Photo by Ken Cheung on Unsplash
The Receptacle and Creativity:
Whitehead and Faber
Introduction
Two ideas in Whitehead's philosophy are often overlooked by religious thinkers who are primarily drawn to his concept of God. The first is his idea of a cosmic receptacle or nurturant space from which novelty arises, concretized through the mutual immanence of all actualities, which he associates with Plato’s concept of the Khora or Receptacle. The second is his idea of Creativity as the ultimate reality, understood as a formless activity of which all actualities are expressions.
It is tempting to think that the Khora and Creativity are two names for the same nameless reality. I assume so below. This view does not reject Whitehead’s understanding of God; rather, it suggests that an important intuition, both religious and philosophical, is overlooked when interpreters focus solely on God. Indeed, in some wisdom traditions—various forms of Buddhism, for example—what matters most religiously is developing a sense for the ultimacy of a formless activity that manifests in every form but transcends them all, rather than focusing on a God of love. It is, of course, possible to honor both perspectives simultaneously. But first, one must develop a sense for what lies beyond God, even as it is expressed through God: the Khora, the formless Creativity that is everywhere yet not confined to any specific location—except, paradoxically, everywhere.
- Jay McDaniel
It is tempting to think that the Khora and Creativity are two names for the same nameless reality. I assume so below. This view does not reject Whitehead’s understanding of God; rather, it suggests that an important intuition, both religious and philosophical, is overlooked when interpreters focus solely on God. Indeed, in some wisdom traditions—various forms of Buddhism, for example—what matters most religiously is developing a sense for the ultimacy of a formless activity that manifests in every form but transcends them all, rather than focusing on a God of love. It is, of course, possible to honor both perspectives simultaneously. But first, one must develop a sense for what lies beyond God, even as it is expressed through God: the Khora, the formless Creativity that is everywhere yet not confined to any specific location—except, paradoxically, everywhere.
- Jay McDaniel
Whitehead on The Receptacle
"But in the ancient cosmologies, including Aristotle’s own doctrine of matter, another train of thought can be found, which is in fact an emphatic doctrine of real communication. Plato’s doctrine of the real Receptacle, and Epicurus’ doctrine of the real Void, differ in some details. But both doctrines are emphatic assertions of a real communication between ultimate realities.
This communication is not accidental. It is part of the essential nature of each physical actuality that it is itself an element qualifying the Receptacle, and that the qualifications of the Receptacle enter into its own nature. In itself, with the various actualities abstracted from it, the Receptacle participates in no forms, according to Plato. But he designates it as ‘the fostermother of all becoming’.
Later in the same Dialogue he calls it ‘a natural matrix for all things’. It receives its forms by reason of its inclusion of actualities, and in a way not to be abstracted from those actualities. The Receptacle, as discussed in the Timaeus, is the way in which Plato conceived the many actualities of the physical world as components in each other’s natures. It is the doctrine of the immanence of Law, derived from the mutual immanence of actualities. It is Plato’s doctrine of the medium of intercommunication."
- Alfred North Whitehead. Adventures of Ideas
This communication is not accidental. It is part of the essential nature of each physical actuality that it is itself an element qualifying the Receptacle, and that the qualifications of the Receptacle enter into its own nature. In itself, with the various actualities abstracted from it, the Receptacle participates in no forms, according to Plato. But he designates it as ‘the fostermother of all becoming’.
Later in the same Dialogue he calls it ‘a natural matrix for all things’. It receives its forms by reason of its inclusion of actualities, and in a way not to be abstracted from those actualities. The Receptacle, as discussed in the Timaeus, is the way in which Plato conceived the many actualities of the physical world as components in each other’s natures. It is the doctrine of the immanence of Law, derived from the mutual immanence of actualities. It is Plato’s doctrine of the medium of intercommunication."
