​By reason of this reciprocal relation, the love in the world passes into the love in heaven, and floods back again into the world. In this sense, God is the great companion— the fellow-sufferer who understands.

-- Whitehead, Process and Reality 
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It is as true to say that the World is immanent in God, as that God is immanent in the World.

 -- Whitehead, Process and Reality

Relational Panentheism
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It is tempting to say that Heaven and Earth flow into one another as manifestations of one another, a result of a single activity of which they are both expressions. This is emanationist panentheism.

A better way, suggests Whitehead, is to say that Heaven and Earth have their own independent agency but that they flow into one another by experiencing one another and being affected, indeed are partly created, by the "other" they experience. The "other" is immanent within them even as "other" than them. This is relational panentheism or, as it were, open and relational panentheism.

​Not all open and relational theologians speak of themselves as panentheists, but typically they are relational not emanationist.

- Jay McDaniel, 10/23/2022



Influx


notes on how the world passes into heaven,
and heaven floods back into the world.
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Our primary experience of time, before we turn it into a concept, is influx. Whitehead speaks of it as experience in the mode of causal efficacy, because in being influenced by others we are partly created by them. Open and relational theologians, and I among them, believe that the primary way that we humans experience divine influx is love. God, the cosmic mind of the universe, is found in the influx of gracious possibilities for responding to whatever befalls us in a healthy way, independently of our deserts. It is pure gift. We can be channels of this grace ourselves when we love others. They can be channels of grace for us. And the more-than-human world can be a channel of influx, too. Witness the role of companion animals in human life: cats, for example.

Of course positive influx is not the whole story. Negative influx is a reality, too. The influx of mean-spirited and dominating people, of dangerous micro-organisms, of violence and war - all are conduits for negative influx. And, of course, we can be and are channels of negative influx, too. This is what some mean by sin.

It should be added that God, too, experiences influx. This is what makes God 'temporal' and not merely timeless. As an eternal companion, God, too, is affected by, and partly created by, what happens in the universe: the joys, the sorrows, the tragedies, the pleasures. They flow into God and, as open and relational theologians emphasize, God cannot escape this flowing. The idea that there are things God can't do is not just the idea that God cannot control the world, it is also that God cannot help but being influenced by the world.  God is not like a king of a throne. God is like a very good friend, albeit grand and magnificent in divine tenderness. This is part of what open and relational thinkers mean by divine openness. It is the openness to worldly influx.

We live in a universe of mutual influence, mutual influx. Part of wisdom lies is recognizing this and adding whatever goodness we can for the sake of life and of God, thus joining God in the journey of grace. If there is life after death, for us and for other living beings, that world will be one of influx, too.

​- Jay McDaniel, 10/23/2022


A Little More Technical
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How do we humans experience time?

Our sense of time does not begin with seeing objects in space move from one location to another, as if we were observers separate from them. It is not seeing a flowing river and then saying "all things flow," as if we were spectators on the shore. We ourselves are always already in the river, whether swimming, floating, or (alas) drowning.

Our direct experience of time is our own stream of feeling, as experienced from a first-person point of view, consciously or (as is more often the case) unconsciously. More specifically, it is a particular kind of direct experience, itself inescapable, which Whitehead calls experience in the mode of causal efficacy. He describes it as vague, uncontrollable, heavy with emotion, and laden with a sense of the influx of past into present.  In his words:
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[Causal efficacy] produces percepta which are vague, not to be controlled, heavy with emotion: it produces the sense of derivation from an immediate past, and of passage to an immediate future; a sense of emotional feeling, belonging to oneself in the past, passing into oneself in the present, and passing from oneself in the present towards oneself in the future; a sense of influx of influence from other vaguer presences in the past, localized and yet evading local definition, such influence modifying, enhancing, inhibiting, diverting, ​the stream of feeling which we are receiving, unifying, enjoying, and transmitting. This is our general sense of existence, as one item among others, in an efficacious actual world. (Whitehead, Alfred North. Process and Reality)

Note that, in this passage, causal efficacy also includes a sense of being influenced by others: "a sense of the influx of influence from other vaguer presences," not part of the personal past, which "are localized but evading local definition," which can modify, enhance, inhibit, and divert the stream of feeling. In human life these other vaguer presences include the emotions of other people, the palpable presence of the natural world. They, too, are part of the influx of experience from the past. They, too, are intrinsic. 

