Reality is a Process

My dialogue with Maitreyabandhu at the London Buddhist Centre

Slightly abridged transcript:

Maitreyabandhu: So what we're going to do this evening is have a conversation—obviously between Matt and me—about process philosophy and Buddhism. Really simply, that's what we're doing. To put it very simply, the central act of Buddhism—what Buddhism is really about, whether it's here in Bethnal Green, Tibet, Burma, or wherever—is that a Buddhist goes for refuge to the Three Jewels. Yes, go for refuge to the Three Jewels. By that I mean you change yourself in accordance with the Three Jewels. You move toward the Buddha, who represents the transcendental ideal of Buddhism and is, of course, the figure we have on our shrine. Then you move toward all those teachings that help you toward that transcendental ideal—not just thoughts about things but teachings that help you change yourself to become, effectively, more like the Buddha. That's the Dharma—at least, that's one way of talking about the Dharma, although today, in our discussion, I want to talk about the Dharma as being “how things really are.”
In Buddhism, the Dharma is understood in those two ways: how things really are, and all those teachings that lead to how things really are—teachings that help you change in accordance with reality. Thirdly, you go for refuge to the Sangha, all those people who have gained some transcendental insight on that journey. Buddhism is something deeply communal, and I want us to talk about that a bit later on.
The language of Buddhism is gachāmi buddhaṃ saraṇaṃ gachāmi—Buddhists have chanted that all over the world. Buddhaṃ saraṇaṃ gachāmi means “I go for refuge to the Buddha.” Dhammaṃ saraṇaṃ gachāmi means “I go for refuge to the Dharma,” and Saṅghaṃ saraṇaṃ gachāmi means “I go for refuge to the Sangha.” Gachāmi means “I go.” In other words, I act in ways to change my state of mind. I go—not “I think,” not “I believe,” but “I go.”
The reason we're having Philosophy East is that, even though Buddhism is skeptical about theory and lacks a final metaphysics, the Buddha very much valued clear thinking, particularly about muddled views and muddled thinking. He particularly valued that. I want to start our conversation with the idea that we are all enthralled to a kind of myth. We see things—part of the meaning of Buddha (which is a title that means “Awake”) is that we are not awake, because we are enthralled to various myths about life. So I thought we'd see whether Matt's philosophy—the philosophy of Schelling and Alfred North Whitehead—can help us go for refuge to the Three Jewels.
It's a bit odd, because you didn't expect this until I talked to you about it, but you've managed very well so far—

Matt Segall: We haven't started yet!

[Laughter]

Maitreyabandhu: Let's see how we go; we'll probably end up in a violent disagreement, I'm sure.
Instead of starting with the Buddha, then the Dharma, then the Sangha, I want to start with the Dharma, because that's where we'll have most to say. By “Dharma” here I mean how things really are—the true nature of the world and ourselves. Buddhism is primarily concerned with that. It's a wisdom tradition: its concern is to move toward how things really are, and, at its best, that's what philosophy tries to do.
When I was young, I assumed philosophy was just a complex word game—and in some branches it can get rather like that—but serious philosophers, serious thinkers of any kind, are always concerned with how we can understand ourselves and the world.
One issue I experience with myself and other Buddhists who come along to the London Buddhist Centre is that we all come to Buddhism with a myth, a view of things that is not a Buddhist view. Put very simply, it's the myth of secular humanism, or the mechanistic myth: the idea—growing stronger at the moment—that mind is like a computer. People seriously wonder whether they could upload their mind to the internet. The assumption is that mind is basically computing, that human beings are information-gathering devices.
So one myth people bring is that the mind is like a computer; that I'm completely separate from the world; that there's a complete boundary between me and the world, even between me and my body. Charles Taylor, the Canadian philosopher, talks of a “buffered self,” the idea of a complete boundary between me and the world, contrasted with a pre‑modern “porous self.”
The core delusion Buddhism tries to overcome is the idea of a really existing, fixed, unchanging “me” in here and a really existing world of things out there. In modern versions, that becomes a dead world of matter, unreachable from the living world of consciousness locked inside my brain, which disappears when I die.
That long rambling introduction over, I thought this would be a good place to start: Is there any way in which Schelling and Whitehead—and your own thought—can help us break down that dichotomy in thought between a really existing self in here (probably just an epiphenomenon of my brain, like a computer) and a world of dead matter out there?

