer a particularly helpful (and Whiteheadian) way of thinking about Christianity, with their emphasis on Christian vocation as requiring humility, ongoing conversion, welcoming the stranger, and deep listening.  The Benedictines confirm the thesis, central to Whitehead, that the deepest level of each moment of experience is itself empathic: a feeling of the feelings of others, thus confirming what might be called a Whiteheadian approach to deep listening.

8.  The Truths are Many: Whitehead’s Philosophy as a Companion to the Study of the World’s Religions. Even as Whitehead’s philosophy can enrich religious approaches to religious diversity, it can also be helpful in more secular settings, as illustrated in liberal arts education.  It can serve as a companion to a lifelong study of, and learning from, the world religions, by offering specific ideas pertinent to an appreciation of specific insights in Judaism, Christianity, Islam, Hinduism, Buddhism, Jainism, Taoism, Confucianism, and other religions as well.  In this section I explain how I, as a teacher of world religions, have often wished that my own students would take a course in Whitehead as they study the world religions, precisely because Whitehead's thought would help them name the many truths to which religions give rise.

9.  The Metaphysics of Violence.   A consideration of the many truths to which religions give rise ought not suggest that religions are always about truth.  They are also about violence, and even when they do not contribute to violence, they must address the problem of violence.   A meaningful philosophy of world religions will help religious people do this.  In our time one of the most powerful alternatives to a process approach to world religions is that of perennial philosophy.  It bears many resemblances to Whiteheadian points of view, but it differs from Whitehead in suggesting that violence is an expression of the divine reality.  This section offers a comparison and contrast between Whiteheadian and Perennialist points of view, showing how and why, for Whiteheadians, it can be meaningful to speak of at least two ultimates: Creativity and God.

10.      How Many Ultimates Are There?  A study of the world's religions shows that the religions have given rise to at least twelve cosmological truths, each of which is irreducible in one way or another.  For example four of these are (1) the irreducibility of the pure presence of things as they appear in the immediacy of the moment, or suchness, (2) the irreducibility of each moment of decision, or karma, (3) the irreducibility of interconnectedness, and (4) the irreducibility of a guiding force that lures each human being toward truth (God).  The purpose of identifying these truths is not to suggest that they comprise all the truths to which religions give rise, but rather to name some of the wisdom that arises out of the many world religions, so that students of the religions might recognize the wisdom when it surfaces, and be attentive to still additional forms of wisdom that might emerge.  Considered as a whole, the twelve insights fall into two general clusters, which might be called the ontological cluster and the divine cluster, thus suggesting that there are two dimensions of the "depths in the nature of things" (Whitehead's phrase) to which religions have awakened: the continuous creativity of which all things are expressions, and the divine reality which beckons all things toward healthy forms of creative self-expression, one form of which is peace between religions.  However, it is important to recognize that religions do not need to be "about" ultimates in order to be effective forms of satisfactory living and that, beyond any identification of the numbers of ultimates, lies a covenant with mystery which is perpetually open to new revelations, including revelations concerning what is ultimate.  In different contexts it can be appropriate to name and number “ultimates” in different ways.

I. An Acoustic Vision of Reality

If some people fear that peace is boring, what might a more adventurous peace look like?  From a Whiteheadian point of view, one way of imagining a more adventurous peace is to recognize that it is a form, not only of truth and goodness, but also of creative beauty.  Here I use the word beauty a specifically Whiteheadian sense.  I mean what Whitehead calls the harmony and intensity of people living together, listening to each other, caring for each other, in ways that are respectful and delightful.  This kind of beauty is fragile, participatory, and creative.  It is not like the passive quality of painting on the wall, the forms of which remain fixed as observers come and go.  Instead it is like the continuous creation of an improvisational jazz concert, in which the musicians are essential to the music.  It is a beauty-in-the-making.[3]

Consider, then, such a concert.  If it is a good concert, it will consist of a creative and evolving harmony of sound, created by different musicians with different instruments, who have the material wherewithal to purchase their instruments, and who are cooperatively responding to one another in an ongoing live performance.  If the concert is to continue, the musicians must be willing to keep on playing even when things threaten to fall apart, and they must be willing to forgive one another of the mistakes they might make.  Perhaps "respect and care for the community of life" is like this.  It can be unpredictable, filled with creative tensions; and it can have its sad and mournful moments.  But it is cooperative and creative, and its competitive dimensions do not issue into violence.

Equally important, "respect and care for the community of life" requires listening to the silences between the sounds, because it is the silences that give the sounds their meaning.  In communities that embody peace, these silences are the things that people cannot say or have not yet said, but that are part of their deeper intentions and hopes.  In peace at its deepest and best level, then, the participants who create peace listen for these silences and handle them with respect.  The spiritual foundation of peace does not simply lie in a capacity to play music; it lies in listening sympathetically and deeply to the subjective aims of others, responding with sounds that are new, surprising, and beautiful.  In the beginning is the listening.  

Indeed, the metaphor of music is especially relevant, because Whitehead’s philosophy does offers what composer and philosopher, David Dunn, calls an acoustic vision of reality, in which the universe is imagined on the analogy of sound rather than sight.  As Dunn puts the matter in explaining connections between music and wilderness experience.

I wonder if music might be our way of mapping reality through metaphors of sound as a parallel to the visually dominant metaphors of speech and written symbols.  I think that most musicians can relate to the idea that music is not just something we do to amuse ourselves.  It is a different way of thinking about the world, a way to remind ourselves a prior wholeness when the mind of the forest is not something out there, separate in the world, but something of which we were an intrinsic part. (BMN 97, italics added.)

What Whitehead offers is a different and more musical way of thinking about the world that is sensitive to the prior wholeness from which all human experience emerges, moment by moment.  Like Dunn, he is critical of ways of thinking about reality that rely exclusively on visual metaphors.  “What we primarily term our visual perceptions are the result of the later states of the concrescence of the percipient occasion,” he writes. (PR 121)  Whitehead’s aim in Process and Reality was to illuminate the earlier and more fundamental aspects of an occasion of experience, which do not have the sense of separation so characteristic of visual experience, and which, so Dunn suggests, may better be revealed in music than in many other media.  A sense of this prior wholeness, which for Whitehead is the deeper background of each and every experience, does not eliminate a sense of individuality or a capacity to act in the world in a creative way.  But a sense of this wholeness can help a person to act in ways that are cooperative rather than competitive with the healing impulses in life.  This is why an acoustic vision of reality can be so important in an age needful of peace.  It can help people let go of impulses toward self-centered satisfaction and contribute more effectively to a wider world of which they are always already a part.

Imagine, for example, an item of visual perception: a small box on a table.  It has sharp edges that enable us to separate it from its background, and it can seem completely separate from, say, another box on the same table.  The boxes seem self-contained as well, if you move one of them, the other is not changed.  Now compare the visual image of this box to, say, the sounds of music in a live concert.  Like boxes, the sounds have distinctive identities: a C-sharp is not a B-flat.  But the sounds are wave-like rather than particulate, which means that they not simply located in one region of space at the expense of being present in others.  They do not have sharp edges.  Moreover, their identities emerge in relationship to, not apart from, other sounds in the performance.  A B-flat in relation to a C-sharp is different from a B-flat in relation to an E-minor.  Equally important, when we hear these sounds, the sounds are inside us as well as outside us, such that we are partly composed of the sounds being heard.  This means that even we, as experiencing subjects, do not have sharp edges, either.  We are not skin-encapsulated egos cut off from the world by the boundaries of our skin, but rather beings-in-the-world who are partly composed of the worlds we are in.  Things can be outside our bodies, but nevertheless inside our experience.  

This is how Whitehead looks at the world.  In Process and Reality he writes that the primary purpose of his philosophy is to elicit a recognition of the inter-being or inter-existence of all things.   In his words:

…every actual entity is present in every other actual entity.  In fact if we allow for degrees of relevance, and for negligible relevance, we must say that every actual entity is present in every other actual entity.  The philosophy of organism is mainly devoted to the task of making clear the notion of ‘being present in another entity.’ (PR 50)

In a Whiteheadian context, then, peace is not simply playing music in cooperation with others, it is also a form of inter-being, of communion, in which the participants have awakened to the fact that they share in one another’s destinies, because all destinies are interconnected.  

The contemporary challenge within world religions, then, is for their participants to undertake a journey toward this kind of peace, cognizant that peace can never be fully realized in life, but that even small tastes of it are well worth the effort.  Many among these participants – Jews, Christians, Muslims, Buddhists, Hindus, Sikhs, and a host of others -- will simultaneously hope that even small experiences of peace, of beauty-in-the-making, in this life are part of what one Whiteheadian philosopher – David Ray Griffin – calls the continuing journey toward “peaceable selfhood“ after death.  As Griffin makes clear, this hope for continuation after death, for the experience of a still deeper beauty in which peace is consistent with the deepest convictions of natural science, which, as interpreted through a Whiteheadian philosophy of science, likewise point to differences between the mind and the brain, such that the mind might continue after death.  And the hope is consistent with earthly hopes for peace on earth.  Indeed, hopes for life after death can energize these earthly aspirations.  In Griffin’s words: “…the belief that we are on a spiritual journey, a journey in which there will be sufficient time to travel to reach our destination, can motivate us to think creatively about things we can do now, socially and even internationally as well as individually, to help ourselves move closer here and now to what we should be. (PPS 291)

Perhaps contemporary efforts toward peace between religions, then, are part of a larger journey toward a beauty that is more than we can imagine, but that seeks partial realization in life on earth.  As humans work toward peace between religions, at least four things are required: (1) a willingness to enter into peaceful relations with other religious traditions not only in terms of neighborly relations but also in terms of theological attitudes toward other religions, (2) an effort to provide images of peace that are as exciting in their way as violence can be in its way, (3) a recognition that religions themselves are dynamic and process in nature, capable of growth and change over time, and (4) a cultivation of truthful awareness, including a capacity for sympathetic listening to the subjective aims of others, even when, as is sometimes the case, those aims are of a violent nature.

Many people believe that, if religions are to promote this kind of listening, the religions must wean themselves of the warning signs named by Kimball identifies.  They are right.  This means that Christians must stop saying that they have the only path to God and should instead recognize that God's saving power transcends historical Christianity.  And it means that Muslims should stop taking the "sword passages" in the Qur'an literally, and instead recognize that the greater jihad is indeed, as Muhammad recognized, the internal battle with the ego.  Fortunately, there are Christians and Muslims in the world today who are working hard to help move their religions in just these directions.  

Some people believe further that, in order for these and other changes to occur, Christians, Muslims and others must simultaneously embrace the view that the Truth is One While the Paths are Many.  The alternative I recommend is to say that The Truths are Many and All Make the Whole Richer.   In the final section I will be identifying twelve among the many truths to which religions point, none of which can be entirely reduced to the others, even as each is related to the others.  It is important to emphasize, however, that my own enumeration of truths is not final or exhaustive, and that the key to interreligious dialogue is to learn to be surprised by truths that have not yet been envisioned.  All come from “the depths in the nature of things.”

By "truths" I do not mean definitive propositions concerning the way things are, which are not susceptible to scrutiny and questioning.  Rather I mean intuitive insights at which religious people have arrived, over centuries of trial and error, which can illuminate some aspect of the depths in the nature of things.  These insights can be expressed in daily life through truthful beliefs, truthful awareness, or truthful living; and it is a serious mistake to believe that these insights are reducible to verbal propositions articulated in formal theologies and philosophies, because, in many if not most religions, truthful awareness and truthful living is more important than truthful propositions, and we do the religions a disservice if we pretend that we have "understood" a religion by attending to its theologies and philosophies.  The insights do not exclude one another, but they can be centers around which a religious life is oriented.  The insights range from the Buddhist intuition of the sheer suchness or as-it-isness of all things as they appear in one's experiential field, in the immediacy of the moment;  through the indigenous intuition that all creatures to all creatures are kin to one another; to the Abrahamic intuition that there is a womb-like mystery in whose presence the whole of the universe unfolds, who hears and responds to prayers, moment-by-moment.  From the perspective of these insights, each of these insights, and nine others as well, contain wisdom conducive to a flourishing life.  This means that each can be saving, given certain problems which humans face, and that there are different forms of salvation.  For example, the Buddhist insight of suchness helps free a person from dukkha, or inner restlessness, which is, among other things, the problem of not-being-at-home in the present moment.  It saves a person from inattentiveness, from perpetual distraction.  The indigenous insight helps free a person from arrogance, which is the problem of not recognizing that we humans are a small part of a larger community of life, upon which our survival depends.   And  the Abrahamic insight concerning God helps solve the problem of loneliness, which is the problem of feeling alone in a cosmos devoid of meaning.  Moreover, these three insights solve these problems honestly, because the depths do indeed disclose themselves, in the immediacies of experience, through suchness and kinship and divine embrace.  

If the truths are many, the question is: What are the wholes that can be made richer by these many truths?  Four kinds of wholes come to mind: (1) the ongoing life of an individual human being, which itself is a series of momentary experiences, changing from one moment to the next, which over time can be enriched by receiving and then integrating different "truths" in its ongoing journey toward peaceable selfhood, (2)  individual human communities (cultural and religious) which, like living cells, are forever in process and which, again like living cells, can be enriched by the infusion of new energy from external sources,  (3) the earth as a whole, which is itself a community of life, and which can be enriched if the insights shared between religious communities are conducive to sustainable living, and (4) the universe as a whole.  Of course, none of us ever have an overview of the universe as a whole, because we are always within that whole.  It is that vast but encompassing mystery in which, on a dark and starlit night, we can sometimes feel small but included.  And because we ourselves are changing at every moment, this vast and encompassing mystery is also changing, insofar as it includes our own changes.  The premise of this essay is that this ever-changing whole, in which all things are continually enfolded moment by moment, is the divine embrace itself.  This means that the many truths of the world religions -- combined with the many truths of science and art, and the many truths of plumbing and pottery -- enrich the very life of God.  God is not one-over-many but one-embracing-many.  Insofar as humans discover wisdom conducive to human and ecological flourishing, and insofar as this wisdom is attuned to some aspect of the depth in the nature of things, albeit in a finite and fallible way, this wisdom contributes to the embracing beauty of the divine, which the Abrahamic religions call "the glory of God."

In proposing that the Truths are Many and All Make the Whole Richer, I am drawing from two sources: the "philosophy of organism" developed by Whitehead, and the numerous "process philosophers" and "process theologians" who have built upon and amplified his thought as it has relevance to a consideration of world religions.  These include, but are by no means limited to, John B. Cobb Jr., Marjorie Suchocki, David Ray Griffin, Mary Elizabeth Moore, Ryusei Takeda, Catherine Keller, Tokiyuki Nobuhara, Sandra Lubarsky, Jon Berthrong, Steve Odin, Nancy Howell, Clark Williamson, and, quite importantly in terms of an understanding of Islam, Muhammad Iqbal.  Their collective point of view -- captured by the phrase The Truths are Many and All Make the Whole Richer -- is sometimes called "pluralistic," because it seeks to encourage a welcoming attitude toward the many different religions.  For that matter, the point of view which says the Truth is One while the Paths are Many also and rightly seeks to encourage this welcoming attitude.  Because these two phrases are a mouthful, we might speak of the Truth is One point of view as unitive pluralism, insofar it emphasizes unities or at least commonalities between the many different religions.  And we can speak the Truths are Many as complementary pluralism, because, even as it celebrates commonalities, it seeks to balance a concern for similarities with a recognition of difference, trustful that the differences are complementary rather than contradictory.[4]  

From a Whiteheadian perspective, there is wisdom in unitive pluralism, insofar as it speaks to common motivations within all religions to live wisely, in sympathetic conformity to the way things are, however they are.   I will say more about this wisdom in section three (Three Kinds of Truthfulness).  But for now let it be noted that complementary pluralism has two distinct advantages over unitive pluralism.  First, it can enable religious people to honor the distinctive truths in their own religions and simultaneously appreciate and learn from the distinctive truths in others, even if those other truths seem unfamiliar and are absent from their own heritages.  This means that people in given religion do not have to say, in encountering wisdom in another tradition, "We knew this all along, but had forgotten it."  Instead they can say, "You give us something new we did not know before.  You make the whole of our lives richer."  This suggests that people in missionary religions -- Christianity, Islam, and Buddhism -- can commend their wisdom to others, trustful that they may have something new to offer, but that they can simultaneously recognize that they have something new to learn from other religions, and trustful that is more wisdom in all of the religions taken together, than in any of them considered alone.  The second value of complementary pluralism is simply that it is more honest to the facts of religion.  When we truly study the religions, we find that they do in fact yield different insights, all of which contribute to a wider wisdom than any contain individually.  It is not only the commonalities, but also the differences that make the whole richer.  Peace between religions requires a delight in diversity as well as unity, precipitate by interreligious dialogues in which both unity and diversity are cherished.  To that subject we turn.

II.  Whitehead and Gandhi

The most influential advocate of peace between religions of the past century years was a Hindu: Mahatma Gandhi.  Gandhi's hope for peace between religions was grounded in his conviction that all religions are inspired by an indwelling lure toward wisdom, but than no single religion has all the wisdom relevant to salvation, however understood.  He proposed that if there is to be peace between religions, people of one religion must undertake friendly readings of other religions, seeking the truth in the other religion, and trustful that the truth of the other religion complements, rather than compete with, the truth of their own.

In an age filled with religious violence, it is important to emphasize that he did not forge these beliefs in a vacuum.  His considerations on peace between religions emerged in the context of his own non-violent struggle for peace in South African and then in India, and he was fully aware of the violence that people can inflict on one another in the name of religion.  He himself died at the hands of a Hindu nationalist.  Thus, it is all the more remarkable that he trusted that all religions also contain a wisdom conducive to peace, even amid their tendencies toward violence.  It is equally remarkable that, in the daily worship services of his ashram, he put this advocacy into practice.  He encouraged a reading from many of the world's scriptures, confident that, at the deepest level, the core insights of the religions are part of a larger whole – a deeper Truth – that humans rightly pursue in the whole of their lives and never claim fully to possess.  He used the word "God" to name this deeper Truth.  

In many ways Whiteheadian version of complementary pluralism extends this Gandhian legacy.  Of course, it can seem odd to mention Gandhi and Whitehead in the same breath, because at many levels the two men were very different.  Whitehead was a British-turned-American philosopher whose public life lay in the world of thought, and whose intellectual vocation was to create peace -- harmonious contrasts -- between ideas, particularly ideas concerning religion and science, philosophy and art, psychology and biology, poetry and politics.  By contrast Gandhi was a spiritual seeker, deeply involved in political struggle, who sought peace between people, particularly Hindus and Muslims.  Gandhi was more interested in how communities might live together, thus making the whole richer, than in how ideas might fit together.   Nevertheless, these two men had similar convictions.  They both thought that the deepest peace is inseparable from, and in some ways identical to, the very life of God; they both thought that the divine life operates in human life through persuasion rather than coercion; they both thought that Jesus of Nazareth -- himself a prince of peace -- illustrates this non-violent way of working in the world; and they both thought that Christians and others, who think they have a monopoly on peace, are mistaken.  Additionally, they both had what one contemporary science writer, Ursula Goodenough, calls a “covenant with mystery.” (SD 12)  They knew that ultimate truth, whatever it is, is always more than anyone’s concept of it, and that people who claim to possess it are foolish.  As Whitehead put it in the Preface to Process and Reality: “There remains the final reflection, how shallow, puny, and perfect are attempts to sound the depths in the nature of things.  In philosophical discussion the merest hint of dogmatic certainty as to finality of statement is an exhibition of folly.” (PR xiv, italics mine)

This is not to say that Whitehead and Gandhi would agree on all matters.   Whitehead thought that the depths in the nature of things include more than the divine peace and divine lure toward wisdom.  These depths include what Zen Buddhists call the self-structuring creativity of each present moment of human experience, on the basis of which human beings can do great good in the world, but on the basis of which they can also diverge from that peace and inflict violence on one another.  As Thomas Kasulis explains in his discussion of the Zen view of self in Zen Action/Zen Person, in each present moment:

 …there is something more than mere determinacy from the past; there is also the present moment working in its own creative way…Experience structures itself …Each moment is new.  Each time is a “first time.” (ZP 139-141, Kasulis’ italics).

