The debate between intent and outcome is divided along the same lines as the separations between mental health and ecological balance, individual and society, self and other, technology and nature, mind and body. Everything is a process. It makes little difference whether you focus inwardly or outwardly—the problems we face are both within and without, subjective and objective. Lasting, effective solutions to our problems address internal and external processes as two of a kind. The world is not our enemy, and we are not the enemy of the world. Our real enemy is the enmity itself.

Yet, in trying to dismantle conflict, we may discover that our desires to preserve order were based in perfectionistic illusions of controllable circumstances. No matter how much energy we expend, we will never be able to avoid differing with the outside world. Nor will we be able to overcome the finitude and transience of life. It seems nearly certain there will always be enmity, perhaps until the end of time, in some perpetual state of thermodynamic rest.

Even so, in experiencing the fundamental inadequacy of all things, we can discover abundance of life hidden in all sorts of unexpected places. Beyond our ideals of perfectionism—just past the farthest reach of our desires—is life in itself. The world outside us may never meet our expectations, we may never fit in with the world, the world may always be rife with conflict—and yet life keeps on, keeps on stirring, seeking, growing, changing.

From the view of process, all things are interwoven in a great tapestry of life seeking life. Processes interrelate with processes ad infinitum. By addressing the two sides of the world as we know it in terms of a common denominator, the “process view” can function as a beacon for the individual drifting after connection and as a bedrock for the world restless with disruption.

There is an element of magic in what I’ve very loosely termed the “process view.” The name doesn’t really matter. What matters about the “process view” is that it is not merely a perspective or opinion, it is a window into life itself, a way of participating in the fundamental process of relation and change. To know it is to know something beyond this or that philosophy—it is to be and to do something. It is a creative act close to the heart of all things, where endless forms most beautiful have been and are being evolved to this day. The matter of life is what life will do, what life will create, and what life will discover with the gift of living in such a time and place as this. See life for its two sides and its being beyond and in-between them, and it will be life itself that sees through your eyes.



July 20, 2021
San Luis Obispo