_Radical decentering,_ a phrase used by Simone Weil, is a spiritual practice especially important for people of privilege and power and for people who are overly self-absorbed. It has four dimensions:
- Appreciating others on their own terms and for their own sakes: recognizing that other people and every living being are their own centers, subjects of their own lives with value for themselves,
- Being humble about one's own location: recognizing that we ourselves are one-among-many not one-over many, no less valuable but also no more valuable than others,
- Having a sense of an inclusive whole where you are one among many: imagining a perspective, a point of view, in which all centers are equally appreciated, on the same plane.
- Recentering our lives in the inclusive whole through faith, imagination, acts of kindness, prayer, and working to build beloved communities.
For process philosophers and theologians, the third dimension -- a sense of an inclusive whole -- points to God. For these theologians God is not a being among beings located in a particular region of space; God is instead a field-like Life, everywhere at once, equally present to all things, God's region of existence includes all regions, not unlike the way that that the Circle below in Kandinsky's "Circles in a Circle" includes smaller circles - except that, in the case of God, the circles inside God are infinite and growing in number and they overlap as parts of one another. New circles are added all the time. The universe is, as Whitehead put it, a 'creative advance into novelty.' God is part of the advance, not apart from it, as the inclusive whole -- the Love -- in which it unfolds. The practice of radical decentering involves re-centering your life in terms of this Love.
Further Commentary You and I, along with the hills and rivers and trees and stars, are circles in the life of God. We inner circles are not mere manifestations of God, as if our agency were nothing but God godding. We have lives of our own even as our lives are part of God's life. We are, to use Whitehead's phrase, actual entities. Or, slightly more accurately (see below) a series of actual entities extending from birth (and perhaps before) to death (and perhaps after).
For Whitehead an actual entity is not an object that endures over time and moves through space. It is instead a momentary event or happening or occasion as illustrated in a pulsation of energy in the depths of an atom or a moment of self-enjoyment and self-creativity in human life. Whitehead believes that such events are the very building blocks of reality and that the physical objects we see in three-dimensional space, what he calls "public matters of fact" or "nexus," are aggregates of such events.
An actual entity has what he calls a 'real internal constitution.' The real internal constitution of an actual entity are feelings (prehensions of what is given to experience) and an act of decision (cutting off certain possibilities for responding to what is given while actualizing others.) These feelings and this decision, along with a subjective aim at satisfaction, are the actuality of the entity at issue.
What are the things that an actual entity feels? They include finite events in the past actual world (past actual entities), abstract potentialities (eternal objects), and numerous other kinds of realities: hopes for the future, images in the imagination, immediately felt goals. Whitehead speaks of the things that are felt by an actual entity as the 'data' of its experience. importantly, the data that are felt by the actual entity include God's vibrant presence as a lure for richness of experience in the moment at hand. God is immanent within the actual entity as this lure or 'initial aim.'
However, the point here is not that God is in actual entities; it is that actual entities are in God. As objects of God's experience, they - we - are part of God's life. An analogy might be the way that living cells within your own body are part of you, even as you have a life of your own and they have lives of their own. Just as what happens in your body happens in and to you, even as you are more than your body; so what happens in and to the entities in the universe happens in and to God, even as God is more than the universe. God is, to use Whitehead's phrase, a "fellow sufferer who understands."
The Finite Circles are Self-Enjoying
Each finite circle, each actual entity, has its own first-person point of view, its own perspective on life, its own subjectivity, worthy of some kind of respect and care. As process philosophers and theologians say, each has some kind of 'intrinsic value' or value for itself. In
Process and Reality Whitehead speaks of this value-for-itself as the self-enjoyment and subjective immediacy of being one among many. "The organic philosophy interprets experience as meaning the self-enjoyment of being one among many, and of being one arising out of the composition of many."
The Principle of Relativity
The fact of this intrinsic value, this self-enjoyment, does not mean that the finite circles are independent of one another. For process philosophers and theologians, the finite circles are parts of one another and they are parts of God. In
Process and Reality Whitehead proposes that the primary purpose of his philosophy of organism (his name for his way of thinking) is to show how, contrary to traditional 'substance' thinking, entities can truly be "present in" one another even as different from one another. He presses this point in explaining what he calls the principle of universal relativity.
"The principle of universal relativity directly traverses Aristotle's dictum, ‘A substance† is not present in a subject.’ On the contrary, according to this principle an actual entity is present in other actual entities. 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.’ (AN Whitehead)
The idea that things are present in one another has implications for human life. It means that when we harm others we are harming part of ourselves, and it means that when we love others we are loving part of ourselves as well. In healthy I-Thou relations the "I" is present in the "Thou" and the "Thou" is present in the "I," even as they are also distinct.
The principle of relativity also implies that, collectively, all the entities of the universe form a vast and evolving network of inter-becoming. This is quite similar to the Mahayana Buddhist idea found in Hua-Yen Buddhism that all the entities can be imagined as a new of jewels that mirror one another, with the added fact that they are present in one another; and also to the idea in the physics of David Bohm that each entity in the universe contains an implicate order, amid which all that is other than the entity is somehow present in the 'implicate order' of the entity as well.
The Self as a Series of Small Circles
It should be added that the circles of life are not fixed or static. They are in process. An actual entity is in in process as it experiences and responds to its actual world (Whitehead calls it concrescence), and it is in process as the subjective immediacy of its immediate experience perishes, such that it becomes an object experienced by others. (Whitehead calls it transition.)