- Alfred North Whitehead. Adventures of Ideas
The Receptacle as Creativity
Interpreting Whitehead
with help from Faber
What does Whitehead mean in this passage? I offer an interpretation. It seems to me that Whitehead’s concept of the Receptacle can be understood in two complementary ways, each reflecting a different aspect of his philosophical outlook. The first sees the Receptacle as a formless but nurturant space from which novelty arises, and the second views it as the medium of mutual communication between actualities.
The Receptacle as a Nurturant Space for Novelty
In the first interpretation, the Receptacle functions as a nurturant, generative space in which new possibilities are constantly being actualized. Whitehead’s universe is not static but in constant flux, and the Receptacle provides the creative field from which novelty emerges. It is where potentiality takes shape, allowing new forms, ideas, and experiences to come into being. In this sense, the Receptacle plays a crucial role in Whitehead’s metaphysics of creativity, as it is the space where the creative advance into novelty occurs. This nurturant aspect of the Receptacle emphasizes the potentiality inherent in the universe—the idea that the Receptacle provides an opening for new developments, facilitating the unfolding of future possibilities. Without this creative space, the dynamic evolution of the universe would not be possible. The Receptacle, in this sense, is a womb for creation.
The Receptacle as Mutual Communication of Actualities
The second interpretation emphasizes the Receptacle as the medium through which actualities communicate and become immanent with one another. Here, the focus shifts from potentiality to relationality. For Whitehead, actual entities are interconnected, and the Receptacle serves as the space where this interconnection is actualized. It is not a passive backdrop, but an active medium through which actual entities prehend, or take in, the reality of others. This relational view of the Receptacle highlights the importance of mutual communication. Each actual entity, in its becoming, influences and is influenced by others, creating a web of relationships that gives shape to the universe. Through this process, the actualities become immanent with one another, meaning they are embedded in and constitutive of each other’s reality. The Receptacle, then, is the very space of this immanent relationality.
Affirming both interpretations
The key to understanding the Receptacle lies in the integration of these two perspectives. The nurturant space, where novelty arises, is not an abstract or independent domain but is actualized through the mutual communication of actualities in the world. In other words, the Receptacle becomes real through the interactions and relationships of actual entities, which are always in process, shaping and reshaping one another. The nurturant space exists in and through this relationality.
By viewing the Receptacle in this way, we recognize that creativity and interconnection are inseparable in Whitehead’s universe. The emergence of novelty is always tied to the dynamic interplay of actual entities, whose mutual immanence brings forth new possibilities. The Receptacle, as both a space for novelty and a medium for communication, reflects the deeply relational and processual nature of reality in Whitehead’s thought.
Whitehead’s Receptacle can be viewed both as a nurturant space for the emergence of novelty and as the medium of mutual communication between actualities. Understood in this way, the Receptacle or Khora includes what Whitehead means by God: the Eros of the universe ingredient in each actual entity as a lure for creative becoming, the companion of the universe which shared in, and is partly constituted by, the feelings and experiences of all actual entities, and the apotheosis of the universe, an everlasting activity of weaving what is given by the world into a living tapestry, filled with tragic beauty, and never fully complete. The Receptacle or Khora also includes what the leading process philosopher of our time, Roland Faber, calls Ideas. But it includes much more. It includes the self-creative responsiveness of each actual entity to others, which is not determined by God, and which can unfold in many different ways, including ways that are violent and tragic. The Receptacle, thus understood, is creative, but neither good nor evil.