A recognition of this self-structuring creativity led Whitehead to ask a fundamental question with which Gandhi also wrestled.  Is this self-structuring creativity identical with, or different from, the God who lures toward peace over violence?

Gandhi was ambivalent on the question.  On the one hand, he was influenced by monistic ways of thinking that are part of the Hindu heritage, leading him to speculate that all earthly activities are expressions of the divine reality which is the only true reality, perhaps not unlike the way in which photons released from the sun are expressions of the sun's own energy.  In his commentaries on the Bhagavad-Gita. Gandhi proposed that, in the last analysis, God is both good and evil, since some expressions of energy in our universe are, after all, quite violent.  In Gandhi’s words: “Every object and every state which we can think of in this universe are God.  This means that God is not merely all that is good. He is also evil.  Nothing exists unless he wills it.” (BGG 150)

On the other hand Gandhi resisted the very idea that he proposed, because he felt deeply that the deepest aspect of the divine life is non-violent love, or Satyagraha, and that humans are free to conform to, or diverge from, its indwelling call.  The whole of his public life was premised on the assumption that God is non-violent rather than violent, which led him to say that the very idea that God is both good and evil “cannot possibly be true in this world…We can only imagine that it must be true in some sense.” (BGG 151) Gandhi's comments lead us to conclude that Gandhi was ambivalent on the question of how freedom is related to God, but that at a practical level, he presumed that God is a lure toward peace over violence, and that violent acts, especially when freely chosen, diverge from divine aims.  

Whitehead was less ambivalent.  He resolves the metaphysical issue by speaking of the self-structuring creativity of finite beings as expressions of an ultimate reality he calls Creativity, and then by speaking of God as the primordial expression of this Creativity, but not the only expression.  In Whitehead’s view, when the British soldiers who killed Indian peasants as they protested British rule were exemplifying freedom of Creativity, which is ultimate and irreducible in its way, but they were not conforming to the will of God, which is likewise ultimate and irreducible.  In this respect, as we shall see, Whitehead's own thought is more Confucian.  It sees the divine reality -- heaven -- as one expression of creativity, but sees earth and human beings as alternative expressions, sometimes conforming to, and sometimes diverging from, the heavenly mandate.   This is one reason some Whiteheadians speak of two ultimates: the ultimacy of the divine reality and the ultimacy of freedom itself, as expressed in the self-structuring creativity of each present moment.  

Which view is indubitably correct?  The more monistic view which equates the divine life with the whole of creativity, or the more Whiteheadian and Confucian view which sees the divine life as one aspect of creativity, but not the only aspect?   We can rightly imagine that, if Whitehead and Gandhi heard the question put this way, they would have reservations with the question itself.  Perhaps Whitehead himself would see wisdom in both points of view, because he does in fact think of God as the "primordial expression" of creativity, which suggests a rather deep connection between universal creativity and the divine life.  But we can also imagine that, in their discussions of these ultimate matters, they would both agree that “the merest hint of dogmatic certainty as to finality of statement is an exhibition of folly.”

What is important for my purposes here is to affirm that, quite apart from these metaphysical considerations, Whitehead extends the more worldly and practical side of Gandhi’s life – his ministry of peace between religions -- by recognizing that multi-religious communities can best emerge when participants are committed to living together, cognizant that each religion has some of the truth and no religion has all of the truth.  A Whiteheadian approach to peace between religions extends the spirit of this proposal in four explicit ways.

First, a Whiteheadian approach envisions God -- the primordial expression of universal creativity -- as an indwelling lure toward wisdom within each human life, thus encouraging the view that each human being and each religion does have something to teach the rest of the world.  This does not mean that the individual humans or the world’s religions are earthen vessels of unadulterated wisdom.  They are also vessels for violence and tragedy for what Marjorie Suchocki (see below) calls “original sin.”  Accordingly the religions require critical as well as sympathetic readings by their adherents and also by outsiders.  But there is reason to say that all religions contain wisdom that is inspired by the divine lure toward wisdom, and that this wisdom is worth listening to and learning from.  A Whiteheadian approach to peace between religions, like a Gandhian approach, emphasizes listening.

The second way in which a Whiteheadian approach extends a Gandhian approach is by envisioning this indwelling lure of God as calling people to open themselves to wisdom from unfamiliar sources, trustful that apparently incompatible forms of wisdom can be gathered together, and jointly affirmed, in the wider harmony of what Whitehead called contrasts.  For Whitehead, a “contrast” is not a conflict.  A contrast is the kind of whole suggested by the yin-yang diagram of Chinese philosophy, in which the black and white complete each other by adding something not found in the other.  Whitehead believed that the whole of a person’s life is a journey of creating and discovering meaningful contrasts that add to the harmony and intensity of that person’s life, and that enrich that person’s capacity to add harmony and intensity of others.  We are on a journey, says Whitehead, and the journey is never ending, because there are always new contrasts – new possibilities for beauty – to be known and discovered.  

A third way that a Whiteheadian approach is Gandhian is that it recognizes the limitations of language in expressing human wisdom.   In western philosophy it is sometimes assumed that a person’s wisdom is reducible to his or her verbalized “position” as presented in an argumentative context, or to his or her “values” as objectified in a statement of well-argued beliefs.  For Whitehead as for Gandhi, though, we humans can know more than we say, and what we say is not always an exact replication of what we know.  Much of our knowing takes place in a deeper and non-verbal dimension of our lives, in which we are aware of ideas that have power and truth, but that are not yet rendered into verbal formulation.  Whitehead called these ideas “lures for feeling,” and he insisted that they are not reducible to the language we use to express them.   A Whiteheadian approach to peace between religions, then, will encourage people of one religion to listen for, and to, the pre-verbal wisdom in people of another religion, some of which is better expressed in music or art or dance, than in philosophy or theology.  We do other religions a disservice if we focus only on what they believe, as stated in verbal texts as written and interpreted by elites, without simultaneously attending to what they feel, which may be where the wisdom truly lies.

A fourth and final way in which a Whiteheadian approach is Gandhian in that it is open to the possibility that human beings can actually “feel the feelings” of others, even if those others belong to different religions and have experiences that are markedly different from, and unknown to, the one doing the feeling.  This means that one person, a Christian for example, can feel the feelings of another person, a Buddhist for example, even if the Christian has nothing in her past that exactly parallels the Buddhist’s religious experience.  Of course, the Christian’s capacity for “feeling the feelings” of the Buddhist  will be enriched if she does have something in her past that resembles Buddhist experience, such as a capacity for quiet and relaxed attention to what is happening in the present moment.  But even if she lacks these feelings, she can have a feel for what is happening inside the skin of her companion in spiritual pilgrimage, and this in one or both of two ways: empathy and imagination.

Empathy occurs through what Whitehead calls "hybrid physical prehensions."  These are forms of feeling in which the objects felt are not items of sense perception, but rather the subjective feelings of others, including their moods and aims.   In order to avoid technical terminology, we might simply refer to these forms of feeling as "empathic awareness," with the understanding that such awareness is more much more intuitive and vague than, say, clear and distinct visual perception, and that it is usually in the background, not the foreground, of ordinary waking consciousness.  Such awareness is evident in ordinary life on a daily basis when we are inwardly sensitive to, and affected by, the moods and subjective aims of others with whom we associate. If they are in bad moods, we often feel their moods; if they are calm, we feel their calmness; if they are angry, we feel their anger; if they are joyful, we feel their joy.  Of course, we may be mistaken, and our conclusions concerning what they are feeling can always be corrected.  Still, these forms of empathic awareness are quite real in ordinary life, and they can also occur in the presence of people of other religions, even when we do not fully understand their beliefs.  Somehow we feel their inner conditions and we learn from what we feel.   A recognition of this possibility is essential to peace between religions.  Without a trust that experiences can be shared, even across religious lines, there is no hope for peace between religions.  

To this emphasis on empathic awareness, Whiteheadians add still another form of listening, which we might call "imaginative empathy" as opposed to "emphathic awareness."   Usually the two go together, but there is also a difference.  Imaginative empathy occurs when, even as we are not able to feel the feelings of others, we can simultaneously imagine "what it might be like" to be inside their skin, looking out at the world from their point of view.   When this occurs, the objects of our immediate perception are what Whitehead calls "pure potentialities for subjective feeling, which are being actualized by the person in whose shoes we are imagining ourselves, but which also transcend that person as potentialities that we ourselves can imaginatively entertain.  

Perhaps an illustration is in order.  Imagine a Christian -- I have a Methodist minister friend of mine in mind -- who is reading the work of Sankara, the great Hindu mystic in the Advaita Vedanta tradition, as Sankara describes the experience of awakening to the undifferentiated ground of all existence, Nirguna Brahman.  Imagine further that this man has never met anyone who has had the mystical experience at issue.   He is not at all sure he knows what it means for the ego to drop away completely, such that only the ultimate reality of Brahman remains, except inasmuch as he has himself experienced dreamless sleep.  He is not sure how to imagine this egoless state as filled with pure awareness, pure being, and pure joy.

From Whitehead’s perspective, there is nevertheless hope for him.  He can imaginatively place himself in the position of one who is having this experience, and thus get a dim and vague feel for the experience itself, because there are potentialities for subjective feeling that can be imaginatively entertained, even if those feelings have never been realized by the person who entertains them. The imaginative act is not infallible.  He may miss the mark completely.  Moreover, he must always keep in mind that the actual experience is quite different from its mental and imaginative rendition.  Just as there is a difference between imagining the enjoyment of a particular kind of food, and the eating of it, so there is a difference between imagining a mystical absorption in ultimate reality and the absorption itself.  Nevertheless, for Whitehead, we humans can feel the feelings of others, in varying degrees and ways, through imagination and empathy.  A cultivation of these capacities can help facilitate peace between religions.

In these ways, then, a Whiteheadian approach to peace between religions is deeply Gandhian in spirit.  It emphasizes God as an indwelling lure toward wisdom within each person and religion; it says that God is within us as a lure to welcome unfamiliar ideas, trustful that they can be combined with what we already know to help produce more beautiful wholes; it suggests that wisdom itself is not reducible to verbal propositions, such that we can listen for intuitive insights within others that are not reducible to their theological and philosophical positions; and it says that we can feel the feelings of others empathically and  imaginatively.  These four ideas can contribute to the kinds of multi-religious communities for which Gandhi hoped.  They can contribute to a culture of peace.

   By Truth I am not referring to propositional truths of a metaphysical nature concerning the depth in the nature of things.  Rather I am referring to the depth in the nature of things itself but which humans often try to master with propositional truths, some of which are expressed philosophically and some religiously.  Of course, If we limit the word "truth" to propositional truths, then the phrase "the depths in the nature of things" does not refer to truth at all, but simply to what Buddhists call the suchness of things, which is neither true nor false but simply is, and which is always more than anyone's experience of it.   However, the word "truth" has many meanings, as I will suggest in the next section.   Indeed, in the world's religions many people use words like "truth" to name not only truthful beliefs, which involve assent to truthful propositions, but also to truthful awareness, as illustrated in the kind of empathic awareness presented above, and perhaps still more importantly, truthful living.  Equally important, many people use the word Truth with an upper-case T to name what Whitehead calls the depth in the nature of things, as it is continually being revealed or unveiled in immediate experience.  This is a more Heideggerian way of understanding truth, in which truth names the process of paying attention to what is being un-veiled or un-concealed from the depth itself.  This depth is not simply far away and beyond the world of ordinary human experience, as if human experience is one thing and depth quite another.  Rather the depth is continually manifest in, but not reducible to, the revelations of ordinary life.  It is the mystery of existence itself, the sheer happening of what happens, as it happens, in the immediacy of each moment.  The first Whiteheadian-and-Gandhian foundation for interreligious dialogue is simply to recognize that this sheer happening is always more than anyone's concept of it, precisely because concepts inevitably presuppose, but never completely capture, the un-veiling itself.  It is to have a covenant with mystery.

The second foundation for interreligious dialogue lies in a recognition, following Gandhi and Whitehead, that God is another name for an indwelling lure toward wisdom which seeks to understand the depth in the nature of things, and which arrives at various finite truths in the process, whether through religion or science, philosophy or art, contemplation or action.  As Gandhi puts it: “I used at one time to know by heart a thousand names of God…but nowadays nothing so completely describes my God as Truth.”   As noted above, Gandhi was ambivalent on the question of whether God is the whole of depth in the nature of things, including the self-structuring creativity of violent acts, or whether God is that part of the depth which, in cooperation with other self-structuring activities, lures individuals and communities toward truthful awareness and truthful living, which Gandhi equated with non-violent living.  Whiteheadians choose the second option. There is more to the depth in the nature of things than God, but God is that lure toward truthfulness -- emerging out of the depths -- that calls humans toward wisdom in daily life, including the wisdom of being attuned to divine aims for non-violence.  God is the primordial but not exclusive expression of creativity.  

The third foundation for interreligious dialogue is that there are many finite truths to which the world's religions have awakened, and that not all of them concern God.  This means that, even as God is a lure toward wisdom within each human being, different people can be lured toward different kinds of wisdom.  This third foundation opens the door for appreciating the many different kinds of truth that have been discovered in the world's religions, ranging from a Zen appreciation of "the pure presence of things as they are, right in front of me," through a Confucian recognition that the human beings become fully human in relationship to one another, to a Native American's appreciation of the kinship of all living beings.  Gandhi was right, all of these insights are inspired by God.  But not all of them are about God, or even about "ultimate reality" or "ultimate realities."

The fourth foundation for interreligious dialogue lies in the honest recognition that all the world's religions fall short, sometimes in terrible ways, of the divine lure toward wisdom.   "Each religion is divinely inspired," Gandhi says, "but they are imperfect because they are products of the human mind and taught by human beings.”   Built into this fourth foundation is the assumption that genuine wisdom lends itself to, and does not contradict, a non-violent way of living in the world, because the divine wisdom by which it is inspired is itself non-violent.   This is the heart of a Whiteheadian and Gandhian understanding of the divine: its deepest nature is persuasion rather than coercion, non-violence rather than violence.  Practically speaking, this means that if a given religion claims that it is "wise" to inflict violence upon others on the basis of their race, class, gender, culture, or religion; then that "wisdom" is not genuine wisdom, but rather confusion disguised as wisdom.   The same principle applies to violence inflicted on other animals and the earth.  Religious claims concerning the "wisdom" of sacrificing animals to appease divine will, or sacrificing the earth for the sake of unlimited material progress, may contain understandable motivations that contain a degree of wisdom, such as a need to restore harmony with the divine or to foster human well-being, but their violence is not itself wise.  It is part of the imperfection to which Gandhi points.

A corollary to Gandhi's recognition is that religions can change and progress over time, becoming less violent than they were.  There can be progress in religion.  In Judaism, for example, the gradual rejection of animal sacrifices combined with a recognition that the deeper sacrifices are for love and justice, was itself an instance of progress in religion.  And in Islam, a similar rejection of literal understandings of the "sword passages" in the Qur'an, which enjoin militant jihad against unbelievers, would be an instance of progress in religion.  This progress does not require a rejection of the claim that a religion is inspired by the wisdom of a sacred text such as the Qur'an, bur rather a willingness to read that text in fresh ways that are conducive to peace, as illustrated in Gandhi's own re-reading of the Bhagavad-Gita as an invitation to peace.  These fresh readings are not "false" readings just because they are new, but rather "new" readings that discover dimensions of meaning in inherited texts that were not recognized beforehand.

In Christianity, of course, a similar kind of progress can occur.  Christians can continue to claim the wisdom of seeing God's non-violence revealed in Christ and, still more deeply, in the wisdom of a way of living that is faithful to that revelation.  But, as the very example of Gandhi makes clear, they need not claim that "being a Christian" is necessary for this kind of truthful living or that God forgives the sins only of those who claim Jesus as their lord and savior.  These claims restrict the very love of God which Jesus sought to proclaim.  In the name of Jesus, Christians can grow past some of the liabilities of their past.  They can make progress.

Religion and Original Sin

How might progress be defined?  Some might wish to define progress in terms of intellectually apprehended truths, and perhaps there is wisdom in this way of thinking.   Perhaps a religion makes progress if its adherents transcend some of the superstitions (however defined) of their past and grow into a more enlightened way of living in the world.   In the contemporary setting, there are many who believe that "progress in religion" requires that religious people recognize the illuminating power of modern science, both in its methods and its provisional insights concerning the physical universe, not simply because these methods and insights are helpful in the modern world, but because they are truthful.  

Nevertheless, a Whiteheadian approach to world religions is more inclined to relativize the insights of science, recognizing that they themselves are not "final" or "absolute" in any definitive or uncorrectable sense, and that, even if truthful in some way, are not necessarily appropriate for internalization in all contexts.   An eighty-five year old man on his deathbed who does not believe in biological evolution need not be converted to evolutionary thinking for the sake of "progress in religion."  In a Whiteheadian context, it is ultimately more important that people live qualitatively rich lives than that they assent to (what some take to be) truthful propositions about the nature of reality.  Truth is in the service of beauty, and there is more to beauty than truth.

In a Whiteheadian and Gandhian approach, it is more appropriate to define progress as progress toward non-violence than "progress toward the internalization of truthful beliefs.   What is non-violence?  Christian theologians often define it as the absence of sin and the presence of love.  But this simply raises the further question: What is sin?

Here the work of one Whiteheadian theologian, Marjorie Suchocki, is especially helpful.  By sin she does not mean rebellion against God, as if God were a monarch whose primary concern is to be flattered.   Rather she means unnecessary violence against creation, the effects of which are felt and suffered even by God.  More specifically sin is, in Suchocki's words, “unnecessary violence against any aspect of existence, whether through act or intent, whether consciously chosen or otherwise.”   Given Suchocki's definition of sin as unnecessary violence, there is a great deal of sin in the world, a great deal of un-peace.  Sin includes sexual abuse, cruelty to animals, neglect of the elderly, racial prejudice, the wanton destruction of forests, the denial of food to the hungry, terrorism, the denial of rights to women, and the overconsumption of material goods on the part of consumer society.  Of course, in defining sin as unnecessary violence, emphasis must be placed on the word unnecessary, because life itself requires some degree of violence, as witnessed in predator-prey relations and also in the simply act of eating.  If we humans are to survive, we must eat, and eating itself involves the taking of one life, that of a plant, in order to sustain another, namely our own.  This is why Suchocki defines sin as unnecessary violence.   Acts of sin are acts of violence that, all things considered, should be and could be otherwise.

One value of Suchocki's point of view is that she helps us make sense of the idea of original sin.  By "original sin" she does not mean a primordial act of disobedience committed by Adam and Eve, the consequences of which are inherited by future generations.  Rather she means tendencies toward sin into which people are born, even if they do not consciously or willingly choose those tendencies.  Suchocki draws upon research which suggests that some of these tendencies are inherited genetically, as illustrated in impulses toward aggression that once served important evolutionary purposes, but that are now counter-productive to the living of live; and that others are inherited from the cultures into which a person is born, as illustrated in impulses toward prejudice that a part of a person's culture.  Her point is that we humans are not born as blank slates, devoid of impulses toward good and evil.  Rather we are born with conditions and into situations that shape us from the very beginning, both for good and for ill.  Quite apart from our intentions, we often fall into violence by virtue of these inherited and socially induced conditions.  