Matt Segall: Yes. I think so. There’s a lot of overlap here between these two philosophers. Has everyone heard of Whitehead? A few of you. What about Schelling—the German idealist Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph von Schelling? A couple. Not a massively philosophical audience, but we’ll get there. You mentioned the transcendental ideal of the Buddha—that we want to be like the Buddha—and, interestingly, “transcendental idealism” is the name Immanuel Kant, this German philosopher, gave to his own approach. It’s different from Buddhism, obviously, because for Kant the self is very important; the self and the mind are really the source of reality. Schelling was one of the next‑generation German philosophers to inherit this idealistic point of view from Kant. More of you have probably heard of Hegel, who was Schelling’s seminary roommate in Tübingen. Hegel would go on to develop an absolute idealism where, in some ways, the self balloons out to encompass all of reality. Schelling held an interesting mediating position. He recognized that there’s an imbalance here in idealistic philosophy and worried about what happens to nature, to the world, to the cosmos in this orientation. So Schelling flips the script. Rather than the Kantian view, where all of reality is brought forth by the mind and is just an appearance for the mind, Schelling says, “Wait a minute—nature is real too.” He asks, “What must nature be like such that human consciousness—our kind of awareness and agency—could be possible?” His conclusion, in short, is that it couldn’t possibly be a machine. Nature must be living; it must be ensouled, and the human being is an expression of that living activity permeating the universe. That subject‑object dichotomy Kant tried to overcome, and Hegel overcame by, in some sense, making the mind half of that picture the whole of things—I know Hegelians on YouTube will say this doesn’t do justice to Hegel, but we only have an hour and a half—Schelling tried to recognize that mind and nature are dependently co‑arising, to borrow a Buddhist concept. You can’t have one without the other, and you don’t want to over‑emphasize either side if you’re trying to move toward wholeness. The temptation is always to say, “It’s all just a machine and consciousness is an empty phenomenon reducible to mechanisms,” or to go to the opposite extreme and say, “It’s all an illusion in our minds.” Some schools of Buddhist metaphysics, when they get carried away, would say something like the Mind‑Only school. 

Maitreyabandhu: Before we go on, what do you mean by “ensouled nature,” just to make sure? 

Matt Segall: The mechanistic view is that nature is a collection of objects, all surface, with no interiority, no inner life. An ensouled view says that just as you and I have an inner perspective—feelings, emotions, motivations—so too do all the beings that compose nature. For Schelling, as for Whitehead, even what we call the non‑living world—the non‑biological world of atoms, stars, mountains, and rivers—has a kind of subjectivity. It might not be recognizable to us at first; it’s a very different, non‑human subjectivity. But “ensouled” simply means there’s that interior dimension, and as human beings we can resonate with it. Soul doesn’t need to be conceived as a separate substance; we can imagine it in a relational way, as both Schelling and Whitehead do. Similarly, Whitehead has a view I call participatory, meaning subject and object are dynamically entangled. It’s often said in spiritual circles that you don’t see the world as it is; you see it as you are. This participatory view also points out how we are shaped by the world, just as our view shapes what we take the world to be. 

In the Western modern period, everyone has heard of Descartes and his mind‑body dualism—“I think, therefore I am.” Subject and object became severed. Descartes aimed to objectify nature as everything external to the thinking subject—something measurable, calculable, controllable through mathematical models—and that project has been very successful. But its success has a shadow side: because we treated nature as something dead, we have actually killed a lot of the Earth and are in the midst of a mass extinction. Our subjectivity imagined that nature was machine‑like, so we went about making it more machine‑like. 

Maitreyabandhu: Where did that view come from, that breaking between subject and object? We’re still living in that dualism, aren’t we? 