The Receptacle as Creativity
Among process philosophers, Roland Faber more than others has developed this understanding of the Receptacle in light of Whitehead's understanding of Creativity as the ultimate reality of the universe. Faber speaks of Creativity as the formless activity of which all things are expressions, transcending all finite actualities as a kind of nurturant potentiality and yet entirely immanent in the creative unfolding of the universe. Understood in this way Creativity is not God, not the Big Bang, and not even the energy of the physical world, although closely connected to it. It is not a substance, either, understood as something self-contained. It is not a creator. It is not an abstract idea. It is not an eternal object. Indeed, to substantialize Creativity or to turn it into a mere concept is a serious mistake. An extended quotation from Faber is in order, with his citations to particular texts in Whitehead omitted for the sake of readability:
Creativity transcends any Event or Concept
"While Creativity is completely without character, if it becomes “substantialized” as its own “reality,” its “abstract form” inevitably will be mis-established as more concrete than the accidents in which it appears—it transfigures into the specter of a “hyper-reality.” Then Creativity is misconstrued as a “perfect being” (say, God) or a “fact” (say, the Big Bang) or a Platonic “Idea” (say, the Good), or a “characteristic, pattern, or formula” (say the world-formula of the Grand Unified Theory of physics), from which the world of becoming is now derived. Then Creativity has been elated to the Creator (AI, 236)—a complete reversal of Whitehead’s philosophical intention and the metaphysical meaning of Creativity." In Whitehead’s universe, it is the world of actualities that qualifies Creativity. In a peculiar sense, Creativity is trans-categorial, a non-concept—one is remined of Derrida’s non-concept of différance and his rendering of Plato’s khora. Creativity completely transcends any event and concept, as it is neither. In this sense, it cannot be restated by anything else, whether concrete or abstract. Consequently, Creativity is completely immanent, as it is only by its immanence that it is neither an abstraction from the Process nor identical to any concrete process (prehension, event, nexus). Creativity is the creative passage of becoming. Several important insights follow from this peculiar transcendent immanence of Creativity. To name three:
Creativity is formless activity
First, Creativity is, like Aristotelian “matter” (materia prima), without any characteristics, but instead is qualified by the becoming of events and nexuses. “Matter,” here, is pure potentiality of actualization, but without any form. Yet while it is, as in Aristotle, formless, it is also, like Plato’s Forms, active—formless activity!
Creativity is expressed in emotional as well as physical energy
Second, as in Spinoza, Creativity is a “substantial activity"; but in a completely non-substantial(ist) way, it is ultimately only activity: things are the individualization of this creative activity, and “substance,” here, transmutes into the pure movement in need of attributes as its limitation, which Whitehead defines as “eternal objects” (PR, 220) and circumscribes with the “principle of concretion.". As today conceptually matter and energy have become indistinct (PR, 109), Creativity appears as an “underlying energy, or activity", allowing for the physical energy and the quanta of the flux of energy, but also for their complexification with emotional energy, the vector character of feelings (PR, 55) and their transition: the past “energizing” the present.
Creativity is neither a "universal" nor a "particular"
Creativity is the “universal of universals characterizing ultimate matter of fact.". However, as Creativity is neither a “universal” nor a “particular,” wrongly dividing reality into actualities actualities and eternal objects , but “the ultimate behind all forms”—the formlessness beyond all forms—and, therefore, only immanent in actualities), it cannot be captured by any known element of being or thought—which is the reason that it is related to the mystery of novelty and expresses the “incompleteness” of both rationality and mysticism.
Creativity harbors all forms and actualities
Instead, “creativity is the ultimate behind all forms, inexplicable by forms, and conditioned by its creatures” (PR, 20). Balancing these potential tensions, Creativity appears, in Whitehead’s text, as that somewhat paradoxical ultimate of formlessness and activity that harbors all forms and actualities, but also transcends their limitations; while it is always pregnant with them, it is always ready to let them transcend into their novelty. In its paradoxality, it eludes all conceptual grasp in the same way that it eludes all categorization while enacting their limited modes of understanding. (Roland Faber, the Mind of Whitehead)
Beyond Creativity
There are many people in the world for whom the discussion above seems irrelevant. They struggle day by day to survive amidst violence, oppression, lack of health care, and limited opportunities. They are not concerned with a "formless activity" that all things express; they seek meaningful ideals by which to live: goodness, beauty, compassion, and care. How, then, is this discussion relevant to them?