Thus, acts of sin -- that is, acts of unnecessary violence -- can emerge from the conscious and willful intentions of their perpetrators, as exemplified in conscious and willful acts of cruelty; but they can also emerge unintentionally and sometimes unconsciously, without the perpetrators intending them.   A young boy who is born into a culture that hates Muslims or Hindus, Jews or Christians, is born into a form of sin that he does not choose, but that nevertheless can shape his life.  He is born into original sin.  Only with personal effort and with the help of a community that introduces him to a less violent way of living in the world, can he transcend this sin and add beauty to the world.   Moreover, acts of sin can be committed by individuals but also by communities of individuals, including cities and nations, corporations and professional organizations, cultures and religions.  Religions can be vessels for great good in the world, but they can also be vessels for great sin.  Indeed, despite their tendencies to the contrary, religions can be carriers of original sin.  They can be conduits by which tendencies toward violence are passed from one community to the next and one generation to the next.

III.  Three Forms of Truth/Two Forms of Learning

Progress in religion can be facilitated by pluralistic thinking, both unitive and complementary.  From a Whiteheadian perspective there is wisdom in unitive pluralism, especially when the emphasis on commonality pertains, not to identical ultimates or identical forms of salvation, but rather to common motivations for being interested in ultimates and in salvation in the first place.  If we think in Whiteheadian terms, we will recognize that many people in the world's religions exhibit a common desire -- a common subjective aim -- for truthful belief, truthful awareness, and truthful living.  Of course, this desire for truth is offset by a competing capacity for self-deception and dishonesty.  Needless to say, we humans are not always honest with others or with ourselves.   Historically, the world's religions have been and still remain vessels of un-truth as well as truth.  As one Whiteheadian theologian, Marjorie Suchocki, explains, religions can be vessels of unnecessary violence against creation, another name for which is sin.  Indeed, religions can be conduits for what Suchocki calls "original sin," insofar as, through their teachings and practices, they transmit impulses toward violence from one generation to the next, into which innocent people are born.   It is a serious mistake to believe that religions have fixed essences that are unequivocally "good."  The better option, recommended by Whiteheadians and many others, is that they are evolving traditions with inherited impulses that contain wisdom and un-wisdom, beauty and violence, and that they can grow and change over time.

Still, at one level many religious people are seeking truth, and this seeking is part of who we humans are.  If we are religious, we share this search with many people who are not religious and with people who are anti-religious.  The atheist who says "there is no God" is as concerned with truth as is the theist who says "there is a God."  And the agnostic who says "in all honesty I must say I don't know if there is a God" is also concerned with truth, exhibiting her respect for truth by being honest – and hence truthful -- about her uncertainty.  It is almost as if truth itself resides in the human psyche, not as a factual or metaphysical claim about this or that matter, but rather as an ideal that makes a claim upon people, to which they feel called to respond.  

As we look for truth, then, what are we looking for?  And what is it that calls us to look for truth in the first place?  To the first question, some would propose -- and Whiteheadians would agree -- that often we are looking for power, for a sense of mastery over things, inwardly and outwardly, so that we can be in control of our lives and the world.  Certainly there is wisdom in this point of view, at least with respect to the human quest for relevant knowledge.  We seek knowledge -- and sometimes also even wisdom -- so that we can have mastery over ourselves and others.  This will-to-mastery is not all bad.  It is part of the very struggle for survival that characterizes evolution; we humans are very much part of that ongoing struggle.

Nevertheless, Whiteheadians propose that there is also a deeper impulse at work in the quest for truth, which is also part of the evolutionary process, but which has more to do with communion than control, with mystery than mastery.   We seek truth because we want to be attuned to the way things are, to be in rapport with the mystery of life, to dwell in communion with the depths in the nature of things.   Whiteheadians join many others -- such as the Hindu sage Sri Aurobindo, and the Christian writer Teilhard de Chardin, and the Muslim philosopher Muhammad Iqbal -- in proposing that evolution itself has a spiritual dimension.  Given this point of view, life on earth can be seen not only as a struggle to survive governed by genetic mutation and natural selection, but also as a spiritual quest, on the part of human beings but also more-than-human creatures, to be united with what inspires evolution in the first place.

Some religious traditions will imagine this inspirational lure in parental or political ways.  They will imagine the lure toward truth as a Father calling to children or a King calling to subjects.  But one of the early founders of Sufism -- Rabi'ah (d. 801) -- imagines it in a different and more intimate way, and many spiritual traditions throughout the world join her in spirit.  She imagines it on the analogy of a Beloved calling to a lover.  Her spiritual heir, Rumi, takes this image of a divine Beloved further and proposes that the whole of creation, not simply human beings, is drawn toward the divine Lover, such that the universe itself becomes a spiritual process of seeking union or communion with the Beloved.  For Whiteheadians, this image of a universe in process is especially helpful, because it rightly suggests (1) that the universe itself has an inner or spiritual dimension, which can respond to the call of the divine and (2) that the divine reality is present in human and non-human life, not simply as a coercive power that threatens punishment, but also and more deeply as, in Whitehead's words, an "object of desire."  For Rabi'a as for many Whiteheadians, that which beckons the human heart toward truthful awareness is not simply an abstract principle or ideal.  It is a Beckoner.   In the spirit of Rumi and Rabia, Whiteheadians believe that this Beckoner is within the whole of the evolutionary process as a counter-entropic lure by which, over vast periods of time, atoms have been inspired to become molecules, molecules to become single cells, single cells to become tissues, tissues to become organs, and so on.   This lure does not interrupt the basic principles of physics and chemistry, but rather works with them and in them.  Accordingly, the Whiteheadian approach is sometimes described as a form of "naturalistic theism" as opposed to a "supernaturalistic theism."   The point here, though, is that this lure is also present within each human being as a lure toward truthfulness, or communion with the depths of things.  God is the indwelling lure toward wisdom that lies within each and every human life.  This means that not only that all religion is inspired by God in some way, but also that all science is inspired, and all art and poetry, and all music.  Wherever we see human beings seeking rapport with the depths, we see responsiveness to God, thus named or not.

A study of the world's religions suggests that religious people typically respond to this indwelling call toward by seeking truthful belief, truthful awareness, or truthful living.  In a Whiteheadian context truthful belief will lie in holding ideas about reality, which may or may not be verbalized, but which conform to the revelations of the depths in the nature of things in some partial and finite way. For example, for Whiteheadians as for Buddhists,  the idea that "everything is interconnected" would be more truthful than the idea that "everything exists in isolation."  It would be an example of what Buddhists call "right view."

Truthful awareness will lie in forms of pre-linguistic awareness that are attuned to the deeper disclosures of experience, such as "mindfulness in the present moment" as emphasized in Buddhism, or "gratitude for the gift of life" as emphasized in theistic traditions, or "a sense of nature’s beauty" as emphasized in nature-based religions, or "empathic awareness" and "empathic imagination" as emphasized in compassion-based traditions.[5]  Various kinds of mysticism, meditation, and prayer would also fall within the purview of truthful awareness.  These kinds of awareness may be clear and distinct, as occurs in mindfulness, but they may also be vague and at the fringes ordinary waking consciousness, as is often the case with "feeling the feelings" of others.  Indeed, if we limit the word "consciousness" to ordinary waking consciousness, then some forms of truthful awareness may be non-conscious altogether, as would be evident in the truthful disclosures of dreams, or the truthful disclosures of what David Ray Griffin calls "attunement" to pre-conscious depths of immediate experience.   In any case, for Whiteheadians, these many forms of awareness can have truth value, either because they can be rendered into propositions that correspond to the actual disclosures of experience, or because they are immediately responsive, and in sympathetic conformity to, the revelations of pre-verbal experience.

Truthful living will then lie in forms of observable behavior that are guided by truthful awareness and truthful beliefs and that are willingly responsive to the call of the moment.  This responsiveness to the call of the moment is what Whiteheadians call responsiveness to the initial aims of immediate experience: that is, responsive to the intuitively felt aims experience that yield maximum beauty -- maximum harmony and intensity -- relative to the circumstance at hand.  In the Christian tradition an intuitive awareness of these aims is called discernment, and truthful living is indeed discerning living.  It should be emphasized, however, that while compassionate living is a form of truthful living, truthful living is not reducible to compassionate living.  In many if not most religious traditions, there are a variety of healthy responses to the immediate circumstances at hand, relative to the circumstances at issue.  These include laughter, courage, protest, play, delight, amazement, creativity, and, after a long day's work, sleep.  In a Whiteheadian context, the discerning life is an ongoing process of beauty-in-the-making.  

These three forms of truthfulness are found in almost all of the world's religions.  In the eightfold path of Buddhism, for example, there is a concern for truthful living (right conduct, right effort); truthful awareness (right mindfulness, right absorption); and truthful thinking (right views).  In Islam, there is an analogous emphasis on truthful living (willing obedience to divine commandments); truthful awareness (humility, fear, gratitude, trust in relation to God); and truthful belief (affirming the truth of God, the angels, prophecy, and the Day of Judgment).  In Islam, however, and also in many forms of Buddhism, it is generally assumed that truthful living is more important than truthful belief, which parallels the fact that in many religions truthful awareness and truthful living are thought to be more important than truthful belief.   This is also the case with dominant strands in many other religious traditions, including Judaism, Taoism, Confucianism, Hinduism, Jainism, and most indigenous traditions.  This rightly leads us to wonder why, in a study of world religions, anyone would ever assume that religion is primarily or exclusively concerned with theology.  The answer may lie in the fact that many studies of world religions have emanated from western, Christian cultures that bear the impact of Christian theology; and Christian theologians more than others have been preoccupied with questions of belief.  This does not mean the other religions are indifferent to truth.  It simply means that -- like Jesus himself --they focus on a different kind of truthfulness.  

Two Kinds of Learning:

Mind-to-Body and Body-to-Mind

In a Whiteheadian context, an interest in truthful awareness and truthful living is rightly accompanied by a recognition that, in many forms of religion, the discovery of truth can occur through two forms of learning: learning from mind-to-body and learning from body-to-mind.   In order to explain these two forms, perhaps an illustration from my own life as a college teacher is in order.  As a college teacher I teach a course called State of the World.  Its purpose is to provide graduating seniors with an overview of the world situation, including the problems of violence identified above, and also to invite them to consider their vocational options in light of the state of the world.  One feature of the course is that it is also a service-learning course, which means that students are required to do five hours of volunteer work a week as a complement to classroom discussions.  Their volunteer work ranges from harvesting crops in a local organic farm, to playing basketball with at-risk youth, to preparing meals at a battered woman's shelter.   The requirement is that it be bodily.

From the Whiteheadian perspective, service learning activities such as these make very good educational sense, because human beings can indeed learn not simply from mind-to-body but also body-to-mind.  Mind-to-body learning is what occurs in the classroom, where my students and I typically sit in chairs, relatively indifferent to our bodies, focusing on the ideas that come from written texts and open-ended discussion.  Of course, we bring our bodies with us, but they remain in the background of our awareness, as if they were ancillary to the process of learning.  Our focus is on the ideas, trustful that the ideas, if valid, can be "applied" outside the classroom in more bodily ways.  In the classroom we are living, for the most part, in our heads.

On the other hand body-to-mind learning is what happens in the service-learning component of the course.  My students find themselves engaging in a variety of hands-on activities, trustful that the activities can give rise to insights in their minds that might not otherwise occur.  They learn from body-to-mind rather than from mind-to-body.   Body-to-mind learning plays an important role in many world religions, including western religions that find wisdom in liturgy and eastern religions that find wisdom in mediation.   It is a kind of learning that Whitehead’s philosophy is especially sensitive to, because his philosophy places a great deal of emphasis on what he calls experience in the mode of causal efficacy, which consists among other things in feeling what is happening within one’s own body and being shaped by what is felt.  For him, this kind of experience has been too often neglected in modern western philosophy, with its emphasis on visual experience of external objects as the primary example of “perception.”   For Whitehead, perception also includes empathic perception, as noted earlier, and kinesthetic perception, as occurs when we enjoy the movement of our own bodies, including of receiving influences from the body.

In the world’s religions, a very obvious example of this kind of experience and this kind of learning is Zen meditation.  Meditation proceeds by placing the body in a balanced and restful state and then attending to the rhythmic process of breathing.  Thus the body becomes foreground rather than background in the immediacy of experience.   The idea is that a quiet body can yield a quiet mind.   The “quietness” of this mind is not that of sleep or trance.  Rather it is a state of relaxed yet alert attention, in which one is aware of the pure presence of things as they are, without judgment and without trying to control them.  In time, so Zen Buddhists say, familiarity with this mode of consciousness can assist a person in listening to other people on their own terms and for their own sakes, without reacting to what they say with judgments of one's own; and it can assist a person in listening to the earth itself.  

Of course, in the context of teaching State of the World I do not require Zen meditation, though often I have wished that my students had a little more relaxed yet alert attention.  But I do indeed presume that there is wisdom can emerge through the body, and that a neglect of bodily experience is a liability of overly intellectualized forms of learning.   Moreover, it follows from a Whiteheadian perspective that, if we wish to reduce violence in the world, it is indeed be helpful for people of different religions to do things together, in bodily ways that serve the purposes of peace.  Peace between religions can as well be facilitated by people kneeling together in prayer, or sitting quietly together in silence, or tilling an organic garden, as it can in their consideration of matters of doctrine.  A Whiteheadian strategy for peace between religions involves religious people doing things together – gardening, for example -- through which they learn from each other and also from the bodily activity of doing itself, especially if the doing if of a healing and constructive nature.

Let me summarize what I have said so far.  I have said (1) that a Whiteheadian approach recognizes three kinds of truth in the world religions, (2) that these forms of truthfulness can be acquired through two forms of learning (mind-to-body and body-to-mind), and (3) that the aim toward truthfulness is inwardly inspired by the divine reality, understood as the "primordial dimension" of the depth in the nature of things.  God is, among other things, a lure toward wisdom.  To these three proposals, two more must be quickly added.  

The first is that no forms of truthful belief, awareness, or living are absolute or final, in the sense of being sufficient unto themselves or being exhaustive of the depths in the nature of things.  There is always more depth than anyone's experience of it: hence the need for a covenant with mystery.  The second is that the divine lure toward wisdom within human life is simultaneously a lure toward beauty, and that beauty is more than wisdom.   As indicated in the introduction to this essay, beauty is not so much a property of objects in space, as it is a property of the soul and of individuals in community.  It is satisfaction -- happiness, if you will -- that is inwardly rich and that is outwardly expressed in respect and care for the community of life.  It occurs in many degrees and many ways.  From a Whiteheadian perspective, the lure toward wisdom within human life is part of a deeper lure toward beautiful living, which includes the beautiful soul in community with a wider world.  Islam calls this kind of beauty "ihsan" and recognizes it as a central dimension of the surrendered life.  A Whiteheadian would agree, and then add that there are many forms of "ihsan."  

Many Salvations

The many kinds of experiential salvation offered in the world's religions -- from moksha (Hinduism) through nirvana (Buddhism) and  wu-wei (Taoism) to the hallowing of life (Judaism) and life in Christ (Christianity)  -- can best be understood as forms of beauty, that is, as forms of harmonious and intense experience, to which an individuals and communities can awaken.   I stress "experiential" salvation because, in certain forms of Christianity, salvation is understood as an ontological status given to an individual or community, quite apart from what they experience.  It is a metaphysical status, not a felt reality.  In a Whiteheadian context, the felt reality of salvation is most important, and this reality is relative to the truths to which there is awakening.  The truths are "saving" insofar as they help yield these various forms of satisfaction.   For example, insofar as a person feels forever restless and not-at-home in the present moment, the Zen recognition of "the pure presence of things as they are, right in front of me" is indeed saving.   Awakening to this pure presence yields the kind of satisfaction sought.   And insofar as a person feels that his or her humanity is being denied in the present -- through racial oppression or domestic abuse or a host of other injustices -- then an awakening to the fact that things can be different in the future is likewise saving.   Both are guided by a subjective aim of beauty: that is, by a desire not only to live, but to live happily, with qualitatively rich satisfaction.   And in this common guidance, both find different kinds of satisfaction, each of which has its distinctive tonality.

The question emerges: Are some forms of satisfaction compatible with, or even conducive to, violence?  At this point a Whiteheadian approach joins a Gandhian approach and says "No, not if they are genuine forms of salvation."   If is imaginable, for example, that a religious group will awaken to the truth of the self-structuring creativity of each present moment, and that it will recognize that this truth is, in its own way, neither peaceful nor violent, such that it can unfold in either way.  From a Whiteheadian perspective, this would be an example of truthful belief and also truthful awareness.   It is true to say that there is a difference between peace and unnecessary violence, beauty and sin, and that freedom can unfold in either way.  However, in a Whiteheadian context conformity to this fact -- through violent acts in the world -- is not itself saving, because it diverges from the divine lure toward beautiful living, which is a lure toward non-violent living.  This means that truthful living has a certain priority over truthful belief and truthful awareness.  

In a Whiteheadian and Gandhian context, truthful living has many forms and kinds, relative to the truths to which people have awakened, but these forms and kinds are complementary to one another, such that one truth does not exclude the other.  For example, one of the "truths" to which many religions awaken, is that each living being has value in and for itself, even apart from its usefulness to others.  With its emphasis on ahimsa, Jainism is keenly sensitive to this truth and is centered around it; but other religions point to this truth as well, as in the case of Jewish emphases on the goodness of creation which even God recognizes on the seventh day, and indigenous emphases on other living beings as spiritual kin to humankind.   There seems to be an intuition that other living beings matter, that they count, because they are subjects of their own lives and not just objects for humans and other creatures.   In Kantian terms, they are ends in themselves and not simply means to other ends.

Many forms of salvation are compatible with one another even if different from one another, and they are simultaneously compatible with the truth of intrinsic value.  For example, a mystic who awakens to the undifferentiated unity of the divine mind, as filled with potentialities which may or may not be actualized in the universe, has awakened to a truth, and an extremely important one.  But the truth to which this mystic awakens does not exclude the complementary wisdom of the theist who apprehends the divine reality as a Thou to whom she is present in prayer.  Both are "saved" by their respective forms wisdom, and both forms of salvations are compatible with, even if not focused on, the truth of intrinsic value.   However, unnecessary violence -- sin -- neglects this complementarity.  It involves an exercise of freedom in ways that violate the intrinsic value of other living beings and that contradict the "truth" of this value.  It follows, then, that insofar as a way of living is truthful, it will not violate or contradict the truth of intrinsic value.  If people in a given religion claim that God commands them to kill others (non-human and human alike) in God's name, they are mistaken about God, who is the indwelling lure toward truth.  If they believe that they are saved through killing, they are likewise mistaken about salvation.  Salvation has many forms, but sin is not among them.

IV. A Continuously Creative Universe:

Insights from Confucianism

We return to the question: How can any meaningful degree of peace come about on our small and fragile planet?   Here the world's religions offer important ideas.  An important feature of Whiteheadian approach to peace is that it recognizes that peace has both an inner and an outer dimension.  On the one hand peace involves the journey of an individual life toward peaceable selfhood, as experienced through one or another form of salvation.  On the other it involves that human being dwelling in community with others in ways that are harmonious and intense.   Considered in a Whiteheadian context, each participant on his or her own individual journey, but that journey includes, and is partly composed of, the very presence of the others.  If we use the word "alone" to describe the individuality of participants, then the participants are alone together, and their very aloneness includes a togetherness.

In a philosophy of complementary pluralism, the world's religions have important insights to add to both dimensions of the journey.  In order to illustrate the applicability of a Whiteheadian approach to the communal dimension,  it helps to bring Whiteheadian thinking and Confucian thinking into dialogue.  This is because, with its emphases on person-in-community as opposed to person-in-isolation, its recognition of the power of empathic awareness, its emphasis on harmony in society, and its deeply ecological nature, a Whiteheadian approach to peace bears similarities to Confucianism, such that one can easily imagine a Confucian Whiteheadianism, in which the richness of Chinese insights is combined with, and adds to, the power of the Whiteheadian approach.  