Matt Segall: Very much so. Descartes was a soldier in the religious wars of early‑seventeenth‑century Europe, the Thirty Years’ War. There were many factions—different forms of Protestantism and the Catholic Church. Having experienced intense disagreement that led to killing, he sought a language—mathematics and science—that everyone could agree on. He created a new project for all people regardless of their religious views. Religion would be for the soul, the interior dimension; science would be about nature, because we can all agree on what we can see, measure, and experiment on. His intention was good: to bring warring religions together. But he so sharply severed the two that, a few centuries later, we’re still cleaning up the mess. We feel alienated as subjects and have paved over much of the natural world to suit our will. 

What Whitehead offers is a way to reconfigure that arrangement. He still talks in terms of subject and object, but rather than thinking of them as two totally distinct substances, he sees them temporally, processually. In each moment of our experience, our subjectivity is constituted by the past flowing into it. The objects of the past—objective data—flow into our present subjective experience. Each moment is fleeting; it perishes and itself becomes an object in the past, inherited by the next subject. 

Maitreyabandhu: What do you mean by “object” there—the past object? 

Matt Segall: For Whitehead, an object is a subject that has perished and passed into what he calls “objective immortality.” 

Maitreyabandhu: Could you unpack that? What’s an example? 

Matt Segall: In Buddhism there is “no self,” at least in one mode of talking. Whitehead renders a similar insight by saying that each of us obviously has a subjective perspective moment by moment, but the subject is momentary. Each moment a new subject is born; the subject we were has died. We inherit that past subject—hence memory. We tell a story about who we are, but we can get tangled in our story and forget to be present. We forget that subjectivity is constantly arising, and you cannot cling to the subject you think you are; it will perish. Clinging leads to suffering. 

Maitreyabandhu: So that’s very close to Buddhism. But there’s another side about the future, isn’t there? 

Matt Segall: Yes. Alongside the present subject and the past object, he talks about the future in terms of the “superject.” The superject is our capacity to anticipate what’s next—desire, intention, imagination of possibilities we’d like to realize. Our immediacy is not cut off from past and future; there are blurry edges. We’re always in tension between past and future. There is no freeze‑frame instantaneous present; it’s fuzzy on either side. 

Maitreyabandhu: Buddhism says we believe in a fixed, separate self. Your account seems very similar: you inherit past moments through stories. Much of life is guided by sense‑making narratives. Is the future somehow active here? 

Matt Segall: The future doesn’t yet exist, but it’s active in that possibilities function as lures—some more attractive than others. The future, though not actual, has a structure of potentiality. The past is settled; we can’t change it, though we can change how we interpret it. The future is open‑ended. While some things are more probable, for Whitehead absolute certainty about the future is impossible. The future is a matrix of possibilities, and they lure us. 

Maitreyabandhu: You can be lured by the negative as well as the positive—if you’re an addict, say. 

Matt Segall: Sure. Addiction often repeats the past. Past experience conditions us to expect certain futures. Whitehead lifts up creativity as the ultimate nature of reality to free us from attachment to acquired habits. We are not determined by the past. 

Maitreyabandhu: It’s easy now to think we are determined by the past—Freud, trauma, and so on. How would Whitehead respond? 

Matt Segall: What we inherit shapes us, and we can’t change the past, but trauma can foreclose our sense of an open future. Metaphysics can be instructive for spiritual life by reminding us we’re not determined by our past. We don’t have total free will—we must inherit the past—but we decide, moment by moment, how to inherit it. 

Maitreyabandhu: That decision seems important. We’re trying to reach a point of freedom, acknowledging our past without being pressured to repeat it. If there isn’t a substantial self persisting through time, does that create freedom? 

Matt Segall: Yes. Creativity is ultimate. Everything is new each moment, including pebbles, grass, and stars. Creativity is not blind randomness; it’s guided by what Whitehead calls “God.”

Maitreyabandhu: We’ll come back to that, but carry on. 

Matt Segall: Whitehead’s conception of the divine is unlike anything you’ve heard. He speaks of two poles: the primordial nature and the consequent nature of God. The primordial nature is an ideal ordering of possibility—the lure of the future. The consequent nature is God as the fellow sufferer who understands. Most of the time we don’t live up to the ideal because we feel inadequate, but in each moment we receive a little injection of what he calls the initial eros—love or desire—that reminds us of what’s possible. Here is our freedom. 