Indeed, process philosophers and theologians add that we ourselves, understood as unified selves or souls, are in process, such that our very lives are really a series of selves rather than one self. Whitehead puts it this way: "The ancient doctrine that ‘no one crosses the same river twice’ is extended. No thinker thinks twice; and, to put the matter more generally, no subject experiences twice." We humans, and many other living beings in the universe, are not one circle but many circles, many subjects, each of which inherits from the past and contributes to the future.
God the Inclusive Circle: Empathy and Guidance
Thus, even as God is partly composed of the smaller circles, God is also more than the many circles or even all of them added together, not only because God's 'space' includes all other circles, but also because God has a life of God's own, a consciousness of his or her own. We can address God as You: as, in the words of Sallie McFague, as mother and lover and father and friend. What is this You like? Following Whitehead, most process philosophers and theologians, whether Jewish or Muslim or Buddhist or Christian, believe that a defining feature of God's consciousness is love. This divine love has two sides: tenderness and guidance. God's love is (1) an ongoing awareness and appreciation of each and every center with tender care and (2) an ongoing act of luring (but not coercing) each and every center toward whatever satisfaction is possible for it, given the needs of the whole. (Process theologians speak of the lures of God as 'initial aims.')
Faith, Prayer, and Worship
Open and relational theologians add that God deserves respect, too. This respect can take many forms, including faith, prayer, and worship. Faith is trust in the beneficence, the goodness, of a Life that includes all lives in a loving way. Prayer includes prayers of address, where God is 'addressed' as a cosmic You who hears and listens in a loving way and also prayers of contemplation, where we rest in a sense of an inclusively loving presence without adding commentary or words. And worship is the act of turning to the larger Life in acts of praise, lamentation, devotion, humor, confession, and hope as individuals and communities. This 'turning' is not a turning away from the world and others, it is preparatory to and yet part of a turning toward them, because we meet God, we have touches of transcendence, in the face of the other.
Relational Panentheism
Some process philosophers and theologians speak of this way of looking at things as pan_en_theism (which ought not be confused the pantheism.) Pan_en_theism is the view that all things -- the hills and rivers, trees and stars, are inside God as objects of divine experience and love, even as God is more than them and they are more than God. In the history of religion there are two types of panentheism: emanationist and relational.
Emanational panentheism sees the many things of the universe as 'manifestations' of God, such that their feelings and agency are really God's feeling and agency. The hills and rivers, trees and stars, are not simply charged with God's presence; they are God's very activity. The implications of this are that everything that happens in human history -- all the violence and injustice, all the pain and tragedy - is likewise God's very activity. It is all God godding.
By contrast, relational panentheism sees the things of the world as having their own feelings and agency, which means that many things happen in the world which are not manifestations of God. Most process philosophers and theologians are relational not emanationist. Typically, they believe that the violence and injustice, the pain and tragedy, do not come from God and are painful even to God. As the Jewish writer Abraham Heschel puts it, divine wrath is a symbolic way of speaking of divine pain. Or, as Whitehead puts it, God is a "fellow sufferer who understands."
Creativity as Ultimate Reality
So imagine, then, that our evolving universe unfolds within the context of an evolving Love that is not all-powerful, for whom the future does not yet exist, but that is faithful to the world in a spirit of, to quote the Bible, "steadfast love." This Love, namely God, has consciousness and will and purposes, and they are directed toward the goodness, beauty, and vitality of the world, but require the world to respond. This Love is a calling presence. And this Love is simultaneously a deep empathy, a fellow sufferer, an eternal companion who, like a loving abba or amma, shares in the joys and sufferings of each and all. In is calling capacity and in its empathy, this love has creativity: that is, a capacity to make decisions. The calling and the empathy are outcomes of that decision-making.
And imagine further that all the entities in the universe likewise have their own agency, their own capacity for feeling and responding to the worlds they face with creativity of their own. They may respond in wonderful ways or horrible ways, in ways that are good for them and the world or that are terrible for them and the world, but that are in any event 'creative' in that they are an actualization of possibilities.
Note, then, that both God and the entities of the universe have something in common. They are both actual, and the heart of this actuality, says Whitehead, is their capacity for feeling and decision-making. Whitehead writes: "But ‘decision’ cannot be construed as a casual adjunct of an actual entity. It constitutes the very meaning of actuality. An actual entity arises from decisions for it, and by its very existence provides decisions for other actual entities which supersede it."
An emanationist panentheism might say that all the feelings and decisions are really but one decision, namely God's. This would mean that God is the ultimate reality and that all things are merely expressions of God, A relational panentheism proposes, as an alternative, that the ultimate reality is the creativity of each and every actual entity, including that supreme actual entity, God, whose life includes all other lives and who has, says Whitehead, a non-temporal dimension as well. Whitehead puts the point this way in
Process and Reality.
In all philosophic theory there is an ultimate which is actual in virtue of its accidents. It is only then capable of characterization through its accidental embodiments, and apart from these accidents is devoid of actuality. In the philosophy of organism this ultimate is termed ‘creativity’; and God is its primordial, non-temporal accident.* In monistic philosophies, Spinoza's or absolute idealism, this ultimate is God, who is also equivalently termed ‘The Absolute.’ In such monistic schemes, the ultimate is illegitimately allowed a final, ‘eminent’ reality, beyond that ascribed to any of its accidents.
Whitehead does not think of creativity as an Absolute which is more real or more actual than the world. He thinks of it as the one activity which is at the heart of God and the world. God is not more real than the world, and the world is not more real than God. Both are real as expressions of creativity itself, which is anywhere and everywhere.
Which takes me back to the notion of decentering. One reason God matters to most process theologians is not that God is the ultimate reality, but rather that God is the love in whom we can center our lives, so that we do not make ourselves the center. To recenter our lives is not to lose our lives, but to save them.