Of course, "Confucianism" is an abstract name for many ways of thinking that have evolved in China, and it is difficult to make too many generalizations.  But many interpreters of Confucianism suggest that peace -- understood here as harmony in society -- must begin, not only with changes in governance and public policy, but also individual by individual, family by family, household by household, and community by community.  Confucianism teaches that peace requires the cultivation and then expansion of empathy, amid which a person is able to imagine him or herself inside the shoes of another, understanding that person's subjective aims and intentions, moods and motivations.  This empathy best begins in small ways, with siblings getting along with siblings, spouses with spouses, and friend with friends.  Only as they become the peace they commend to the world, can peace in the world emerge.  One Confucian scholar, Mary Evelyn Tucker, describes this extension of empathy through the image of concentric circles:

A useful image for describing the Confucian ethical system is a series of concentric circles with the person in the center.  In the circle closest to the individual is one's family, then one's teachers, one's friends, the government, and in the outer circle the universe itself. (Tucker, 221)

To this image of concentric circles we can then add, as Confucianism so often does, that the practice of empathy or respectful relations can be facilitated by the practice of what Confucianism calls "li" or, as it is sometimes translated, manners.  Here the word manner need not suggest something stiff and lifeless, but rather something gracious done for the sake of whole relationships, such as the writing of thank-you notes, or the shaking of hands when greeting someone, or addressing an old person in an honorable way that acknowledges the wisdom of experience.  These simple acts are the part of the culture of peace: the way in which people learn to get along with each other, respect each other, and learn from each other.  In their quiet and seemingly simple ways, they are rituals by which the deeper patterns of the universe -- the widest aspect of the concentric circle -- become ingredient in daily life.  They are examples of the "body-to-mind" learning described above, showing how bodily activities can express deeper ritual patterns that belong, not only to human cultures, but to the earth community from which human cultures emerge.

Of course, even at the small and local levels of peace, people who seek peace ought not to expect utopias.  No amount of hand-shaking or thank-you notes can bring about the messianic age.  Family life bears this out.  Sometimes the forms of peace that are most difficult to sustain are those between family members, and more than a few ambitious souls -- usually but not always men -- have avoided the trials and responsibilities of family life by pouring their energies into what they take to be "larger" concerns, such as careers and participation in the public sphere.  Those left behind, often but not always women, then become responsible for peace within the domestic sphere, because the breadwinners are never at home.   Nevertheless, there may be a blessing for those responsible for the domestic sphere, and also a curse for those who do not participate in it.  It is the homemakers of the world -- female and male alike -- who are in a better position to learn the arts of empathy and thus the arts of peace.  

All of these reflections bear upon a Whiteheadian approach to peace.  A process approach agrees with Confucianism, and also with Judaism, Islam, and countless other family-sensitive traditions, which emphasize that genuine peace cannot and ought not exclude the domestic sphere.  It also agrees that this peace can be facilitated in bodily ways, through the exercise of ritual practices -- li -- that promote the arts of peace.  Yet a process approach also agrees with feminists and with victims of domestic abuse, including women in Confucian and other settings, who have often experienced the oppression and tediousness that often comes from being solely responsible for domestic life.   In order for peace within households to emerge within families in which women and men live together, there must be mutual respect and shared responsibilities.  If any semblance of peace is to emerge in our world, relations between the sexes must be mutually enhancing and much of this begins in family life.

However, it is important to add that a Whiteheadian vision of peace, like a Confucian vision, does not end with family life, and that it does not even begin with family life to the exclusion of other points of departure.  Rather it begins by paying attention to all the concentric circles simultaneously, from the personal to the political, the local to the global.  It simultaneously involves sensitivity to the divine dimension of reality: to the One-embracing-any or the divine embrace.  And it involves attention to the fact that the universe itself -- the many that are embraced by the One -- is itself a web of unfolding connections.  Not always a happy web or a peaceful communion, but a communion nonetheless in the sense that each creature contains all the others.

In order to appreciate this deeper web, Confucianism is again helpful.  The aim of life, so Confucians say, is to become fully human and part of this process involves sensitivity to the fact that reality is a single and dynamic whole, consisting of a trinity of heaven, earth, and humanity.  Equally important, all dimensions of this interactive whole -- the heavenly no less than the earthly -- are expressions of a deeper reality that is sometimes described in Chinese thought as "ch'i."  In Chinese philosophy "ch'i" has many connotations, but it often means something like, in the words of a leading Chinese scholar Tu Weiming, a "continuously unfolding creativity" or "the spontaneous self-generating life process" that is manifest in all things, including departed ancestors, hills and rivers, human beings, water and plants, and divine realities as well. (Weiming 210-211)

A Whiteheadian approach to peace agrees with all of this.  The Whiteheadian cosmology as presented in Process and Reality encourages us to imagine the universe as a whole as multi-planed, including a heavenly as well as earthly dimension; it recognizes that all living beings, in whatever plane of existence, are subjects not objects; it recognizes that no subject exists by itself, because all are internally related to all others; and, as developed by process philosophers and theologians, it finds plausible the possibility, deeply affirmed in so many world religions that the larger peace may well include harmonious relations with departed ancestors, who dwell in non-visible planes of existence.  It then adds, as would many East Asian and South Asian traditions, that these non-visible planes need not be understood as supernatural, in the sense of interrupting the laws of physics and chemistry; but rather as, in the words of David Ray Griffin, ultra-natural.   The whole of nature -- including heaven, earth, and humanity -- is the trinity.

To this emphasis on a natural trinity, process thinkers then add a more contemporary emphasis on creative evolution, suggesting that nature is an evolving process in which new things emerge over time that have no parallel in what came before.   This invites a recognition, not only of Confucian Whiteheadianism, but also Confucian Darwinism, in which further emphasis is placed on the emergence of novelty in the continuously creative process of the universe.   In life on earth, for example, there was once a time when single cells did not exist and had never existed, except perhaps as ideas in the mind of God.  But then, some four billion years ago, single cells emerged as creative products of natural processes.  The same applies, of course, to plants and animals, including human beings.  This emphasis on nature as process that is evolving, not only on earth but also in its galactic dimensions and perhaps also in the non-visible planes of existence that parallel our galaxy, leads Whiteheadians to image peace itself as a dynamic and creative process, rather than a settled and static fact.   Peace includes novelty as well as stability, intensity as well as harmony, and its ultimate aim is beauty.  With its emphasis on family, empathy, harmony, and li, Confucianism shows how this peace can be concretized in the public and visible dimensions of daily and community life.  

V.                  The Continuing Journey:

Salvation and Life After Death

To this emphasis on community life, however, there must also be added an emphasis on the more private dimensions of a journey toward peace.[6]In a Whiteheadian context this inner dimension involves seeking meaningful degrees and kinds of satisfaction in daily life, in community with others who likewise seek meaningful degrees and kinds of satisfaction.  It involves a quest for beauty, the ultimate expression of which is what many religions call "salvation."

Already I have said that many religions point toward different kinds of salvation, relative to the different problems that humans can face and to the different truths to which humans awaken as they grapple with these problems.  A Whiteheadian perspective helps us appreciate both the unity and the diversity in these kinds of salvation, and also appreciate the possibility that the journey toward deep satisfaction continues after death.

In a Whiteheadian context all forms of salvation are forms of satisfying existence, and thus of beauty.  As indicated earlier, beauty within the soul refers to two experiential qualities that are sometimes separated but that can be combined: harmony and intensity.  In the course of a lifetime and even a day, harmony and intensity are evanescent, but in their evanescence they form the very spice of life.  Harmony is what we feel when we have lunch with a friend and enjoy a good conversation, and intensity is what we feel when, in the middle of the conversation, something hilarious or deeply meaningful is shared.  Harmony is what we feel when, after a long day, we are able to go to sleep, and intensity is what we feel when, amid the sleep, we are awakened by an earthshaking dream. Harmony is what we feel when we feel are reconciled with someone from whom have been estranged, and intensity is what we feel when, having reconciled, we pour our energy into a common task.  In all of these instances the harmony has some degree of intensity, and the intensity has some degree of harmony.  Somehow, says Whitehead, it is in the coalescence of these two qualities that life becomes beautiful.  And the beauty itself requires the passage of time, including the passing away of what has been beautiful, for beauty to occur at all.  If reality were frozen, if human life did not flow, moment-by-moment, there would be no beauty.

This does not mean that, amid the flow of life, there cannot be enduring patterns of beauty.  Many human beings understandably want and need harmony and intensity in stable yet fluid forms. Sometimes this is expressed (1) as an inwardly felt desire for psychological integration, for bringing into harmony two worthy ideals in one’s life that are, at face value, mutually inconsistent.   Sometimes it is expressed (2) in an in an inwardly felt desire for community, or mutually-enhancing relations with others.   And sometimes it is expressed as (3) an inwardly felt desire for freedom from inordinate attachment to things finite as if they were infinite, for the purpose of letting go into an infinite and wider whole. These three aims forms of satisfaction -- of lived beauty -- are found in the religions, and represent what might be called three general forms of salvation as experienced in their subjective dimensions: salvation through integration, salvation through communion, and salvation through letting go.  Often but not always the three go together.

Salvation as Integration:

The Wisdom of Yin-Yang

In the west one of the most vivid presentations of this desire for integration is found in W.E.B DuBois The Souls of Black Folk.  First published in 1903, DuBois’ collection of fourteen essays displays of the cruelty of racism in American culture and celebration of the strength and pride of Black America.  At the same time it is a classic exploration of a battle within the mind and heart that many ethnic minorities face throughout the world.  DuBois calls this battle  “double-consciousness” and describes as a subjective response to a world which yields a person:

no true self-consciousness, but only lets him see himself through the revelation of the other world.  It is a peculiar sensation, this double-consciousness, this sense of always looking at one’s self through the eyes of others, of measuring one’s soul by the tape of a world that looks on in amused contempt and pity.  One ever feels his two-ness, - an American, a Negro; two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings; two warring ideals in one dark body. (9)

When a person is faced with these unreconciled strivings, with the problem of having two warring ideals in one body, that person’s need is to bring together the wisdom of both into what Whitehead would call a “contrast,” that is a harmonious integration of the two ideals so that they enrich one another.  DuBois puts it this way:

The history of the American negro is the history of this strife, -- this longing to attain self-conscious manhood, to merge his double self into a better and truer self.  In this merging he wishes neither of his older selves to be lost.  He would not Africanize America, for America has too much to teach the world and Africa.  He would not bleach his Negro soul in a flood of white Americanism, for he knows that Negro blood has a message for the world.  He simply wishes to make it possible for a man to be both a Negro and an American. (9)

While Du Bois’ emphasis is on an integration of culturally defined self-images, integration can also occur in relation to other dimensions of human life.  Additional forms of integration include an integration of conscious and unconscious aspects of experience, as illustrated in various forms of shamanic experience; an integration of faith and reason as illustrated in Christianity; an integration of mind (mental aspects of experience) with body (physical aspects of experience) as illustrated in yoga; and an integration of emotional energies, as illustrated in Tibetan traditions that emphasize recognizing and reconciling the many different subjective forms (anger, tenderness, fear, courage) that are part of human experience.  What these many forms of integration have in common is a gathering together of separate data, sometimes expressed as "warring ideals," into a single whole, that becomes a part of a person's ongoing life-history.   In life as we know it, the process of integration is never complete, because with every new moment there is more to be integrated, which itself suggests that a more final yet dynamic integration may need to occur after death.

Salvation as Harmony

With Others

The second form of salvation – salvation as harmony with others – was discussed above in the context of Confucianism, and it is likewise explicit in Du Bois.  It is the wholeness found in feeling richly connected with a surrounding environment in mutually enhancing relations.  In the case of Du Bois this surrounding environment is primarily a human community.  It is the United States, understood as a community of people.  But, as was emphasized above,  the need for communion -- for mutually enhancing relations with others -- can well include a need for mutually enhancing relations with the more-than-human creatures within the community of life: animals, plants, hills, rivers, stars.  And it can include a need for rich relations with the divine reality, as illustrated in Christian emphases on being reconciled to God through faith in divine grace.  Thus there are many "larger contexts" in which salvation through communion can occur, paralleling the concentric circles of Confucianism described above.  They are family, tribe, nation, religion, earth, and heaven.  All form a "something more" with which a person can feel connected and thus find satisfying existence.

The fact that some people feel "saved" by giving their lives for their families, tribes, nations, or religion shows the power of this second form of salvation.   The various kinds of martyrdom that are found in Christianity and Islam, paralleled by those found in patriotism in its many varieties, display the power of finding the meaning of one's life in association with a group.   The problem with these family, tribe, nation, and religion, understood as "something more" with which one can be connected, is that it can lead to extreme forms of we-they thinking, in which the intrinsic value of others is denied in the name of the intrinsic value of one's group.  In Buddhist terms, it is "right association" gone wild.   In the contemporary context Islamism and Christianism are particularly liable to this wildness.

The danger of we-they thinking, insofar as it leads to violence, can also be seen when the earth functions as the "something more," particularly when the portion of the earth at issue is a specific piece of land to which one group claims allegiance at the expense of others.   Both the sense that "this land" belongs to "us" as seen in the Abrahamic religions, and also the sense that "we" belong to "this land," as seen in indigenous religions, can lead to forms of violence that are contradictory to peace.  Sacred geography becomes geographical idolatry, and others suffer.

The Abrahamic religions at their best, and others as well, thus take as their aim a post-family, post-tribal, post-national way of living, in which humans can dwell together in ways freed from ethnic rivalries and ancient hatreds.  "In Christ," so Paul says in Galatians, there is neither male nor female, gentile nor Jew, slave nor free: rather there is a community of people gathered together in submission to a deeper grace revealed in Jesus.  Islam points in a similar direction with its concept of the umma as a community surrendered to the will of Allah as revealed in the Qur'an.  Nevertheless, these traditions easily lapse into Christianism and Islamism, in which the church or the umma subtly replaces the divine reality to which both religions point.   Within their own traditions there are ways to critique these idolatries, by focusing more completely on the divine reality as the encompassing context in which life is lived, in relation to which all finite communities (family, tribe, nation, earth) are relativized.  But this focus points to the need for an additional form of salvation besides communion: namely, a relinquishment of particularized self-images (such as "I am a Muslim" or "I am a Christian") insofar as those self-images have come to function in idolatrous ways.

Salvation as Dropping Away

Of Ego and Ego-Attachments

This third form of salvation occurs when the sense of being an isolated self drops away completely, either because a person is absorbed into a larger whole or because there is nothing left after the dropping away occurs.   In the history of world religions one of its most dramatic exemplifications is Buddhist nirvana, which is often described in the latter sense.  As Buddhists will quickly insist, the "nothing left" is not merely an empty vacuum.  It is a state of existence of pure enlightenment, pure awakening, in which there is no separate self that experiences the awakening.  There is just the awakening itself.

In a Whiteheadian context it is best understood as a feeling of complete transparence to the divine reality, in which there is only God as the primordial expression of creativity.  When emphasis is placed on the creativity of which God is the primordial expression, then nirvana is an awakening to creativity: the boundless happening of which all things are expressions.   When emphasis is placed on God as the primordial expression of this creativity, emphasis is placed on the boundless wisdom – the enlightenment – that infuses this creativity.  Nirvana, understood as the blowing out of inordinate attachments and the awakening to the way things truly is pure, experiential transparency to ultimate reality.

What is interesting, however, is that in many Buddhist traditions a resting in this sense of complete transparency is itself an idolatry.   When the Heart Sutra says that Form is Emptiness (the finite is the infinite) but also that Emptiness is Form (the infinite is the finite), the suggestion is that the whole point of enlightenment experience is not to rest in enlightenment, but rather to allow Emptiness to become Form: that is, to allow the ego-transcending wisdom of the enlightenment experience to become enfleshed in daily life, such that enlightenment becomes "drinking this cup of tea" or "holding this person in your arms" or "taking this nap."    Somehow, the dropping away of ego-attachments becomes a context, not for escaping the world of the here-and-now, but rather for being more freely immersed in that world, cognizant that enlightenment is this very world, rightly understood.

Intimations of this third form of salvation are also found in other traditions.  In Christianity, for example, some mystical traditions point to a dropping away of ego through absorption in God, and some more practically minded spiritual traditions indicate that the purpose of this dropping away is to "practice the presence of God" in daily life, moment by moment.   And in Islam, some mystical traditions point to a similar recognition that, in the last analysis, Allah is the only true reality, in the face of which the ego and its attachments are unreal, but that the point of this realization is to enter into the same inner condition of Prophet Muhammad, in which there is moment-by-moment responsiveness to the call at hand.   Muslims would add that the whole idea of true prophecy, understood as responsiveness to the call of God in ways that become channels of grace for the world, requires that dropping away of ego, without which true prophecy becomes false prophecy.

Continuing Journey

From a Whiteheadian perspective, the three kinds of salvation just named make sense.  It is important to emphasize that there may be many more forms of salvation in the human sphere, and that I have named but three.  In any event, all are forms of harmony and intensity that can occur in a human life, which means that all are forms of lived beauty.   They are paralleled and enriched by other forms of beauty, enjoyed by other living beings, which are saving for those other beings as well.  When we consider that not simply humans, but all living beings, are lured by God toward various forms of harmonious and intense existence, we realize that there are as many forms of salvation as there are kinds of existence.  

In the human forms that I have identified, there are various forms of wisdom that are entailed in each.  For example, in salvation as psychological integration, there is the wisdom of realizing that apparently mutually incompatible ideals can in fact be integrated into larger wholes.  We might call this the wisdom of yin-yang.  And in salvation of communion with something more, there is the wisdom of realizing that living beings are composed of their relations with others, such that no entity is an island.  We might call this the wisdom of interconnectedness.   In salvation through relinquishment of self-image and other forms of ego-attachment, there is the wisdom of what Buddhists call anatta (no-self).  When this kind of salvation results in a recognition that the emptiness of reality is best realized in the concreteness of daily life, there is the wisdom of commentaries, that is, the wisdom of realizing that the whole of the universe is contained in each moment.  As has been emphasized, all forms of salvation are forms, not only of beautiful existence, but of truthful existence.

A Whiteheadian approach further suggests that these three forms of beauty can themselves be integrated, such that, in principle, an individual human being might come to awaken to all of them, plus however many more forms of salvation there happen to be.  This is because the truth of the whole -- namely God -- consists of mutually consistent truths; and if there is truth in a given form of salvation, it is contained within the truth of the whole.  This does not mean that God is the only truth, or that truths about God are the only kinds of worthwhile truth.  But it does mean that God is an enlightened consciousness, everywhere at once, in which all truths are known, and that in this enlightened consciousness all apparently inconsistent truths are seen in their togetherness.

Life-After-Death

If we use the word salvation with an upper-case S, to name all the forms of salvation combined, we are then led to ask: How many humans on our planet are fully saved?  The answer seems to be "Very few."  Most humans taste one or another form of salvation, relative to the religious tradition that shapes them, but not the others.  If the aim of God is that all living beings taste the whole of truth, then it would follow that individuals need more time than an earthly life permits to taste this fullness.  And the questions then becomes: (1) Is the human mind so constituted, that it might continue in its journey after death, even after the death of the brain? (2) Is the universe so constructed, that is has multiple planes of existence, into which a mind might thus enter, so that its journey might continue?  (3)  Is there any evidence that the journey does continue, given the possibility of continuance? And (4) if evidence does exist, such that it becomes meaningful to hope for a continuing journey, is this possibility compatible with the methods and insights of the natural sciences, such that religious people might simultaneously embrace the wisdom of science and the wisdom of hoping that the journey continues.