Maitreyabandhu: Isn’t this another way of talking about values? Consciousness seems value‑laden. 

Matt Segall: Absolutely. David Hume separated fact and value, another rendering of subject‑object. Whitehead says value permeates nature. Creativity wants to express itself—anthropomorphic language, but useful. Aim is intrinsic to the universe. Evolution is not mere natural selection; there’s also subjectivity aiming at more ideal futures—an intensification of experience, attraction to value, movement toward beauty. Nature seeks beauty. 

Maitreyabandhu: Let’s sidetrack to Whitehead the person. He started as a mathematician with Bertrand Russell, writing Principia Mathematica. I was struck by Whitehead and his rugby tackle. 

Matt Segall: He comes from a line of Anglican schoolmasters and a seventeenth‑century Quaker freedom fighter, George Whitehead. At Sherborne School he was on the rugby team—a stocky, fierce player. He studied mathematics at Trinity College, Cambridge; Bertrand Russell was his student and collaborator. They tried to prove logically that 1 + 1 = 2 without intuitive gaps—a monumental task. Paradoxes arose; Russell was devastated, but Whitehead felt liberated. In the 1910s, Einstein’s work drew him into physics. Relativity and early quantum theory convinced him the old mechanistic cosmos no longer made sense. He turned to metaphysics to reimagine the universe’s basic structure. In the 1920s he wrote on philosophy of science, critiquing the “bifurcation of nature,” where physics treats the really real as mathematical conjecture and the human mind as a dream. He insisted the red hue of the sunset and the electromagnetic waves are both part of nature. 

In 1924 Harvard invited him at age 63. In his first lecture he said it was the first philosophy course he’d taught—and attended. He’d long studied philosophy, could recite Kant from memory, and was a Cambridge Apostle. At Harvard he told a seminar colleague, the idealist Hocking, that being tackled in rugby is the real: anyone who has been buried in the scrum knows reality can whack you. He wanted philosophy grounded in the body. 

Maitreyabandhu: That rugby tackle seems important—philosophy shouldn’t get carried away by abstractions. 

Matt Segall: Exactly. Western philosophers obsess over visual experience, the most disembodying sense. We’ve neglected visceral feeling. Whitehead said no one shows up and says, “Here I am, and I’ve brought my body with me.” We need to bring the body back into philosophy. 

Maitreyabandhu: It’s part of the idea we can upload our mind to the internet—a dangerous metaphor. 

Matt Segall: Yes. Each era mistakes its leading technology for a metaphor of mind: wax tablets for Greeks, steam engines in the nineteenth century, radios in the early twentieth, computers now. Forgetting it’s a metaphor is dangerous. We may upload something, but whether anyone is home is another matter. 

At Harvard, Whitehead was popular. After teaching the men, he’d lecture at Radcliffe, the women’s college. Suzanne Langer and Mary Parker Follett were among those influenced. He taught until 1937. After his death in 1947, analytic philosophy dominated and he went into cold storage until American theologians revived him in the late 1960s and 70s, creating process theology. Recently there’s a Whitehead renaissance: philosophers, architects, ecologists, artists—many disciplines are interested. 

Maitreyabandhu: Let’s have tea soon, but first Whitehead and Wordsworth. Whitehead was a deep reader of The Prelude. 

Matt Segall: His daughter Jessie said his copy of The Prelude was falling apart; he read it daily like scripture. He has a chapter called “The Romantic Reaction” in Science and the Modern World. Romantic poets reacted against mechanism stripping value from nature. When we strip value, we do objective harm. Aesthetics and moral value are not human projections; we inherit them from nature. Whitehead thought Wordsworth expressed this brilliantly. 

Maitreyabandhu: Let’s break for tea, then return to the idea that values are not locked inside us—we’ve been exploring dualism, but want to revisit value. 

Matt Segall: Sounds good. 