Is this experience of time the whole of our experience?
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Whitehead does not think that experience in the mode of causal efficacy, and thus of time, thus understood, is the whole of our experience. He says that experience in the mode of causal efficacy is part of what he calls "the physical pole" of our immediate experience, complementary to which is what he calls "the mental pole" which, interestingly, is not temporal. He writes:
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"Every actual entity is "in time" so far as its physical pole is concerned, and is "out of time" so far as its mental pole is concerned. (Whitehead, Process and Reality)
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The mental pole of experience consists of our feeling of potentialities for integrating what we receive from the physical pole into a satisfying gestalt in the immediacy of the present moment. It consists of acts of imagination and intellection, conscious or unconscious, but with a minimum of reference to past or future. 

 ". . they are distinct, definite, controllable, apt for immediate enjoyment and with a minimum of reference to past, or to future. (Whitehead, Process and Reality)


Do other creatures also experience time through experience in the mode of causal efficacy? Other animals? Living cells? Molecules? Atoms? Actualities on other planets?
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For process philosophers, the answer is certainly Yes. Experience in the mode of causal efficacy is found in any creature on our planet and anywhere in the universe, in whatever dimension. This means that other animals experience time, and so do living cells, microbes, and any other kind of actuality. It means that even extra-terrestrial intelligences will experience time through experience in the mode of causal efficacy. And it means that spirits, angels, devils, ghosts, other kinds of creature likewise enjoy and suffer experience in the mode of causal efficacy.
​

How about God?
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From an open and relational perspective, God, too, enjoys and suffers experience in the mode of causal efficacy. God is the living subject - the cosmic Mind - in whom the universe lives and moves and has its being. An analogy might be the way a Womb includes within its constitution the embryos that develop within. God is the Womb of the universe. As with all actualities, the divine Womb has a mental pole (a side outside time) and a physical pole (a side in time). The physical pole is God's ongoing experience in the mode of causal efficacy, moment by moment, taking into account and being affected by each and every event in the universe. The physical pole is, in Whitehead's words, the "influx" of the universe into God, such that God, too, partakes of temporality.

Is God's experience of influx vague, uncontrollable, heavy with emotion, and laden with a sense of the influx of past into present? First things first: who knows? The idea that we understand the inner life of God is a form of foolishness best avoided. Indeed, it is possible that the whole endeavor of open and relational theology is misguided. It is best to be humble, especially about convictions that matter to us.

But what seems important to affirm, albeit in humility, is that God, too, is emotional. That is, subjective forms (tenderness, hope, kindness, suffering, joy) are the subjective side of God's reception of worldly influence. Perhaps judgment, too: a sense that things could have and should have been otherwise. And perhaps even anger. As Abraham Joshua Heschel often pointed out, anger is the flip side of empathy. We can be angry with others because we love them so much. Perhaps it is the same with God. 

The flooding of the world into God must be both painful and pleasurable, delightful and saddening, relative to what is poured forth. God is companion to it all! And the flooding back of God into the world, again and again, is unabashedly graceful and gracious, like a truly good friend who never gives up on us, even when we give up on ourselves. God's faithfulness is the flooding forth of divine love quite apart from our deserts. This is a God who says "I will be there, with you, no matter what."

- Jay McDaniel, 10/23/2022

Being In Time
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From a process-relational perspective, we are always "in time" and "out of time." There is a side of our experience which feels itself part of the temporal world and part of our experience with minimal reference to past and future. Whitehead speaks of the first side as the physical pole of our experience and the second as the mental pole of our experience. Always they occur together, but still they are different.

The same is true of the cosmic Mind in whose life the universe unfolds: God. God is both in time and out of time; God, too, has a physical pole and a mental pole. Whitehead speaks of the part of God which is "in time" as the consequent nature; the part of God which is "outside time" as the primordial nature.

There is no need to be concerned with the technical terminology. Indeed, there is no need to treat Whitehead's perspective as anything more than a likely story about God or, for that matter, the universe. Whitehead's philosophy best functions as a springboard for imaginative adventure, not as a mental grid into which all things fit.

Still, we can consider the possibility that God is a subject not an object, that this subject is "in time" in something of the same way we humans are "in time," namely through what he calls experience in the mode of causal efficacy or influx. And that, in God's case, if indeed God is kenotically loving, then the kenosis of God is not voluntary but, in a certain sense, involuntary. God cannot avoid the influx of the world into God's life; otherwise God would not be "God" at all, but simply timeless absolute of no special relevance to the world.

What makes God lovable is not that God volunteers to be affected by the world, as if God could not be affected. What makes God lovable is that God is tender, trustworthy, everlasting, and eternally faithful to the world itself. It is the quality of the quality of God's influx in the world and also, just as deeply, the world's influx in God.

- Jay McDaniel, 10/23/2022
Open Horizons