It is in response to these four questions that the pioneering work of David Ray Griffin is especially important, as developed in three books:                               .   In these books he makes the very strong case that each of the four questions noted above deserve a resounding "yes" by way of response.  In Unsnarling the Divine Knot he shows how, on both empirical and philosophical grounds, it makes sense to distinguish the mind from the brain, showing how the two are of the same ontological order, but not numerically identical, such that one can meaningfully speak of mind-brain interactions, each affecting the other in life as we know it.  In Parapsychology, Philosophy and Spirituality he shows how, in light of a great deal of empirical evidence, it is more plausible than not to assume that the mind continues in its journey after death and how this assumption can be combined with worldly concerns for a more socially just and ecologically sustainable world.  In both books he draws upon Whitehead's philosophy to suggest that the universe is indeed a multi-planed reality, not reducible to three dimensional space as perceived by the eyes, which can house different kinds of actuality.  And in both books he shows how these possibilities are consistent with a thoroughgoing naturalism that takes seriously the insights of evolutionary biology, ecological studies, and physics.  Griffin does not prove that the journey of a soul continues after death, but he leads his readers to find this proposal more plausible than contrary proposals.

What is Griffin is right?  What if the journey does continue?  If so, what if anything is the "end" of the journey?  A Whiteheadian philosophy of complementary pluralism provides no clear answer, and, in the interests of a covenant with mystery, it eschews the very possibility of offering definitive answers.  But speculations are possible, two of which come to mind.  One is that the journey continues until all forms of salvation inwardly desired by the creature at issue, consciously or unconsciously, are realized, after which there is an end of finite existence altogether, and all that remains is the ongoing life of God, in which that finite journey is everlastingly remembered in an ongoing process of divine integration.   A second is that the journey continues everlastingly itself, in transparent communion with the ongoing life of God.  We might speak of the first option as Nirvana and the second as Heaven or Paradise.

A further speculative possibility presents itself as well and it concerns Hell.  By virtue of decisions made in this life, some individual souls may need long periods of rehabilitation, so that they can grow in the wisdom toward which they are drawn.  This wisdom will include, among other things, coming to understand the forms of violence they have inflicted on others in this life, both human and non-human; and entering into "empathic awareness" with those whom they have victimized, both for the sake of personal wholeness (integration) and reconciled relations with others (communion).  In other words, they cannot enter fully into salvation of the first two kinds until and unless they have shared in the experiences of their victims and experienced the remorse for what they have done.  Moreover, even the third form of salvation -- dropping away of ego -- would be absent from their lives, insofar as they committed their violent deeds out of ego-attachments (including attachments to their religions).  Empathic awareness would again be necessary for salvation, and it might take a very long time for this awareness to emerge in a person's life.   Hell, then, would be purgative stage in the journey after death, in which a person is lured by the divine reality to enter into the empathic awareness required for salvation.

Could a person resist this lure forever, and thus remain forever separated from the fullness of salvation?  This is possible, and this would be what is best meant by everlasting damnation as espoused in the Abrahamic religions.  This everlasting damnation would be a contingent affair, not a necessary affair, and it would be self-chosen, again and again, forever.  It is best understood as self-damnation, because it is not willed by God, but rather by the individual human being at issue.  The more realistic image, though, given that the indwelling lure of God within each human life, is that, in time and with tremendous remorse, an individual would eventually enter into that ultimate end, conceived either as Nirvana or Heaven.

To these questions concerning human destiny there must be analogous questions concerning other living beings, because most of them, too, die in apparent incompleteness, as witnessed in the situation of prey in the natural world.  When the fox chases the rabbit, the rabbit does not seem to want to die.  The journey is not yet complete.  Can the rabbit's journey continue, too?  From a Whiteheadian perspective as developed by Griffin, the answer depends on the character of the rabbit's subjective psyche: whether that psyche has the psychic momentum to continue after death.   Certainly many Asian traditions have believed that the rabbit does indeed have that momentum, and that all forms of life, not just human life, are on a journey toward wholeness that extends beyond death, until wholeness is realized.  The "round of birth and death" of which Buddhists, Hindus, and Jains speak need not be understood in terms of continuation on the earthly plane through reincarnation, although this is a possibility from a Whiteheadian perspective, but can as easily be conceived as a continuation in non-three-dimensional planes of existence, on the analogy of what Buddhists traditionally call "the six realms of existence."  This leaves open the possibility, shared by people in East and West alike, that in the last analysis, all living beings, not just human beings, are able to continue in their journeys toward wholeness, until that wholeness (however conceived) is realized.

VI. The Missionary Religions:

 A Clash of Civilizations?

The speculative concerns of the previous section rightly suggest that, when we truly consider peace as an appropriate aim for religions, this peace must include life-after-death as well as life-on-earth.  This would make peace on earth a meaningful taste of a larger and wider peace and it would make that larger and wider peace a meaningful hope for human beings on earth.  In the current situation, however, many people understandably feel that there is so much suffering on earth, some inflicted in the name of religion, that concerns for life-after-death are, at best, a luxury and, at worst, a sinful distraction from more important concerns.  These more important concerns partly center upon the activities of the world's missionary religions, because they, more than others, assertively seek to influence the whole of the world.

From a Whiteheadian perspective, a journey toward peace on the part of a given religion need not require a relinquishment of world mission.   It is important to recognize, however, that not all religions have been inspired by a sense of world mission.   Most of the world's religions -- from Judaism and Confucianism, through Shintoism and Hinduism, to Shintoism and Native American religions -- have been part and parcel of a local culture and, for the most part, have not sought converts across cultures.  Some, like Judaism, are deeply multicultural.  Judaism is trans-geographical community whose members include peoples from many different nations and ethnic groups, joined together in memory of a common past, namely the history of Judaism itself, and in anticipation of a hoped-for future.  Judaism is a people-in-pilgrimage.  In this way Judaism is much like Islam, which is also a trans-cultural community with a cultural ethos that includes many cultures.  But for the most part Judaism has not sought converts across cultures, at least not as actively as other religions, including Islam.  In this sense Judaism is more like Confucianism:  In the long view of human history, the three religions that have most actively sought converts across cultures are Christianity, Islam, and Buddhism.  This is why they are often the "missionary" religions of our world.  

Of course, Buddhist missionary activity has taken a subtle form in recent times.  Most of us do not have Buddhists knocking on our door asking if we have made a personal decision for enlightenment.  Nor do we hear Buddhists waging war against unbelievers in the name of God's will.  Among the missionary religions, aggression is a special problem for the two religions -- Islam and Christianity -- that typically rely on a special revelation from a God who is sometimes depicted, as we see in the Book of Revelation in the New Testament and also in the Qur'an, as a Holy Warrior.  Buddhism does not appeal to special revelation but rather to empirical observation of one's own consciousness; and its theistic expressions in Pure Land Buddhism more typically present divine spirits as compassionate rather than judgmental.  Even the Tibetan tradition, which does indeed have images of divine spirits with fiery characteristics, emphasizes that these being reflect psychological impulses within each of us that can be transmuted into compassion.  As a consequence, Buddhism often seems to have a more peaceful tenor.  It is more passive: an active welcoming of people into the Buddhist fold, but not initiating contact in the first place.  At least this is the way it is in the western nations, where increasing numbers of people are converting to Buddhism, not because someone has knocked on their door, but because they are spiritually hungry and the Abrahamic religions do not offer what they seek.

On the other hand, Christianity and Islam are quite active today in many parts of the world, and they promise to be equally active in any foreseeable future.  Especially in Africa, where the two religions compete for converts,  violence often results, and this violence is partly induced by their respective cultures of missionary zeal.  The zeal comes from the fact that Christians and Muslims believe that their respective religions have divinely revealed wisdom that is unique and final, and that is important to the salvation of all people, not simply the salvation of their adherents.[7]  For the Christian this wisdom is Christ as revealed in the New Testament.  For the Muslim it is way of life revealed in the Qur'an, as revealed through the Prophet Muhammad.

Of course, it is logically possible that the genuine wisdom of the Qur'an and the genuine wisdom of Christ are compatible and complementary.  Certainly Muslims believe that God’s will was revealed in Christ, such that the revelation of God in Christ is compatible with, not contradictory to, the revelation of God in the Qur’an.  Sympathetic to this view, but not convinced that one kind of wisdom is superior to the other, we could propose that the wisdom of Christianity and the wisdom of Islam are like two sides of a yin-yang diagram in Chinese philosophy, each side completing and enriching the other.  Turning east, we might propose that the deeper wisdom of Buddhism can also enrich, and be enriched by, the core insights of the Abrahamic faiths.  We might then imagine a trialogue, in which Buddhists and Muslims and Christians are seated around a table, each learning from the other in ways that enrich their respective journeys toward truth.

This is how Whiteheadians would have it, and, as we have seen, how Gandhi would have had it.  Nevertheless, many Muslims and Christians in our world today are not very Gandhian or very Whiteheadian.  The assumption among many Christians and Muslims is that their respective claims to wisdom are, and must be, competitive rather than complementary, and that this competition must be hostile rather than friendly: a matter of spiritual warfare between forces of truth and untruth, belief and unbelief, good and evil.

Many advocates of the spiritual warfare approach put the matter in more specific historical terms.  The warfare is not simply a battle between good and evil in general terms, but between the post-enlightenment Christian West, shaped as it is by Protestant Christianity in Europe, and the House of Islam, shaped by a recent history of western colonialism.  The argument is these the two civilizational traditions are fundamentally at odds with each other on basic values concerning violence, women, democracy, freedom of thought, and the rights of non-Muslims in Muslim societies.  

On the Muslim side, advocacy of spiritual warfare is expressed clearly and disturbingly by militant Muslims who, inspired by the traditional Islamic distinction between Dar-al-Islam (house of Islam) and Dar-al-Harb (house of war), and provoked by specific grievances against the West, wage jihad against Jewish and Christian unbelievers.  In the words of Sayyid Qutb, sometimes said to be the godfather of Islamic radicalism:

How is it possible to start the task of reviving Islam?...There should be a vanguard which sets out with determination and then deeps walking on the path, marching through the vast ocean of Jajiliyyan (unbelief) which has encompassed the entire world.

In Qutb’s view, the ocean of unbelief that encompasses the world is, of course, inspired by western consumerism and secularism, and there is only one way to remedy the situation.  It is to establish Muslim states governed by Islamic law or Sharia, the specifics of which have already been defined and are closed to evolution of change.

There is only one place on earth which can be called the home of Islam, and it is that place there the Islamic state is established and the Sharia is the authority and God’s limits are observed and where all the Muslims administer the affairs of the state with mutual consultations.  The rest of the world is the home of hostility. (Esposito, Unholy War, 60-61)

On the Christian side, the "spiritual warfare" approach is expressed clearly and disturbingly by Christian writers such as Robert Spencer in Islam Unveiled: Disturbing Questions about the World's Fastest Growing Faith. Citing texts in the Qur'an and the Hadith, Spencer argues that the true home of hostility is not the secular West, but rather Islam, because the core texts of Islam, and much of Islamic history as well, are riddled with injunctions to violence, warfare, disrespect for women, intolerance of non-Muslims.  In this words:

It is not true that all religions are basically identical, or that all are essentially peaceful.  It would be too pessimistic to say that there are no peaceful strains of Islam, but it would be imprudent to ignore the fact that deeply embedded in the central documents of the religion is an all-encompassing vision of a theocratic state that is fundamentally different from and opposed to the post-Enlightenment values of the Christian west.

At the heart of the matter, thinks Spencer, is the fact that Christianity and Islam shape different kinds of personalities, the Christian less violent and more respectful of persons than the Muslim.  His concern is that Muslims are already waging what he calls a “demographic jihad” in the West through immigration, and that they bring with them tolerance for, if not explicit sympathy with, militant Islam.  Thus, except perhaps through divine intervention, warfare is inevitable:

Whether or not Islam ever becomes dominant in Western Europe or elsewhere in the former lands of Christendom, the war will not end…No one can predict the features of the world that will emerge from these conflicts, except that it will be new, and that it will be difficult – unless there is some wondrous intervention from the Merciful One.  (173, 175, 176)

Spencer's negative conclusions would be challenged by many reformist Muslims throughout the world, who call for an evolution of Sharia and who are working hard to claim and expand what he calls “the peaceful strains of Islam.”   These Muslims, whose voices are so often muted by the power of Islamic revivalism, are developing Qur'anic philosophies that emphasize democracy, freedom of religion, freedom of thought, the rights of women, and the rights of non-Muslims in Islamic societies.  

Nevertheless, Spencer's conclusion that warfare is inevitable would well be shared by many a conservative cleric within Muslim revivalist movements, and most certainly by the militant fringes within Islamic revivalism.   Both sides claim that secular Western society, whose spiritual foundations lie in Christianity, and Islamic revivalism, whose spiritual foundations lie in the vision of the Qumran, are inherently incompatible.  There can be no Gandhian dialogue in which Muslims and Christians and Buddhists sit around a table sharing and learning from each other.  Much less a trialogue that includes the third missionary tradition, namely Buddhism.  There can only be, in the now infamous words of Samuel Huntington, "a clash of civilizations."

Of course, this is not the whole story.  There are other Christians and Muslims who believe that, despite the genuine and serious disagreements, participants in the two religions can listen to each other and learn from each other in ways that are conducive to a more peaceful world.  A Whiteheadian approach to world religions and peace between religions stands with the second group.  Moreover, it takes heart in the fact that more than a few Christians and also some Muslims have found value in Whitehead's thought as a resource for religious self-understanding.  In the past fifty years the two most prominent examples are John B. Cobb Jr. and Muhammad Iqbal.

John B. Cobb. Jr.

John Cobb's theology is multi-faceted and his thoughts on the world's religions are complex and nuanced.  But one of his most important contributions to peace between religions lies in his recognition that all of the world's religions contain wisdom worth affirming, that all of this wisdom is inspired by a divine lure toward truth, but that none of the religions contain all the truth.  This means that there is more wisdom in all the religions added together, but also that there is more to be discovered than any have yet known.

In light of this assumption, Cobb then offers a unique way of helping Christians transcend the view that there is only one way to God.  Of the two Abrahamic missionary traditions -- Christianity and Islam -- it is Christians rather than Muslims who have most often said this.  The traditional Muslim view is that there is salvation outside the religion of Islam, but not outside a surrender to God's will as understood to the best of one's lights, and that this surrender is best understood, not in terms of right beliefs but rather in terms of right actions.  In this sense Islam is much more like Judaism, which is likewise described, to use the language of Jewish novelist Chaim Potok, as a deedology rather than a creedology.

On the other hand, Christians have often claimed that belief in Christ is itself a prerequisite to salvation, apart from which salvation is impossible.  Potok is right.  In many respects Christianity seems to be more of a creedology than a deedology.  This has led many Christians, especially in the Protestant traditions, to accent the intellectual and verbalizable dimensions of religious life at the expense of the more liturgical and bodily dimensions of religious life, committing what one Protestant theologian, Paul Tillich, calls "the intellectualist distortion of the meaning of faith."  Tillich speaks of this as a distortion because, in point of fact, the living reality of faith involves the will and the emotions as well as the intellect, none of which quite capture the whole of faith.  Nonetheless, this emphasis on the intellect and thus on "right belief" has led more than a few Christians to say that salvation comes, not simply through Christ as a healing spirit in the world, but through believing in Christ.  The assumption is that belief is itself a necessary gateway through which Christ enters one's life.

 Cobb's more Whiteheadian view is consonant with the more generous traditions within the biblical and post-biblical heritages: namely those that recognize God's saving activity outside the confines of any particular religious tradition.    What is unique to his approach, however, is to recognize that there can be many forms of salvation.  This view does not emerge as an a-priori commitment to distinguishing Christian salvation from other forms.  Rather it emerges out of many years of inter-religious dialogue in which, over time, differences emerge as beautiful in their own right, because all make the whole richer.  When people of different religions truly engage in dialogues with one another about what is most important to them, what is "most important" is not usually the least common denominator.  It is what inspires them to love the religion in which they participate.  Often this love is expressed in terms of a distinctive kind of experience that seems, to the religious person at issue, to touch something ultimate and irreducible.  In Zen, for example, this experience lies in awakening to the pure presence of things as they are, right in front of me.  In Advaita Vedanta Hinduism it lies in the experience of, or at least a journey towards, a pure and object-less consciousness that is beyond the world of appearances yet within each person as his or her true self.  And in Lutheran Christianity it lies in being embraced by the limitless love of God with whom the Christian has an I-Thou relationship.

 In the absence of face-to-face encounters, more liberally minded observers might assume that awakening and absorption and salvation by grace are precisely the same experience.  And indeed there are similarities, for all three so often point to a dropping away of inordinate ego-attachments.  But a recognition of this profound commonality does not always get at what is most important to the participants.  The Zen Buddhist still wants to talk about the pure presence of things as they are in its amazing suchness;  the Vedantist still wants to talk about the undifferentiated unity from which all things emerge, which is beyond name and form; and the Christian still wants to talk about a personal God, filled with formal characteristic such as a preference for violence over peace, who knows the name of each human being and shares in the suffering even of falling sparrows.  Cobb appreciates these differences and wants to be sensitive to the claims of the other.  Here Whitehead helps.

One unique feature of Whitehead's thought is that it permits a Christians to appreciate the wisdom of different points of view, recognizing that there is indeed "the pure presence of things as they are, right in front of me" which is ultimate in one way; and there is an "ultimate reality beyond all appearance" which is ultimate in another way; and the "loving God who shares in the suffering of people and sparrows" who is ultimate in still another way.  It is not so much that there are many disparate truths, but rather that the entirety of truth -- what Whitehead calls "the depths in the nature of things" -- contains many dimensions.   Historically, different religions have been drawn by the indwelling lure toward truth to be sensitive to different dimensions of this depth.  One way to put this is to say that they have awakened to different ultimates.  This way of thinking is helpful insofar as the particular aspect of truth to which a religion is especially sensitive, say "the pure presence of things as they are" for the Zen Buddhist, does indeed function as a center (albeit without circumference) for the religionist's life.  This has led Cobb and other process theologians to speak of multiple ultimates or multiple centers for religious life.  

Indeed, we might speak of four such centers: (1) the pure presence of things as they are, right in front of me, (2) the God of love who calls all living beings to wisdom and compassion, (3) the totality of the interconnected universe, which includes God and the pure presence of things as they are, and (4) the unmanifest consciousness from which all things emerge, including the totality.  In hearing this, if we are the Vedantist noted above,  we might then say that the fourth is more real than the first three, in which case it is what is truly ultimate. There are degrees of ultimacy and some realities are more ultimate than others.   If we are John Cobb, however, we will say instead: "No, these four centers are equally ultimate for the people who are centered in them, and there is no reason to prioritize one over the other.  Let us recognize that there are many truths."   Cobb's idea is that different religions have been sensitive to different dimensions of the fullness of truth, and also that the fullness of truth transcends them all.  Rather than speaking of multiple ultimates, we might simply speak of multiple awakenings, which is shorthand for "awakenings to different dimensions of the entirety of truth."

It is this recognition that then allows Cobb and other process theologians to say that God has been at work in the history of human life, all over the planet, in truth-giving and saving ways.  This means that Christians can appreciate that God has been influential in world history in ways that are different from but complementary to Christian life, from which Christians have much to learn; and that they can simultaneously appreciate the good news of Christ as a form of salvation from which others can learn.   An approach such as this provides a way of moving beyond the Christian view that there is one way to God, while at the same time appreciating that not all religious are about God.   With Gandhi, Christians can say that all religions are inspired by God, understood as the indwelling lure toward truth and that all religions have discovered aspects of ultimate truth that have enabled them to live fully and richly in life.  And Christians can then add that different religions have been inspired to recognize different aspects of the ultimate truth.