[Pause for tea] 

Maitreyabandhu: I was trying to frame this in terms of going for refuge to the Dharma. Going for refuge is the central Buddhist act, and it means actually taking the next step in your life. It is not just thinking or believing; though there is value in thinking, it is more a question of what the Buddha would say you need to do to become more aligned with reality, to see reality as it is. Traditionally, that is called going for refuge. Going for refuge to the Dharma is going for refuge to how things really are, which at the same time acknowledges that we do not see how things really are. One crossover I think we noticed—see whether you think this is right—is that Whitehead, like Buddhism, offers a critique of substantialism. We have a very deep instinct to make things where no things exist. This is a fundamental insight of Buddhism: we make ourselves a thing, we make the world a thing, and, weirdly, we even make ideas into things that we then feel protective of and want to defend. Sometimes that is good; sometimes it is not. We even rarify abstractions into things. Human beings have a strong tendency to create things where no things exist, and it sounds to me—and tell me if I’m wrong—that Whitehead is trying to grasp something of that insight.

Matt Segall: There is no such thing as a “thing” in process philosophy. Or, if there is a thing, you really have to emphasize the gerund at the end—the “‑ing”—or add an extra one: thing‑ing. There are only processes. A process is a nexus of relations. Whitehead repeats a fallacy in all his later books: the fallacy of misplaced concreteness. We tend to concretize or reify ideas—matter, mind, self. The idea is not that we must contort our language and never use nouns, turning everything into a verb, but rather that the structure of reality is not necessarily the same as the structure of our grammar. The subject‑predicate structure of language, going back to Aristotle, leads to a certain kind of metaphysics: substance‑property metaphysics, things with qualities that inhere. We picture the red stop sign: a distinct, separate thing—the octagon. Whitehead suggests there is not some solid substance underlying the world we perceive. What we perceive as color, even what we perceive and call physical stuff, is actually a function of relationship—not only relationships among things “out there,” but the relationship between our own experience and what we perceive. Overcoming the fallacy of misplaced concreteness is recognizing the fluidity of reality and acknowledging our participation in it. When I said earlier that the world is as we perceive it, or that it is not about some independent reality we cannot touch while our experience is merely a projection, I meant we are always a confluence of causes and conditions. That is a very Buddhist view, and Whitehead says as much. In Process and Reality, his magnum opus, he notes that his cosmology bears more resemblance to Buddhism than to the Western philosophical tradition. He tries to overcome our tendency to reify things into substances. He would not say there is no self; rather, the self is new in each moment, a network of relationships. Even when Buddhists say, “There is no self,” one can misunderstand. It does not mean there is no locus of experience. You do not want to get attached to emptiness.

Maitreyabandhu: Yes, that’s right. Buddhism is simply saying there is no fixed, separate self. The real issue is that we treat ourselves as a thing in a world of things. Let’s now talk about going for refuge to the Sangha. One of my own bugbears is that people often approach Buddhism as something you do on your own with your eyes closed. The image of Buddhism in the modern West is the meditating Buddha, as though Buddhism boils down to a private practice in your own mind. Of course, Buddhism values and teaches meditation, but Buddhism is deeply communal. Any kind of human life, never mind spiritual life, is communal: it is a “we” thing, not a “me” thing, yet it is easy to get stuck in a me‑thing. Contemporary Buddhism can look like a deeper version of a me‑thing. Philosophers like Žižek criticize that, calling it “Western Buddhism”—a misunderstanding. I have been struck, from reading and listening to you, by the relational nature of life. Our experience is relational; it is between. It is not something that just inheres in me. Can Whitehead—or Schelling—help us see that, if we are to deepen as persons, we need to deepen with others, not try to work it all out in isolation in the “lonely, buffered self” Charles Taylor describes?