Muhammad Iqbal

If the need among Christians is to transcend the view that God's saving activity is restricted to historical Christianity, then the need among Muslims is to transcend ideas in the Islamic heritage which seem to justify the use of unnecessary violence for religiously desired ends.  This need not require a relinquishment of Qur'anic wisdom. To the contrary, the journey can well be enriched by the Qur'anic view that the whole of communal life, and not just the psychological self, and indeed the whole of the universe, can be and in some ways already is embraced in the Oneness of God.  But the journey does involve recognizing that Qur'anic teachings on jihad are properly understood, at least  in our time, not as invitations to inflict violence upon unbelievers, but as invitations to struggle for peace inwardly (the greater jihad) and outwardly (the lesser jihad) in dynamic yet non-violent ways.  This means that Muslims must feel free to exercise ijtihad: that is, a creative re-interpretation of sacred text relevant to new situations.   Only by embracing the spirit and practice of ijtihad, as reform-minded Muslims already do, can Muslims relinquish the more violent sides of Islam and thus avoid the fifth warning sign -- the willingness to use destructive means for divinely inspired ends.

As creative re-interpretation occurs, it will help if Muslims have larger visions of Islam in terms of which that interpretation can occur.   There are many such visions available, among which is the pioneering work the work of the mystic and philosopher,  Muhammad Iqbal, the spiritual father of modern Pakistan.  In many ways he is a Muslim analogue to the kind process theology proposed by John Cobb; or, to put it differently but not less accurately, process theology is a Christian analogue to the dynamic vision of Islam offered by Iqbal.  Inspired by images of the universe as creative evolution, Iqbal called fellow Muslims to recognize that Islam is and should be an evolving tradition that requires creative interpretation by each generation; he insisted that no historical embodiment of Islam in the past, not even the period of the "rightly guided caliphs" of the early Muslim community, provides exact parallels to what is needed in Islam today; and he suggested that the best of Islam lies, not in a past to which Muslims must cling, but in a future toward which they can aim.  Iqbal proposes that Islam's gift to the world's future lies in three distinctive offerings: (1) a spiritual interpretation of nature that (2) a deep intuition of divine Oneness, and (3) a recognition that social life itself can break free of ethnic hatred and ancient tension, in order to become what he called a "spiritual democracy."  

        Just as John Cobb finds Whitehead's philosophy helpful in recognizing multiple awakenings that have occurred in the world religions, so Iqbal finds Whitehead's philosophy especially helpful in affirming a spiritual interpretation of nature.  Iqbal agrees with Whitehead that nature itself is an continuous process, filled with creativity, which can unfold in ways both good and evil, but which is embraced within the unity of the divine:

We have seen that Professor Whitehead describes the universe, not as something static, but as a structure of events possessing the character of continuous creative flow.  This quality of Nature's passage in time is perhaps the most significant aspect of experience which the Qur'an especially emphasizes..and which offers the best clue to the ultimate nature of Reality. (43)

For Iqbal, what makes this evolving process "spiritual" is that it is creative rather than mechanistic and that it occurs within, not apart from, the life of God (53).  Humans are properly understood as creative participants in this process, called by the divine to create and be part of "spiritual democracies" in which all voices have a role.  These democracies are not "secular" in the western sense of being unrelated to matters of religious, but they are indeed "secular" in the sense of being free from coercion and free for the use of reason and imagination in charting desired and desirable futures.

In light of his hope for the emergence of spiritual democracies, and in light of his feeling that reason and empirical investigation can contribute to the emergence of these democracies, Iqbal interprets the Islamic claim that Muhammad is the last of the prophets in a uniquely freeing way.   Whereas some might say that this claim encourages blind obedience to the past, Iqbal interprets the claim to mean that, after the revelation of the Qur'an to Muhammad, there is no more need for prophecy, and human beings are free to think for themselves.  In this spirit he interprets traditional Islamic teachings concerning heaven and hell in creative ways:

Hell, therefore, as conceived by the Qur'an is not a pit of everlasting torture inflicted by a revengeful God; it is a corrective experience, which may make a hardened ego once more sensitive to the living reality of Divine Grace.  Nor is heaven a holiday.  Life is one and continuous.  Man marches always onward to receive everfresh illuminations from an Infinite Reality which 'every moment appears in new glory.'  And the recipient of divine illumination is not merely a passive recipient. Every act of a free ego creates a new situation, and thus offers further opportunities for creative unfolding. (117)

As shown in an earlier section, this Iqbalian interpretation of hell is compatible with a Whiteheadian perspective.  However, for now my point is that Iqbal parallels Cobb in pointing out an essential prerequisite for peace between religions.  One prerequisite, highlighted by Cobb's approach to religious pluralism, is that religious people learn to listen to and honor insights from other religions.   Without this listening and learning, there can be no lasting peace between religions.  Another prerequisite, highlighted by Iqbal, is that religious people recognize that their own traditions best understood, not as settled and static facts defined by the past, but as ongoing processes capable of growth and development over time.  In the case of Islam this recognition is especially important, given the tendency of revivalist Muslims to assume that all answers lie in the past and the new ideas are, by virtue of their newness, contradictory to Islam itself.   Iqbal reverses the equation, suggesting that, according to the Qur’an, God is found in the newness. The importance of Iqbal's approach to Islam ought not to be underestimated in light of the widespread view today that there must be an inevitable clash of civilizations between Islam and the West.

VI.                Whitehead and the Benedictines: Christian Vocation

as a Call to Listen

As I was writing this essay a friend came up and asked me: "Which voice are you using, your liberal arts voice or your Christian voice?"  I disagreed with her way of posing the question, because I think that a liberal arts voice and a Christian voice can complement each other; but I also appreciated her point, because, in fact, I have been speaking with two voices.

The Liberal Arts: A Call to Think Freely

One is that of a liberal arts professor who, in the context of the classroom, tries to create a space within which students can think for themselves about the world religions, without being pressured to "agree with Christianity" or "agree with Islam" or "agree with Buddhism."  The liability of this professorial stance is that it can feign neutrality, when in fact there is no pure neutrality, because all points of view, including liberal arts points of view, are shaped by historical influences and value commitments.  Indeed my own commitments as a liberal arts professor are to freedom of thought over coerced thought.   I share this value with Whitehead and many others who, like me are indebted to western liberalism, the roots of which lie in the western Enlightenment of the seventeenth and eighteenth century.   Nevertheless, the value of a liberal arts orientation is that, in fact, it does encourage students to think for themselves, without being hamstrung by religious authoritarianism.  

Not all religious people in the world would agree that this kind of freedom is a value.   In the history of Christianity there are numerous examples of Christians who insist upon conformity to scripture, as interpreted by fathers of the church, over freedom of thought, including a freedom to interpret scripture in fresh ways.  In Islam today there is a similar tension between liberal Muslims who advocate freedom of thought and fresh interpretations of the Qur'an through ijtihad, and revivalist Muslims within the clerical class, who insist upon taqlid, or the imitation of inherited interpretations as embodied in Islamic law, without adding anything new.  A Whiteheadian approach to the world religions is on the side of the liberals.  

Moreover, it sees something Abrahamic -- indeed Islamic -- in the more liberal approach.  For Whiteheadians as for all serious Muslims, part of healthy religion lies in freedom from idolatry: that is, freedom from clinging to finite things as if they were infinite.  When inherited modes of thinking, no matter how wise, become objects of ferocious clinging, such that they cannot be questioned or revised, they have become idols in one's life, and thus substitutes for the divine reality, who forever calls human into fresh interpretations of inherited traditions.  This is where a liberal arts approach to religion and an Islamic approach to religion come together.  Both are critical of idolatry.

Christianity: A Call to Listen

The other voice from which I speak is that of a believing Christian who has been actively involved in dialogues with Buddhists and Muslims for many years.  When I speak from a Christian point of view, I bring with me a Whiteheadian or process understanding of Christianity.  This means that I envision Christianity, not so much a prescribed path to be traveled with an already-defined destination, but rather as a way of walking that can accommodate many different paths. This way does not require repeating the beliefs of Jesus or imitating his every action.  This would be idolatry.   But it does involve a desire to walk in Christ’s footsteps, day by day and moment by moment.  As John Cobb puts it, the desire of Christians is “to be open to God in our way and our time, as Jesus was in his way and his time.”

With its emphasis on openness, a Whiteheadian approach to Christianity is continuous with Christian traditions that emphasize humility and listening to others  and welcoming the stranger as defining characteristics of an authentic Christian spirituality.  Christian traditions that emphasize these three traits are in tension with more aggressive Christian orientations that emphasize proclaiming the gospel in word and deed, even before listening to others and finding out about their own experience, and protecting oneself from others, including strangers, who might sully Christian purity.  Historically these two orientations have been in conflict with one another.  Some Christians have gravitated toward a theology of openness and others toward a theology of self-protection, some toward a theology of listening and others toward a theology of proclamation.  

In Western Christianity one of the most inspiring examples of a theology of listening is in the monastic order of the Benedictines, whose ways of thinking can well be appropriated, and are appropriated, in lay settings, and whose approach to Christian life resembles Whiteheadian approach in many respects.  The Benedictines envision the Christian life as a combination of work and prayer in ordinary life neither to the exclusion of the other; and they emphasize that this combination is best accomplished in community with others, with a deep impulse toward hospitality to strangers.  Similarly Whiteheadian Christians emphasize these things, adding that "community" includes plants and animals, hills and rivers, trees and stars, as well as other human beings.   This enriched understanding of community is quite consistent with Benedictine thinking, which itself involves a commitment to be faithful to places and not just people.

But the similarity between Whiteheadian Christianity and Benedictine Christianity runs still deeper, and it has to do with what one Benedictine author, Joan Chittister, calls a spirituality of awareness as distinct from a spirituality of consolation. (WD 24). A spirituality of consolation identifies spiritual well-being with consoling and peaceful states of consciousness, such that everyday emotional states -- such as boredom and sadness and sleepiness -- are thought to be less spiritual than heightened states of consciousness.  On the other hand, a spirituality of awareness is more Buddhist in tone, in that it identifies spiritual well-being with mindful awareness of what is happening in each present moment, whatever is happening.  Chittister says that Benedictine spirituality is oriented toward the latter.  She then explains that, for Benedictines, the very heart of this mindful awareness is listening: that is, feeling the feelings of others, human and non-human alike, with sensitivity to what is given for experience.

What, then, is this listening?  For Chittister and other Benedictines listening is a metaphor for feeling the feelings of others with an interest in affirming and honoring their well-being.   It is noteworthy that this way of feeling is called listening rather than seeing, because as most of us know through the experience of listening to music listening has quality that is not always present in seeing.   In seeing things we often have a sense that there is a dichotomy, a separation, between subject and object.  In looking at a table, for example, the table can feel like it is out there, two or three feet in front of our eyes, whereas we are in here, two inches behind our eyeballs.  Not all visual perception has this quality, but some of it does.

On the other hand, in listening to music that we enjoy, the dichotomy between "outside" and "inside" is not at all that sharp, because the sounds that we hear out there in the room do not have sharp edges in our phenomenal field, and they are also in here within our minds.  It is very difficult if not impossible to separate our listening to the music from the music itself.   They seem to be two side of one coin.  This does not mean that, even as we listen to the music, we cannot also separate ourselves from it analyzing it as we listen.  But the "object" from which we separate ourselves, namely the music, is within us, not outside us.  There is a sense in which, for good or ill, we are the music being listened to, even as we can also reflect on the music and thus transcend it.

Chittister's point, then, is that Benedictines understand Christian vocation as a call to listen --  that is, to feel the feelings of others with an interest in affirming and honoring their well-being -- and that this listening is not unlike listening to music.  The things that we hear, namely the feelings of others and the others who feel them, are part of who and what we are, even as they are more than us and we are more than them.  This listening has a wisdom to it, because, in feeling the feelings of others, we understand who they are, what their aims are, what they are seeking, what is important to them.  In this sense the listening is also a seeing, if by "seeing" we mean being illumined, that is, becoming aware of something that we were not aware of beforehand.  But it is an intuitive and empathic illumination, not a clear and distinct illumination, because it is dealing with things -- namely feelings -- that do not have clear edges.  Equally important, the listening may be wrong.  We may think we are hearing what others say, and thus feeling their feelings, only to realize that we were not hearing them at all, because we were projecting too much onto them from our own experience.  Thus the listening involves and requires a commitment to keep listening and to be willing, amid this listening, to be corrected again and again.  The Benedictine claim, then, is that this listening and this commitment to listen are part of the very substance of Christian spirituality, especially as it accents a spirituality of awareness.  The listening need not occur only with the ears, but can also occur with the help of the eyes and with touch and with a host of other capacities, including the imagination.  The unique feature of listening is that it is empathic.  It is in the words of Saint Benedict, "listening with the eyes of the heart."  

Whiteheadians who hear Benedictines speak of "listening with the eyes of the heart" will feel a natural resonance with their way of thinking.   Like the Benedictines, Whitehead affirms that empathic feeling – pre-linguistic feeling the feelings of others – is the ground of all immediate experience and he affirms that active and reflective responses to what is felt come after, not before, the empathy.   Whitehead's Process and Reality proposes that in the beginning of each moment of human experience, and in the beginning of each moment of divine consciousness, there is a taking into account – a prehending, in Whitehead’s word – of something that is given for experience.  In human consciousness this "something that is given for experience" may be a person or an animal; an energy in the body or a dimly-discerned fantasy in the imagination; a memory from the past or a hope for the future; or it may simply be the internal chattering of the mind.  Ultimately, says Whitehead, the something that is given for experience is the universe itself as expressed in, but also more than, the particular object that is given for experience.  Whitehead coins the term "concrescence" to name the way in which the many things of the universe "become one" in the immediacy of the moment.

If we look at the process of concrescence from a third-person perspective, as if it were something we were diagramming on a blackboard, we might say that the already-determined universe is in one place, just to the left of a process of experiencing.  We might draw it like this:

The snowflakes on the left represents the already-decided events of the past; the clouds on the right represent not-yet-decided events in the future; the point of intersection represents the vantage point of the experiencing subject, as that subject prehends (takes into account) the already-decided past and not-yet-decided future; and the flames represent the various ways in which the prehending subject can integrate the past and future (as potentiality) into a meaningful whole in the present.   The many events in the past are the items that “become one” in the process of concrescence, such that the process of concrescence is itself, in Whitehead’s words, a “concrescence of the universe.” (PR 51) The letter I in the center of the middle flame represents that fact that this possibility for integrating the influences is the “ideal” possibility, yielding maximum harmony and intensity for the experiencing subject relative to the situation at hand.  In process thought this ideal is understood to be from God, and the experiencing subject feels this possibility with an inner eros to realize it, thus participating in the very eros of God.  Indeed, the hoped-for and energetically-charged ideal is one way in which God is present in each and every moment of experience.  This is the way the process of concrescence is often depicted in introductions to Whitehead’s philosophy.

However, if we jump inside the diagram, or perhaps better, turn away from the diagram altogether and imagine ourselves inside the process of the many becoming one, we realize that the universe -- the many that are becoming one -- is not "back there" to the left but rather "right here"  where we are sitting or standing or lying down.  If we are talking to another person, the universe is present as this person, right in front of us, with whom we are talking; if we are eating a meal, the universe is this food, on our plate, that we are eating; if we are mourning the death of a loved one, the universe is this loved one, who is now absent from us, whom we miss dearly.  To be sure, these realities do not exhaust the whole of the universe, and it is good to think about other things, too.  We cannot always focus on the food on our table or on the people we are talking to.  But they are themselves incarnations of the whole of the universe as present within our experience, and we meet the universe through them.  Each face, each blade of grass, each frog, each dream, is given for experience -- and our task is to receive and creatively respond to what is given.   As Buddhists emphasize, we are always and inevitably in the present moment of experiencing something and this moment begins with an act of reception, of feeling something, of welcoming a stranger.  In the beginning is the listening.

As a moment of experience occurs, this listening is filled with aliveness.  It is part of Whitehead calls the subjective immediacy of experience itself.  But in the course of a human life this immediacy is perishing from one moment to the next, such that a person can never hold onto it.  We can enjoy the immediacy or suffer the immediacy or sleep through the immediacy, but we can never cling to it changes from moment to moment, as do we ourselves.  Whiteheadian thinkers are often called "process" thinkers, and the word "process"  is meant to name both the process of experiencing itself, as begins with listening, but also to suggest the reality is first and foremost a process of flux and flow, changing and every instant and new at every moment, such that there is much to love and appreciate, but nothing so solid that it can be held onto forever.  This idea is very Buddhist, insofar as Buddhists emphasize not clinging to a world in flux, and it is no accident that Whiteheadians and Buddhists have much in common, since recognize what Whitehead calls the perpetual perishing of subjective immediacy.  But the idea is also very Christian and Jewish and Muslim, because these traditions, too, recognize that the word "forever" is rightly applied only to God.   Process thinkers add that even the forever-ness of God is in process, which means that even God cannot be clung to as a solid object among solid object.  Of course, many Jews and Christians and Muslims agree.  Faith in God, they say, is not clinging to God as if God were an object among objects, but rather trusting in God as a subject among subjects, everywhere at once, who feels the feelings of the world and responds in Whitehead's words with "tender care that nothing be lost."   Many Jews and Christians and Muslims envision God, too, as responsive in just this sense.  When they pray, they do not think of God as hearing the prayer before they pray, but rather as they pray.  

This image of a universe in process, and even a God in process, has deep implications for Christians who feel called to listen.  It means that our process of listening never ceases, because there is always more to be heard, to be felt, to be prehended, to be listened to, than has yet been heard.  The spiritual life is thus an ongoing and lifelong process of conversion, in which our hearts are continually transformed by what we hear.  As one Benedictine sister, Joan Chittister, puts it:

Benedictine spirituality is the spirituality of an open heart.  A willingness to be touched.  A sense of otherness. There is no room for isolated splendor or self-sufficiency.  Here all of life becomes a teacher and we its students. The listener can always learn and turn and begin again.  The open can always be filled.  The real discipline can always be surprised by God. (WD 24)

In an age that is increasingly aware of religious pluralism and of the need on the part of religious people to listen to one another, Whitehead's philosophy can help all Christians and many others as well become better listeners and more Benedictine in spirit.  It can help facilitate a capacity for deep listening, in which the subjective aims and feelings of people of other religions are heard and understood, even when those aims are at odds with those of the listener; and in which their wisdom, expressed in words but also in sighs too deep word words, is appreciated and learned from, in a process of ongoing conversion.  For the Christian, this way of approaching other religions can unfold with a trust that wherever there is wisdom of any sort, whether in religion or science or secular humanism, this wisdom is of and from the very God revealed in Jesus, even though it may not be about the God revealed in Jesus.  As Chittister puts it, we can be "surprised by God," and often this surprise will come through the minds and hearts and faces of people of other traditions in whom God is present.  This does not mean that other religions, or our own for that matter, are completely filled with divine sweetness and light.  There is a sad and tragic side to religion, too.  A good bit of it!  

VIII.            The Truths are Many: Whitehead’s Philosophy as a Companion

to the Study of World Religions

In teaching the world’s religions, my aim is to teach the religions critically but also empathically, helping my students understand what it might be like to be inside the skin of a Hindu or Buddhist, a Muslim or Jew, looking out at the world from his or her own perspective, and inspired by the ideals of the religion at issue.

Over the years I have discovered a common pattern among some of my more conservative students.  Many of them arrive in class with their guards up, having determined in advance that if one religion is true, namely their own, then the others must be false.  To be more precise, they arrive believing that if their religion contains the most important kind of truth -- namely truth relevant to salvation -- then the other religions cannot have any of this truth, even as they might contain other less important truths.