Matt Segall: There is a wonderful line in Process and Reality: “We find ourselves in a buzzing world amid a democracy of fellow creatures.” One of my teachers, Thomas Berry—teacher of my own teacher, Brian Swimme at CIIS—said in a very Whiteheadian spirit: “The world is not a collection of objects; it is a communion of subjects.” Hopefully the earlier point was clear: subjectivity is not something only humans have; not only animals, plants, or single cells; subjectivity, for Whitehead, is present in atoms and stars. The basic structure of reality is a series of interrelated “actual occasions” of experience. These are not isolated; they are bound up in a network of relationships. At the human level, Martin Luther King, Jr., brings this home: “I cannot be who I am supposed to be until you are who you are supposed to be, and you cannot be who you are supposed to be until I am who I am supposed to be.” Mary Parker Follett, who applied Whitehead’s ideas to management, said: “You never encounter me, and I never encounter you. What you encounter is me‑plus‑you, and I encounter you‑plus‑me.” We are always bound up in this relational matrix, becoming other together from what we were before we encountered each other. Even when we close our eyes to meditate, there is not a unified identity in there somewhere to discover. Even in the “me” thing, if we are honest, there is a multiplicity of me’s. Psychologically, we come into relationship with others, and in intimate relationships—friendship, romance—it often feels that others know facets of me better than I know myself. We need that reflection to deepen and learn. There is so much about us we cannot see ourselves.

Maitreyabandhu: Indeed. In a sense, when you unpack it, it is obvious: you cannot think of a person as separate. We are born into community. You could not imagine consciousness separate. How did we get to thinking otherwise?

Matt Segall: I am glad you mention birth. To the extent we have a sense of self‑esteem, it is a gift first from mother, parents, loving community. Individuality, so valued in the West, to be healthy must be born in loving communities. Confidence, value—you cannot make that yourself; it must be reflected to you, starting very young. Where do we learn to encounter otherness? Developmental psychology suggests that in those first months, mother is the first Other. Without that bond, we cannot encounter otherness healthily later in life. Biologically, we are communities of trillions of cells maintaining our coherence. Do individual cells know what they are doing? Maybe. But as a community, what sorts of societies can we bring forth? Mutuality is not about sacrificing joy; we enhance our own inner experience by deeper relationship. We gain more joy and love.

Maitreyabandhu: Did Whitehead bring this back into philosophy? It seems we lost sight and began thinking of ourselves as utterly separate.

Matt Segall: He did. Theologians kept Whitehead in print. His conception of the divine, unlike most Jewish, Christian, and Muslim theisms—where God is separate, creates by fiat, needs nothing—challenges that. For Whitehead, there is no God without the world, and no world without God; the relationship is intimate. That changes many issues that lead people away from God concepts. Whitehead’s divine, though the language may be a stumbling block, brings us toward resonance with Buddhism, where Buddha‑nature is present in all things. Whitehead would say the divine is present in all things as an ideal drawing us toward possibility.

Maitreyabandhu: Let’s turn to the jewel of the Buddha. The Buddha is the ideal, the transcendental person. My teacher Sangharakshita says the Buddha is a mystic marriage between the immanent and the transcendental, humanity and enlightenment, the universal and the personal. When the Buddha spoke of his insight, he rejected both nihilism and eternalism. Nihilism—the idea that at death consciousness is wiped out—is wrong—and, interestingly, ugly. Eternalism is also wrong. The middle way is not between them; it is above and beyond that. The traditional metaphor: two fires burn and draw attention, but high above is a star—the middle way. At any moment we are slightly nihilistic or slightly eternalistic in how we act. Where would Whitehead be? As soon as we reach God, I hit a speed bump—again, with respect. I understand people’s experience, but I prefer sticking to experience. The word “God” has ancient connotations. Buddhism has no God, nor place for one.

Matt Segall: I mentioned two “sides” of the divine: primordial and consequent. We are in between. The physical world and our experience exist within God, between these sides. I have not mentioned the consequent nature yet.

Maitreyabandhu: Remind us of both.

Matt Segall: The primordial nature is the original impulse, an expression of creativity—the first expression. It is similar to Aristotle’s prime mover, except Aristotle solved motion; we no longer have that problem in physics. Instead, we face how to go from infinite possibility—the quantum vacuum—to finite actuality. God is not the prime mover but, to coin a term, the possibilitect: the orderer of possibilities allowing infinite creativity to take definite form. Think of the primordial nature as a filter: it prevents us from being overwhelmed by infinitude, giving us relevant possibilities moment by moment. Yet each moment passes away—Whitehead’s nod to nihilism: you cannot hold on to what you think you are; it perishes. The consequent nature is God as “the fellow sufferer who understands”: the aspect feeling everything, remembering all, changing and growing with the world. The primordial nature does not change; the consequent nature does. The divine is fully immanent, with us in joy and pain. Some theistic traditions hint at this, but many Christians forget the incarnation: the divine became human and died. If we emphasized that more—overcoming the need for God to be “large and in charge”—this incarnational view is similar to Whitehead’s. Though Whitehead did not identify as Christian, there is an incarnational emphasis in his theology.

Maitreyabandhu: Why did he feel we needed that language at all? He clearly did not believe in the old man in the sky, yet uses this concept. Especially as his primordial creativity keeps things in motion—why the concept “God”? Why not another language? Many people still believe in a traditional God; but you and I may not.

Matt Segall: Whitehead looks at the history of religious experience globally. He wants his metaphysics to ground interreligious dialogue so that all great traditions recognize themselves in it, at least partly. Whether that works is empirical; we will see. Religious experience is part of the data a philosopher must consider constructing a cosmology. Across cultures—Buddhism perhaps excepted—there is an intuition of a personal dimension to the universe. Personhood is not accidental. The human being exemplifies a deeper personalizing tendency in things. The tendency to imagine a personal God seems prevalent. I do not think it is foreign to Buddhism: Siddhārtha Gautama was a person, not a supernatural being.

Maitreyabandhu: That is right. The Buddha was born as we are born. What he achieves, we too can achieve. In some interpretations of Christianity—heretical perhaps—Jesus, born of a woman, shared our nature. Institutional religions can capture these figures, but history shows these beings inspire people outside institutional contexts. Community, yes; hierarchy, no.

Matt Segall: Looking at the evolution of the earth and the history of human religious experience, we can understand the human as exemplifying the deepest tendencies of cosmogenesis rather than as an exception to the mechanistic rule. The alternative mechanistic picture is that we just popped up as a lucky mistake, apex predators who survived. But another view is that evolution is driven not just by bloodlust; wisdom and compassion are latent in nature, seeking fuller embodiment. The human tries to realize these values. In Buddhism, being born human is auspicious: we can bring about a different way of life if we realize wisdom and compassion.

Maitreyabandhu: The great matter is rebirth—better than reincarnation, which sounds like a real self puts on a new outfit. We are a becoming that continues after death. The human realm balances pleasure and pain: not so much pain we cannot reflect, not so much pleasure we cannot be bothered to reflect. Humans can gain enlightenment. I am intrigued by the “person nature” of things. There is something fruitful there: we are an example of something. You mentioned Tathāgatagarbha—Buddha‑nature. I think of it as poetic description, not airy‑fairy. Poetic does not mean less rational; it means describing how certain insights feel. In such experiences, it can feel as if something has always been there, rediscovered—like flying above clouds into the always‑shining sun. Buddhism would not make a metaphysics of “It has always been there,” as that becomes eternalism; nor “It wasn’t there and you discovered it,” which becomes nihilism. Buddhism is cautious. Does that provoke you? I am struck by the “personal nature.”

Matt Segall: Metaphysics can lead us astray. Whitehead’s aim is to reform the metaphysical impulse, orienting it toward experience. “The sole justification for any thought is the elucidation of experience.” To the extent we talk about something inexperienceable, it is a warning sign—whether in metaphysics or science. In physics, we do not perceive atoms directly, but in principle they are perceivable. As long as the unperceived is, in principle, perceivable, fine. But when science conjures entities that remain forever unperceivable—string theory is beautiful but untestable—science and metaphysics blur. Whitehead found that problematic. Nature is what we are aware of in perception, including technological extensions. We should avoid hypothetical mechanisms that explain what we perceive but themselves are in principle unperceivable. Whitehead is speculative, but it is “speculative empiricism.” We must remain grounded in experience. He coined new words to describe experience freshly, avoiding assumptions.

Maitreyabandhu: It is striking that he takes religious experience seriously. Philosophers often dismiss it, yet many have such experiences. “Spiritual” now sounds vague; “religious” has dignity, weight, commitment. Whitehead’s family background matters, but it is unusual for philosophers to treat religious experience as data.