Several years ago I was reflecting on their beliefs when the grandson of Mahatma Gandhi, Arun, visited my campus.  We were having lunch together, and I explained the situation to him.  He listened to me, paused for a while, and then quietly asked if these students were Jewish or Christian or Muslim.  I said that most of them were Christian, and he offered an interesting observation.  He explained that, at least in his own experience, members of the Abrahamic family of religions sometimes equate religion with the possession of already-revealed divine truth, whereas his grandfather equated religion with the pursuit of truth not yet attained.  

As he said this, he put his finger on something that I myself bring to the college classroom.  As I teach the world religions to college undergraduates, I bring the hope, characteristic of most college professors trained in the west, that my students will be engaged in a pursuit of truth and that they will bracket to some degree their pre-determined commitments to truths already revealed to them.  Indeed, I bring this hope not only as a liberal arts teacher but as a friend to the Abrahamic religions.  It seems to me that this emphasis on the transcendence of Truth is Abrahamic as well as Hindu, at least insofar as the Abrahamic traditions are open to continuing and progressive revelation.  For Jews and Christians and Muslims, the heart of this openness lies in a recognition that all humans are in the situation of Abraham, who, as the Bible says, was called by God into an unknown future and who had to let go of familiar securities in order to respond to that call.  For religious people today the “familiar securities” are not necessarily the physical comforts that Abraham enjoyed in Ur, but rather those psychological comforts, sometimes taken as absolute certainties, which block people from openness to other religions and from future revelation.  One of the deepest and most pernicious of these securities is that internal habit of mind which says: "I already have all the truth and there is nothing left to learn."  This internal habit is a false god in its own right, because it prevents a person from recognizing what Muslims mean when they say "Allahu Akbar" or "God is Great."  They do not simply mean that God is bigger and more powerful than all other beings.  They mean that God is a deep and all-pervading mystery, everywhere at once, who is incomparable to any finite thing we know and yet closer to us than our jugular veins.

What is interesting, though, is that about four weeks into the course, things often change, despite their initial resistance.  My students become more Gandhian, more open to continuing revelation.  The culprit is Huston Smith, whose classic text, The Worlds Religions, inspires them to be moved by the various kinds of wisdom found in each religion, despite initial inclinations to the contrary.  As Smith readily admits, his book is weak on history and social context; and it does not dwell on the darker and more oppressive sides of religious life, to which I will speak later in this essay.  This is why many teachers of world religions supplement his text with other introductory texts.[8]  

Still, at least in my own experience, Smith's book is unparalleled in its capacity to inspire students to take the wisdom of the world’s religions seriously.  He moves from religion to religion, imagining himself inside the skin of people who are drawn to the religion from the inside, and making the case for it as they might make the case for it.  The results are transforming.   Smith inspires my students not only to learn about the religions, but also to learn from them, even after they finish the class.  

Wisdom in Religion and Science

As this conversion occurs, I often see an idea emerging in their minds.  It is the idea (1) that each religion has its own distinctive wisdom, resulting from trial and error over many generations of spiritual seeking, (2) that no single religion has all the wisdom relevant to human flourishing, and (3) that there is be more inherited wisdom in all the world religions added together, than in any of them considered alone.  Smith gives my students a phrase to name this threefold possibility.  He speaks of the world's religions at their best as the distilled wisdom of the human race.  Many of my students add a fourth component to the three-fold proposal.  They begin to suspect that, even if someone pulled together all this distilled wisdom, there would still be more wisdom to discover than any of the religions have discovered.

Some of these students are science majors.  They arrive in class believing that science itself is a wisdom tradition, albeit a new one that has emerged somewhat recently in world history, compared to the more traditional religions.  As I ask these students what they appreciate about science, I often get two responses.  They appreciate the insights concerning nature that science offers, such as the idea that the universe is evolving over time and that there is indeterminacy within the very depths of matter.   And they appreciate what they like to call the scientific method.

As one who spends a great deal of time treating religions that appeal to divine revelation, I find their appreciation of scientific method quite understandable.  They like the fact that scientific method, whatever it is, does not rely on divine revelation or private mystical insights for wisdom, but rather on observation, theorizing, and replicable experiments that can confirm or falsify a theory.  For them, there is something fresh and promising in this way of seeking knowledge, particularly when compared to the worst aspects of appealing to revelation, as found in some religions.   If the unfolding of human history has involved continuing revelation, then they take science itself as part of that revelation.

This takes me, then, to what happens about the fourth week in class.  A question naturally emerges in the minds of all of these students: Has anyone tried to synthesize the best wisdom from religion and science, in such a way that is plausible to the scientific mind and yet meaningful to the advocates of the religions?  It is at this stage that I often wish that my students were simultaneously taking a course in the philosophy of Whitehead, precisely because it can help a person appreciate and interpret the wisdom of the world's religions, in a way that enriches, rather than contradicts, the methods and insights of the natural sciences.

Toward this end I have often envisioned a hypothetical student who is indeed reading a basic textbook in the world's religions while taking a course in Whitehead's Process and Reality and other works in the Whiteheadian tradition.  In particular, because she is a science major, I have usually imagined her as having read the works of David Griffin, described earlier.  All of this has impressed her, and she finds herself being disposed toward a more sympathetic, non-supernaturalist approach to the world religions.

In my imagination she shares her newly found interest in the world religions with one of her biology professors, who reminds her, as Griffin does, that religion is an activity within, not apart from, the evolutionary history of life on earth.  She agrees with her professor, and reminds the professor that scientific methods and the insights of science must likewise be outcomes of evolution and forms of adaptation, subject to the laws of physics and chemistry and to the dynamics of natural selection. This recognition of the co-evolving nature of religion and science leads her to believe that, along with Whiteheadians, that religion and science are two modes of human activity, both of which can yield wisdom concerning the nature of reality.

Whiteheadian Interpretations of the World’s Religions

Please assume then, that my hypothetical student has somehow come to life and that she is studying the world’s religions with Whiteheadian (and Griffin shaped) eyes.  In what follows I offer a sampling of the kinds of insights from the world religions that she might come to appreciate with Whitehead's help, each of which would be, from a Whiteheadian perspective, compatible with insights from science.   She would come to appreciate:

Hindu insights concerning the divine reality as personal (Saguna Brahman) and transpersonal (Nirguna Brahman) and the idea of a "continuing journey" after death until wholeness is realized.  Her Whiteheadian eyes might lead her to understand Saguna Brahman as referring that side of God which “feels the feelings” of all living beings (the consequent nature of God) and Nirguna Brahman as a name for the reservoir of pure potentiality (the primordial nature of God)  that is beyond personal characteristics.[9]  The gods and goddesses of Hinduism might then be understood as diverse faces through which God is discerned, analogous to the colors of a prism through which divine light shines.  Karma would be understood as a description of the fact that, in each moment of existence, a human being finds himself or herself in conditions (inner and outer) that are partly the result of personal decisions made in the past, but to which he or she can creatively respond in the present moment itself, thus helping bring about alternative destinies for the future.  And the continuing journey would be understood as the journey of a soul toward what David Ray Griffin calls peaceable selfhood, which can be understood in terms of absorption into the consequent nature of God with no semblance of individuality remaining, or as everlasting communion in which individuality is completed.

Buddhist insights concerning the interconnectedness of all things; the impermanence of all things; the illusion of have a skin-encapsulated ego; and the ultimate reality of Sunyata (Emptiness).  She would understand these claims as referring to the fact that all beings are indeed present in all other beings such that nothing exists all by itself; that the universe is, in Whitehead's words, "perpetually perishing" in its subjective immediacy, such that even the good things in life cannot be clung to forever; that human beings are themselves a series of experiences extending from birth (and perhaps before) to death (and perhaps after) in which the "subject" is identical with the act of experiencing itself and partly composed of the world that is experienced; and that the ultimate reality of the universe is a spontaneous or self-structuring creativity of which even God is an expression.

Jain insights  concerning  the intrinsic value of all life and the value of living non-violently in relation to life.  Whiteheadians can understand this to mean that all living beings are subjects for themselves and not simply objects for others, and that their subjectivity deserves respect in its own right.  A non-violent approach to animals as well as humans is a "truthful" relationship to them, which itself leads to a peaceful release from the violent aspects of acquisitive consciousness.

Confucian insights  concerning the self as person-in-community who finds sacred value in family and community life; who lives in accordance with "li" or the connective patterns of the universe-in-process, as expressed in custom; who walks within the larger context of a trinity of heaven-earth-humanity.  Whiteheadians can understand the trinity to refer to the whole of the universe is a seamless web of interdependent existence, with visible (earthly) and invisible (heavenly) dimensions; they can understand "li" to refer to the patterns of relationship that have emerged over time, creative conformity to which helps people to live harmoniously with one another and become more fully human in the process; and they can understand the Confucian emphasis on family life as expressive of the fact that the divine part of the trinity is found in, not apart from, fidelity to the bonds of relationship on earth.

Taoist insights concerning divine presence as the Way of the universe itself, which can never be grasped but always be trusted.  Whiteheadians can understand this to name the divine reality as present in the universe in a continuous and ever-adaptive way as a directive and creative energy within human life and the whole of the cosmos.  The "energy" of God would not be the physical energy of the universe per se, but rather the divine eros itself, as incarnationally present throughout the whole of life through divine subjective forms.

Islamic insights  concerning the unity of God (unity) who is both infinitely near (tashbih) and infinitely distant (tanzih) and who seeks the development of societies, not just individuals, that dwell in truthful sensitivity to the divine. Whiteheadians can understand this unity to refer to the all inclusive spaciousness of the divine as it embraces the whole of existence; they can understand the distance to refer to the fact that God is always more than anyone's concept of experience of God, and they can understand the nearness to mean that God is within each living being as a lure toward wholeness.  Following the lead of Muhammad Iqbal, who was himself influenced by Whitehead, they can understand Prophet Muhammad as a mouthpiece through whom divine aims for communal wholeness -- for what Iqbal called "spiritual democracy" -- were revealed in the Qur'an.  And, again following Iqbal, they can understand the vision of Islam to include a recognition that humans can live free from ethnic and blood relations with a deeper sense of the spacious inclusiveness -- the tawhid -- of the divine, in cooperative relationship with a dynamic and evolving cosmos that is itself filled with divine energy.

Jewish insights concerning covenantal relations with God that are realized in fidelity to the bonds of relationship; the hallowing of everyday life through tradition and ritual; the reality of prophetic imagination; and the importance of the "sabbath" as (in Abraham Heschel's words) the sacred in time.  Whiteheadians can understand these covenantal relations as part of the give-and-take of divine human relations over time; they can understand the hallowing of life through tradition and ritual as a recognition that the whole of ordinary life can be a context for sacred awareness; they can understand the prophetic imagination as human attention to the indwelling lure of God as it presents contrasts between "what is and has been" and "what can be and should be," and they can understand the sabbath as naming both a dimension of the divine life -- the peace of the consequent nature -- and a quality of human life in relationship that can be intentionally observed one day of the week, but felt and lived from in many days of the week.

Indigenous insights concerning the kinship of all life and on invisible planes of existence with which harmony can be established.   Whiteheadians can understand the kinship to refer to the fact that human beings are indeed biological and spiritual kin to other creatures, both because humans arise from biological evolution along with all other creatures and also because they share with other creatures the reality of subjectivity.  Indeed, Whiteheadians can be open to the possibility, recognized in many different indigenous traditions, that communication can occur between species through hybrid prehensions, empathic conformity to the subjective states of others, humans and non-humans alike.  And, along with indigenous traditions and numerous others, Whiteheadians will appreciate the possibility that there may be invisible beings (living ancestors, spirits, jinn, angels) who, if actual, are filled with subjective immediacy of their own unique kind.  The latter possibility derives from the fact, emphasized by Whitehead, that three-dimensional space as discerned by the visual senses is but part of a larger space-time continuum (Whitehead called it the extensive continuum) in which other kinds of actualities might exist.

All of these insights make sense from a Whiteheadian perspective.  I do not include Christianity here, because I will be referring to it at the end of this essay in a more extensive way, proposing that, at least for Christians, part of the very heart of Christian spirituality lies in listening to, and being transformed by, many of the insights named above.  My point here though, is to illustrate how, in these and other ways Whitehead assists in what Gandhi called "friendly readings" of the many world religions that can complement, but not replace, a more critical reading of the religions that is sensitive to the many ways in which they encourage unnecessary violence in the world.  

What about the Qur’an?

A special word is in order, though, about the three Abrahamic religious traditions with their emphases on inspired texts, and perhaps especially Islam, since among the three it has the highest view of sacred scripture.  Can Whitehead contribute to a “friendly reading” of the Islamic claim that the Qur’an is the divine word of God and worthy of respect precisely because it has a divine origin?

Some Whiteheadians are inclined to say “no.”  David Ray Griffin argues that a Whiteheadian point of view necessarily requires a rejection both of ontological supernaturalism, in which it is claimed that the divine reality can (or does) interrupt the normal causal relations of the world and epistemological supernaturalism, in which it is claimed that the divine reality can (or does) override human finitude, thus enabling some people to be mouthpieces for “infallible revelation” and "inerrant inspiration” (38).  What troubles Griffin most about emphases on infallibility and inerrancy is that they lead to close-mindedness, foreclosing appeals to rational discourse and empirical inquiry.  In his words: “The question of the truth of a given worldview must be settled by appeal to the normal rational-empirical criteria of self-consistency and adequacy to the facts,” not by appeal to divine authority or infallible revelation. (39)

I have imagined my hypothetical student as agreeing with Griffin on most points.  Must she, if she is true to Whitehead, also agree with him in his apparent denial of Qur’anic revelation, or is there a distinctively Whiteheadian way to understand textual revelation, that respects the status of scripture, but does not foreclose rational and empirical adjudication of truth-claims?  The answer depends on two things: (1) whether divine causation as conceived in Whitehead can, at least in principle, so influenced a person – in this case Prophet Muhammad at certain points in his life --  that this person truly becomes a vessel through whom God speaks, even as he was finite and limited in his or her own capacities for knowledge, and (2) whether a written and spoken text such as conceived in a Whiteheadian way – in this case the Qur’an -- can function in history in such a way that, in interaction with those who trust in its power, and who approach it in a spirit of peace, can reveal divine lures for feeling, both through its inexhaustible content and also in the sweetness of its sound.

It seems to me that a Whiteheadian can answer both questions in the affirmative. This need not mean that non-Muslim Whiteheadians share the same confidence in Prophet Muhammad or the Qur’an as Muslims; but it does mean that Whiteheadians can appreciate, rather than dismiss, Muslim approaches to the Qur’an, including that of Muhammad Iqbal.  Indeed, a Whiteheadian might even agree that, if it has divine origins, the Qur’an may well be infallible and inerrant, because divine wisdom is itself without fallibility and error, but then also add, as do many Muslims who emphasize ijtihad or independent judgment, that the process of interpreting the revelation is, and must be, an ongoing process, subject to human finitude and failing, that never exhausts the divine side of revelation.  Moreover, a Whiteheadian approach can also add, again with many Muslims, that the revelatory power of the text depends in part on the subjective aims and conditions of those who interpret it.  If those subjective forms and aims are themselves in accord with the indwelling lure of God, then they will be able to hear and respond to the authentic callings of the text, which are deeper than the words.  This kind of approach, it seems to me, is both faithful to the living Qur’an and yet responsive to some of Griffin’s concerns.  It leaves room for appeal to rational and empirical criteria for adjudicating competing truth claims, precisely because such appeals – a willingness to let truth speak for itself – are part and parcel of the humility of a surrendered life.  Inasmuch as a Muslim feels that the call of reason and the call of revelation are complementary rather than contradictory, it is possible to speak of infallible revelation and inerrant inspiration and, at the same time, of reason and empiricism.  The key, on the Muslim side, is to avoid the idolatry of claiming that one has mastered and thus exhausted the dynamic and inexhaustible nature of the revelation.

IX. The Metaphysics of Violence

The previous section was to show how Whitehead’s philosophy can help a person interpret the diversity in ways that are sensitive to the uniqueness of the various traditions, but that can simultaneously facilitate meaningful generalizations about the world’s religions.  What is needed is a philosophy of world religions, which itself can be corrected over time, but which helps provide perspective for interpreting the many religions.

In our time two powerful examples of this kind of philosophy have emerged.  The first is the "perennial philosophy" developed by Fritjof Schuon, Seyyed Nasr, Huston Smith, and Ken Wilber.  The second is the "process philosophy" of Alfred North Whitehead as developed by John B. Cobb. Jr, David Ray Griffin, Marjorie Suchocki, and numerous others.  

The perennial perspective and the process perspective have many things in common.  Both affirm the view, common in many world religions but also consistent with some forms of modern physics, that the universe is a multi-planed reality of which the visible world is one dimension.  Both appreciate the wisdom  the different religious types that emerge in the world's religions, ranging from the prophet who truly hears a call from a divine reality to the mystic who awakens to an ultimate reality.  Both affirm the Buddhist insight that the interconnectedness of all things makes possible the unique "suchness" of each thing, and that each thing is itself a manifestation of ultimate reality.  And yet, when it comes to questions of ultimate reality itself, they have different emphases.  This difference will take us into metaphysical considerations for the moment, but it worth identifying at the outset, in order to give a flavor for the process approach and its approach to questions of violence.

The perennial perspective typically proposes that the various world religions all point to an ultimate reality beyond personality and differentiation, which then expresses itself in the manifold nature of the world.   In Advaita Vedanta Hinduism, for example, this ultimate reality is called Nirguna Brahman, or Brahman without form.  It is beyond all characterization and beyond all finite characterizations of good and evil.  The parallel in the West is neo-Platonic thinking, which pictures an undifferentiated One which is more real than the world of manyness, and from which the world of manyness emerges.  This way of thinking deeply influenced mystical perspectives in Christianity and Judaism and also the Sufi traditions of Islam.  It led some Sufis to interpret the first part of the Shahadah in a uniquely mystical way.  The saying "There is no god but God" really means "There is nothing real but the Real."

To appreciate this mystical way of thinking, we might imagine as undifferentiated source of light which emits individual rays of light, but then emphasize that this source is more real than its rays.  We might imagine this source on the analogy of our own sun, except that it would be beyond all appearances, beyond time and space, and yet, through its self-expressive manifestations, everywhere at once.  This invisible and self expressive sun represents the ultimate reality of the universe, conceived as a pure and creative consciousness or mind, of which all things are expressions.   Whereas modern western science reduces consciousness to matter, a mere irruption of the physical brain; this more mystical perspective says that consciousness precedes matter as the ultimate reality of the universe and that all matter is a materialized or non-subtle form of consciousness.  Even the brain is congealed consciousness.  The whole of the universe, says the mystic, is alive with consciousness.

The individualized rays of the universe then represent what Chinese call the "ten thousand things" of the universe in their movement and activity.  This means that the "ten thousand things" include the atoms as the vibrate, the porpoises as they swim, the hills as they provide shelter for animals, the colts as they frolic in the fields, the children as they play, and the prophets as they call for social justice.  But it also means, less happily, that the ten thousand things include the fundamentalist Christians as they promote prejudice against people of other religions; the militant Muslims who wage aggressive jihad against infidel unbelievers; the corporate executives who make decisions that destroy forests and indigenous communities; and, to put the matter graphically but realistically,  the murderers as they murder.  All of these "rays" are of the same substance as the sun, which means that they are all expressions of the same ultimate reality.  Of course some of them -- let the murderer be our example  -- does not realize this.  The murderer makes his decision to murder, because he wrongly believes that he is separate from the person he murders, failing to recognize that he and she are mutual expressions of ultimate reality.  The need, then, is for the murderer to awaken to his own true self, which is always already identical with the ultimate reality of the universe.