Matt Segall: He is unusual. People ask if he had mystical experiences; none are recorded, aside from appreciation for the Romantic poets. He credits his wife, Evelyn, for awakening him to the arts and to emotion. Whitehead thinks emotion is fundamental. What physicists describe as energy transmission—electromagnetic radiation—has an objective measurable side, but its subjective interior side is pulses of emotion. Why are there vectors of energy? There is an aim, a desire, an emotional motive. On a sunny day, lying in the grass, soaking up solar radiation feels good. Whitehead would say we are feeling what it is like to be the sun, absorbing—his term—“prehension,” a basic feeling with a vector from sun to us. We do not become identical with the sun, but we feel some sense of what it is like to be the sun.

Maitreyabandhu: What does he mean by feeling? Feeling blurs into emotionality. Buddhism uses vedanā, often translated as feeling—pleasant, unpleasant, or neutral.

Matt Segall: He means affect: the qualitative “what‑it‑is‑like” of experience. It may feel anthropomorphic to attribute feeling to the physical world, but for Whitehead, the difference between physical and biological is degree. The “hard problem” of consciousness arises if we assume a materialistic universe devoid of interiority; then we cannot explain when consciousness emerged or how brains “do” it. Whitehead adopts a kind of panpsychism. Many analytic philosophers now consider it because the hard problem may be impossible otherwise. Perhaps consciousness never “came online”; maybe there has always been an interior dimension. Evolution deepens and complexifies it. No zero point, no hard problem—other problems remain.

Maitreyabandhu: I like the idea that everything has an internal dimension. In meditation, one senses something unknowable, ineffable about oneself—self disappears into the dark. It seems possible everything has that. Is that Whitehead’s extrapolation?

Matt Segall: Yes. Alan Watts, influenced by Whitehead, said every being imagines it is human. He meant that every being experiences itself at the center, having its own perspective. Thus, each being thinks the world exists for its sake. Buddhism says that is the core delusion: arranging the universe around oneself. Yet physics presents an “omnicentric” universe. The delusion is the fixation and reification of self. Humans, in their auspicious position, can overcome the delusion of centrality.

Maitreyabandhu: We must draw to a close. How has reading Whitehead for many years affected your life, beyond thinking and teaching? You might start with the story of your mother.

Matt Segall: When asked how I became a philosopher, I tell this story. At seven, bouncing on the bed, I saw my mother folding laundry and suddenly realized she would die one day. She was healthy, but the finitude of her life struck me. For two weeks I burst into tears, faked stomach aches at school to go home and check she was alive. What snapped me out of it was realizing I would die too. That evoked a different response: mystery, not fear. If I could not remember being born, I did not wake up and ask, “How did I get here?” Similarly, looking to my death, it could not be that the lights just go out. Experiencing the inevitability of death reconfigured my relation to my mother’s mortality. She is still alive, but confronting death’s mystery made me a philosopher, though I did not know it then. Socrates says in Phaedo, before drinking poison, “All philosophy is preparation for dying.” D. H. Lawrence writes, “We are building the ship of death,” which is the soul—poetically understood. I discovered Whitehead later. I am drawn to process philosophy because we face an ecological catastrophe. This relational thinking—recognizing we exist among a democracy of fellow creatures and that nature is permeated by value—offers hope. If we place Earth’s value at the center and relate as Earthlings, we might avert disaster. Whitehead’s thought contributes to the worldview shift and transformation of consciousness required to move away from anthropocentric values—where nature is raw material awaiting human production and monetary valuation. Those habits run deep. Metaphysics is dangerous but unavoidable; we must make explicit our assumptions and try something else.

Maitreyabandhu: In a sense, that is where we started. People taking up Buddhism with a metaphysics—really, a nihilistic, mechanistic metaphysics—think it is a description, but it is a metaphysics. We need to do our metaphysical work, for better or worse.

Matt Segall: I think so.

Maitreyabandhu: That is a great place to finish. Thank you.

Matt Segall: Thank you.