Process Philosophy

A process or Whiteheadian philosophy can agree with much of what has just been said.   Whitehead speaks of a pure agency -- a fathomless and formless Creativity, beyond good and evil -- that is manifest anywhere and everywhere in our universe.  Precisely because Whitehead did not develop the idea very much,  Whiteheadian thinkers have interpreted it, and continue to interpret it, in many different ways.  One way is to gain guidance from perennial philosophy -- and also of many forms of non-dualistic mysticism -- and speak of Creativity as the ultimate reality of the universe, of which all things in all their activities are expressions.  This interpretation of Creativity can include an affirmation that Creativity is pure consciousness, if by consciousness we mean something like "pure experience" or "pure subjectivity," because for Whitehead, the myriad entities of our universe are indeed forms of pure experience or pure subjectivity.  This can also include recognition that there are as yet unmanifest expressions of Creativity, because there are event that will occur in the future --  whether the frolicking of colts or the killing of innocents -- that have not occurred in the present.  Certain forms of mysticism might then awaken to this Creativity, realizing that it truly is the ultimate reality of the universe, because it is not reducible to anything beyond itself.  He or she could then rightly say: This is nothing real but the Real.  There is nothing creative but the Creativity.  All of this is imaginable from a process point of view, and the mystic's awakening would be genuine and valid.

Where process philosophy differs from perennial phillosophy, however, is in responding to three interrelated questions, all of which have profound implications for a response to violence.

·         What is the ontological status of the murderer's decision to pull the trigger? Was it actually the product of ultimate reality and only apparently the product of the murderer?

·         Is the ultimate reality more real than the universe itself, such that the ten thousand things and their activities are mere appearance, compared to the undifferentiated unity of ultimate reality?

·         Is the ultimate reality God? Is it the One to whom theists point when they say "God shares in our suffering and joys?" or "We are saved by the grace of Amida Buddha?" or "Lord hear my prayer?" or "Beloved, come near."  Is it the Thou with whom we have I-Thou relations?

In order to understand how process philosophy approaches these questions, let us first consider how a perennialist might answer them.  He or she might say something like: "Just as we do not imagine rays from this sun as acting on their own, but rather as following their course through space as a result of the sun's generative capacities; so we must understand the murderer's decision, not as something belonging to an independent agent, but rather as the expression of single timeless decision, made by the source of the universe.  And yes indeed, this ultimate source is more real than the universe.  Our ultimate destiny is to realize that, in the last analysis, we were not truly real, because only the Real is real.  And to be sure, this ultimate reality is indeed God, albeit in God in transpersonal form which completely transcends I-Thou relations.  In ultimate reality there is no I orThou to be related. There is just the pure consciousness of ultimate reality."

A process response to these questions will be different, and in order to understand it, we might first consider how a murder victim's mother who is Christian might respond to what the perennialist has said, and then how a Zen Buddhist might also respond.  Both of them would illustrate the process alternative to the perennialist response.

The mother might say: "I am doing my best to forgive the man who killed our daughter, but I cannot pretend that he was a mere puppet on an ontological string.  It was he who made the decision, not an ultimate reality beyond him.  And for that matter, when I pray to God, I do not have in mind an undifferentiated unity beyond good and evil.  I have in mind the Abba of Jesus, to whom he himself prayed for strength and power.  My God is a Thou, not an It.  And I have faith that, with God's help, I can forgive the murderer and grow beyond this pain."

The Zen Master might say: "I agree with the mother.  In Zen we are suspicious of attempts to locate an ultimate source of existence beyond the world of appearance, because these attempts take us away from the true presence of ultimate reality.  Ultimate reality is not something beyond or apart from the immediacy of each moment.  It is the pure presence of things as they are, right in front of me. This pure presence includes the things we see and feel and hope and taste, and it includes the self-structuring creativity of each present moment, as it responds to each situation. The murder's decision to pull the trigger was a tragic example of that self-structuring creativity, but it was not reducible to something beyond itself.

Having heard the mother of the murder victim speak, the Zen Master might then add:  "And as for the question of whether this self-structuring creativity is God, I cannot say.  The creativity in each moment is indeed an irreducible reality, but it does not sound at all like the God of whom Christians speak, or even of the Amida Buddha of whom my Pure Land friends speak in Buddhism.  If there is a God, and we Zen Buddhists are agnostic on that question, even God would be an example of self-structuring creativity.  Even God would be an expression of what we call emptiness or pure suchness.  Why don't we just let suchness be suchness and God be God?"

Process philosophy, then, agrees with the spirit of these Christian and Zen approaches.  It differs from perennial philosophy in emphasizing that the ultimate reality of the universe -- Creativity -- is not an agent distinct from the agency of particular entities, but is instead the particularized agency and pure suchness of each one of them, day-by-day and, still more ultimately, moment-by-moment.  It is the self-structuring creativity of the murder victim's mother as the laments the death of her daughter, the self-structuring creativity of the murderer who pulled the trigger, and the self-structuring creativity of the Zen Buddhist who, in the freedom of the Zen mind, feels free to break our stereotypes of mystics and side with the mother.

IX.                Summary and Conclusion:

How Many Ultimates Are There?

A Whiteheadian version of complementary pluralism offers two gifts relative to the need for peace between religions.  First, it offers a philosophy of complementary pluralism that offers distinctive interpretations of peace, religion, and prospects for peace between religions, which may be helpful to people of different religions and no religion as they seek to learn from various world religions.  Such learning is part of what can help promote a culture of peace in our world.  While this kind of learning can occur in formal religious settings, it can also occur in higher education, in the context of which, as I have tried to show, Whitehead's philosophy provides a helpful companion to the study of world religions.

Second, as developed by Christian theologians, Whitehead’s philosophy supports a theology of complementary pluralism that can help Christians and others learn from the many world religions in ways that complement rather than contradict many of the core insights of their own traditions.  This twofold contribution is supported by ten key ideas which, as stated below, offer a summary of this essays key proposoals.

1.          Peace.  The peace toward which people of different religions rightly strive consists of local communities, often multi-religious, in which there is a common spirit of respect and care for the community of life.  This peace is not the result of political arrangements alone, but also the product of a "culture of peace" to which many religions can contribute, each in its unique way.  A culture of peace is not a static state of affairs into which people enter, but rather an ongoing process of beauty-in-the-making which is fragile, participatory, and creative; and which includes peace with the earth and with animals as well as peace between people.  

2.          Peaceable Selfood.   The culture of peace has an outer dimension and an inner dimension.  The outer or visible dimension consists of observable practices which are conducive to respect and care for the community of life.  These range from simple forms of social etiquette (Confucian "li") to kindly treatment of animals (Jain ahimsa) to a sharing wealth (Islamic zakat).  The inner dimension of peace consists of the subjective aims and forms of the people who undertake these practices.  This subjective side of peace can be understood as a journey toward peaceable selfhood.  The peace of this peaceable selfhood is characterized by two forms of experiential well-being, harmony and intensity, which together might be called lived beauty.  Over long periods of history and through trial and error, different religions have yielded different but complementary insights, some but not all of which concern "ultimates" of one sort or another, but all of which are relevant to the ongoing journey toward lived beauty or peaceable selfhood, which begins with a journey toward peace on earth but may also continue after death.   The various forms of salvation that have been discovered and revealed in the world's religions are forms of lived beauty or peaceable selfhood.

3.          Three Forms of Truthfulness.  The insights of the various world religions that are pertinent to peace and  peaceable selfhood have been internalized in one or several of three forms of truthfulness: (a) truthful beliefs, as exemplified in the philosophical and theological teachings of the many world religions, (b) truthful awareness, as illustrated in a variety of subjective forms ranging from being mindfully present in each present moment, through empathic listening to others in ways that are sensitive to their own internal states, to sheer gratitude for the gift of life, all of which are attuned to certain dimensions of the depths in the nature of things; and (c) truthful living, which occurs when human beings willingly respond to the call of the moment through simple acts of kindness, laughter, shared struggle, and sorrow.[10]   In seeking the wisdom in a given religion, students of the world religions should be especially sensitive to truthful awareness and truthful living, both of which are missed if there is an inordinate focus on truthful belief.

4.          Two forms of Learning.   In the world religions the three kinds of truthfulness are realized through at least two forms of learning: learning from mind to body, as occurs in theological and philosophical interchange, but also from body to mind, as occurs in various experiences of meditation, music, prayer, manual labor, social service, and face-to-face interactions such as shared meals. [11]   Learning from the religions can occur through both forms of learning, as illustrated in various forms of inter-religious dialogue that emphasize shared activities of service as ritual as a context for mutual transformation.

5.          The Power of Listening.  With time and patience, empathy and imagination, human beings can "feel the feelings" of people in other religions, and thus grow in their sensitivities to the subjective aims and motivations of others even when, at first, of those other people may seem quite unfamiliar and strange.  This capacity for feeling the feelings of others can help people of different religions listen deeply to the different beliefs of traditions, but also appreciate the "truthful awareness" of people in other religions, even when they may not agree with the formal beliefs by which those others interpret the awareness. [12]

6.          The Reality of Violence.  Amid the different kinds of wisdom that religions possess, the religions can and do fall into sin, which is best defined as unnecessary violence against creation, and also into original sin, which is best defined as habits of violence that are transmitted from generation to generation, even apart from the intentions and aspirations of those in a current generation who inherit them.  A complement to this proposal is that, despite their falling into various kinds of sin and original sin, there is hope, because the world's religions are evolving processes capable of growth and change, such that, as Whitehead-influenced thinkers ranging from John Cobb (Christianity) and Muhammad Iqbal (Islam) recognize, there can be progress, even in religion.

7.          The Possibility of Progress in Religion.  Religions are evolving traditions that can grow and change over time, sometimes for the worst and sometimes for the better.  They change for the better when they transcend their impulses toward violence against creation.  One means of progress is through interreligious dialogue, amid which individuals and communities within religious can gain insights from other religions that help compensate for the oversights within their own.

8.          Four Starting Points for Dialogue.  There are four attitudes that religious people can bring to interreligious dialogue: (1) a covenant with mystery, trustful that what Whitehead calls "the depths in the nature of things" is always more than anyone's concept or experience of it; (2) a recognition that all religious truth is inspired by an indwelling and divine lure toward wisdom, (3) a recognition that people have been inspired toward different insights, not all of which concern God, and (4) a willingness to change, cognizant that the religious life is itself an evolving process.

9.          Multiple Truths.  The world's religions have yielded at least twelve core insights, named below.  The practical value of naming these core insights in advance of studying the religions is that, as people of different religions are dialogue with each other, they can be on the lookout for them, and they can come to appreciate ways in which different religions have seen deeply into them.   None of these insights can be completely reduced to the other, and each reveals certain irreducible aspects of what Whitehead calls "the depths in the nature of things."  

The twelve insights fall into two general clusters.  The first cluster consists of insights pertinent to the nature of the whole of existence, divine or otherwise.  The second cluster consists of insights pertinent to the divine reality of theistic traditions, when that divine reality is understood as a Thou, or a self-conscious reality in its own right.  Six key insights of the first cluster concern:

·   Pure Presence of Things as They Are:  the irreducibility of "the pure presence of things as they are, right in front of me," which Buddhists sometimes call the "suchness" or "as-it-isness" of things.

·   Intrinsic Value: the irreducibility of each living being as a subject of its own life, such it has value in and of itself, apart from its usefulness to others, as emphasized in Jainism.

·   Karma. the irrevocability of each finite human decision as it responds to what is given, which is highlighted in numerous religions that emphasize karma and personal responsibility.

·   Inter-being:  the absolute interconnectedness or inter-being of all things, as highlighted in numerous traditions, ranging from Buddhism and Hinduism to indigenous traditions.  A corollary to this insight is the Buddhist idea that the human self, understood as a skin-encapsulated ego cut off from the world by the boundaries of the skin, is an illusion.  By contrast, says the Buddhist, the true self is composed of all other things, such that there is no sharp divide between the subjective self and the objective world.  This insight is related to the Confucian insight, also found in many other traditions, that a human self is a person-in-community, not a person-in-isolation.

·   Perpetual Perishing. The impermanence or perpetual perishing of subjective immediacy, as emphasized in various traditions that stress the need for "letting go" of things when they pass away.

·   Pure Activity. The continuous creativity of which all things, even holy realities, are expressions.  It is manifest as the passage of time, the interconnectedness of all things, the pure presence of things as they are, the intrinsic value of each living being, and also as the self-structuring creativity of each present moment.   In other words, aspects of the pure activity are disclosed in the five previous insights, and the five insights point to various ways in which the pure activity is manifest in the universe as we know it.  It is important to emphasize that, in its manifestation as self-structuring creativity, the pure activity transcends good and evil and can unfold in ways that are peaceful and violent, tragic and horrible.   Moreover, in addition to its already-existing manifestations in the form of determinate beings whose self-structuring activity has already occurred, there are also instances of this self-structuring activity that have not yet occurred.  This suggests that pure activity has un-manifest as well a manifest dimensions.  In both of these two aspects – the manifest and un-manifest – the pure activity is sometimes called "the ultimate reality" of which all things, even the gods and goddesses, are expressions.  In Hinduism this ultimate reality is called Nirguna Brahman; in Buddhism it is sometimes called Sunyata (Emptiness); in Chinese traditions it is sometimes called ch’i ; in mystical traditions in the Abrahamic traditions it is sometimes called the Godhead; and in the philosophy of Whitehead it is called Creativity.

As we study the various world religions, we find inklings of the six insights just named, all of which pertain to the ultimate nature of reality.  Even as they are linked together in the notion of pure activity, they can also be separated.   In Zen, for example, emphasis is placed on “the pure presence of things as they are, right in front of me,” but not so much pure activity in its un-manifest dimensions.  On the other hand, in certain forms of apophatic mysticism, emphasis is placed on transcending “the pure presence of things as they are, right in front of me” in the interests of intuitively realizing the un-manifest and thus formless aspect of pure activity.  Moreover, the six insights can be appropriated in ostensibly non-religious as well as religious contexts.  In western existentialism, for example, emphasis is placed on the ultimacy of finite decisions in the present moment, but not on the ultimacy of interconnectedness or the intrinsic value of each living being.  Thus we have the image of a lonely individual, alienated from the world, who has realized that he and he alone is responsible for his destiny, without support from others.   But in many traditions, as the description of pure activity suggests, the first five insights are gathered into the unity of a single concept, such as Nirguna Brahman or Sunyata, which is then said to denote the ultimate reality of the universe.

In addition to the insights named above, the world's religions have also arrived as a set of insights that are often gathered under the rubric of the a word such as “God” or “Allah” or “Adonai” or “Saguna Brahman” or “the Great Spirit” or “Amida Buddha.”  If we think of the first cluster as naming the ultimate reality of the universe; then this second cluster names what might be called the ultimate actuality of the universe: that One-embracing-the-many to whom religious people surrender in faith and trust, who has will and purposes for the world.  Theistic traditions around the world have variously awakened to what we can call:

·   A  Universal Compassion: an unbounded empathy, everywhere at once, which seeks the well-being of each living being and which may also shares in the sufferings and joys of all living beings,

·   A  Universal Mind: an unbounded wisdom that contains pure potentialities for all that can happen in the world, knowing what is possible as well as what is actual.

·   An Indwelling Lure toward Wholeness: an indwelling and yet ever-adaptive lure toward satisfying existence within the whole of life and creation, which in human life functions as an "inner teacher" or "inner guide" toward wisdom, compassion, and freedom.

·   The Reality of Cosmic Judgment: a cosmic judgment, made on the part of a mystery at the heart of the universe, concerning the contrast between "what was" and "what could have been" and between what “needs to be” but “might not be” in the future.  This idea is clearly expressed in Abrahamic emphases on a day of judgment, and also in prophetic traditions that recognize God as on the side of the poor and powerless.

·   The Reality of Cosmic Mercy: a cosmic forgiveness that embraces human beings even apart from their sinfulness or falling short of what could have been and should be.  This idea is emphasized in Pure Land Buddhism, as exemplified in the bodhisattva Kuan-Yin, and also in the Abrahamic traditions.

·   Incarnation:  a yearning on the part of the divine mind to become enfleshed in the daily and corporate life of human beings and the whole of creation.  This idea is emphasized in Christian images of a God who became flesh in Jesus and also in other theistic traditions that emphasize the immanence of the divine in the world.

As with the case of the ontological cluster, different religious traditions can focus on one or several of these five without the others.  For example, some forms of philosophical Taoism have a profound sense of the divine as an indwelling and yet ever-adaptive lure toward wisdom that permeates the universe; but they do not emphasize this reality as a self-conscious Thou who exercises judgment or mercy.   Many but not all forms of Judaism and Islam emphasize the reality of divine wisdom and compassion, but do not emphasize the fifth insight -- divine incarnation -- out of respect for the unity of the divine. Moreover, the divine cluster, too, has its non-religious versions.  Additionally, various kinds of theism within the three Abrahamic traditions can center on mercy without judgment, or judgment without mercy.  Finally, philosophical deism in the West typically emphasizes a divine intelligence who lies behind the order of creation, but who plays no active role in creation.  This is the exact opposite of philosophical Taoism, because it emphasizes a transcendent wisdom without stressing an indwelling lure.

The question then emerges: How many ultimates are there?  A Whiteheadian approach will respond in at least seven ways.  One option is that there are at least twelve, for each of the twelve insights named above can be taken as a center around which a life can be truthfully ordered.   A second option would be to multiply the various possible combinations, in which case twelve would be a wild underestimation of the number of ultimates.   A third option would be to say two, insofar as the ontological cluster and the divine cluster form two groupings within which the insights can be gathered.   We might speak of the ultimates then as Emptiness and God, or Creativity and Amida, or the Godhead and the Great Companion, or the Abyss and the Lord.   A fourth option might be to speak of the "ultimate" as what Whitehead calls the "depths in the nature of things," from which all these insights emerge, but which forever eludes any of them.   It would be tempting then to speak of the ultimate as the One, but even a word like "the One" could suggest numerical unity over plurality, and would thus be a finite characterization.  Thus we might simply call it the Mystery and say that it is "not one, not two" and then add "and not twelve, either."  A fifth option might be to say, along with the Zen Buddhist, "Mu!," a word which literally means "not" or "nothing," but which also means, among other things, that the whole question of numbers is irrelevant, because the very notion of numbering ultimates takes us away from what is truly important, which is obedience to the call of the moment in the open present.  A sixth and equally Buddhist approach might be to say "Who cares?," because religions at their best are first and foremost about the reduction of unnecessary suffering, not about ultimates.  An inordinate concern with ultimates easily leads to greed for views, which is a manifestation of the very clinging that obstructs true awakening.  And a seventh option, which seems to me more in keeping with the kind of pluralism to which religious people are called today is: "I don't know how many there are, but tell me what is most important to you, and I will tell you what is most important to me, and let's listen to each other for a long time, after which, if we need to, we can talk about the number of ultimates."

It is tempting to say that one of these options is the true option, and the others are false.  But it seems to me that it is more in the spirit of Whitehead to recognize that, in different contexts, each of these responses can be appropriate, relative to the context at issue.  In the context of philosophical dialogue, it may be appropriate to say "at least two" in order to counter the liabilities of identist pluralism.   In the context of working together to help reduce suffering, it may be apppropriate to say "Who cares?"  In the context of interreligious dialogue in a prayerful setting, it may be appropriate to say "Let's listen."  And in the context of ending a very long essay, filled with far too many lists, we can rightly imagine that the Zen Master would rightly say, at least to me, "Mu!"   All of these responses would be "true" in context.

What is most important is to remember that religious traditions, when weaned from unnecessary violence against creation, can yield great wisdom concerning the life well-lived; that this wisdom is consonant with, not contradictory to, the wisdom of science; and that both forms of wisdom, taken together, offer hope for a small but beautiful planet.