At a metaphysical level, the discussion becomes relevant only when it it recognized that it is not enough to talk about the Receptacle, which turns it into a mere concept in the mind. The Receptacle (Creativity) is actual through its actualizations, one of which, from Whitehead's perspective and from Faber's perspective, is a divine actualization that carries within itself ideals such as goodness, beauty, compassion, and justice. In a certain sense the Receptacle itself, while ultimate, is incomplete without these ideals. It does not lead to positive nurturance unless the ideals are felt and responded to. hese ideals are indeed relevant to people in need. A meaningful and life-nourishing religious perspective becomes available only when the formless activity - the placeless Place from which all things emerge - is understood to include a divine instantiation that gives life, itself felt through the ideals. Then the discussion becomes relevant, offering guiding principles for action, empowerment through possibility, a sense of community and solidarity, and a call to compassionate action. The Receptacle doesn't do anything of its own accord. If we speak of it as "nurturant," we can only see its nurturance in the concrete embodiments of the nurtured and the nurturers. It is we and the other creatures in the world, indeed in the universe in all of its dimensions, who bring the Receptacle to life. We need it, yes, but it needs us, too. And it is not really an "it."
The Moment as Ultimate
Process philosophers and theologians often propose that there are multiple ultimates—most notably, Creativity and God. These ultimates do not compete with one another but are ultimate in distinct yet complementary ways. Creativity is placeless place from which all emerges and a creative advance into novelty. God, on the other hand, represents a calling and loving presence, a lure toward love and goodness, and a companion to all of life. This divine presence embodies the relational, guiding force that nurtures and sustains the flourishing of existence.
One could think of these ultimates in terms of the Godhead and God, where the Godhead is the formless source, and God is its personal, relational manifestation. This notion finds parallels in other religious traditions: in Buddhism, Emptiness and Amida Buddha reflect a similar duality of the formless and its compassionate expression; in Hinduism, the concepts of Nirguna Brahman (the impersonal, formless absolute) and Saguna Brahman (the personal God with qualities) echo this same relationship. In each case, the formless activity of becoming and its primordial form of relational presence coexist, distinct yet inseparable.
And yet, these two ultimates—Creativity and God—are not enough to fully capture the depth of reality. As Faber often emphasizes, there is also the ultimacy of multiplicity itself, the universe in its vastness and diversity, unfolding in a continuous process of becoming, with mutual immanence through prehensive interactions. This relational multiplicity, the interconnected web of life and existence, is not just a backdrop or a canvas on which Creativity and God act, but an ultimate in its own right. It is the dynamic, ever-changing tapestry where both Creativity and God find their home and expression.
The universe, with its endless variety and mutual unfolding, represents the third ultimate: the multiplicity of actualities, where Creativity unfolds and God’s loving presence moves through relationships, events, and beings. This triadic vision—Creativity, God, and the relational multiplicity of the universe—offers a fuller understanding of existence. It shows that reality is not just shaped by a formless ground and a personal divine presence but is also woven through the mutual interdependence of all things, where each entity participates in the ongoing creation of the whole.
Thus, the three ultimates of Creativity, God, and the multiplicity of can be seen as distinct but deeply interwoven—together yet different. They form a choreography of becoming, where the formless gives birth to the form, the divine guides and nurtures, and the universe in its diversity unfolds in a continuous and ever-evolving process. This triad reflects the fullness of existence, inviting us to recognize our own participation in this ongoing creative advance into novelty.
And where do they come together? The answer is Zen-like. They come together in the concreteness of the present moment, in the immediacy of concrescence, which is where all three are found. This moment is where the many become one, expressed in the self-creativity of the moment, as it is lured by the ideals provided by God. This concrescence is ultimate in its own right. It is the novelty of the Receptacle, the place where the multiplicity becomes a novel thing, the occasion for receiving ideals from God. Let Whitehead have the last word:
"Each instance of concrescence is itself the novel individual ‘thing’ in question. There are not ‘the concrescence’ and ‘the novel thing’: when we analyse the novel thing we find nothing but the concrescence. ‘Actuality’ means nothing else than this ultimate entry into the concrete," (Whitehead, Process and Reality)
The Receptacle as a Nurturant Space for Novelty
In the first interpretation, the Receptacle functions as a nurturant, generative space in which new possibilities are constantly being actualized. Whitehead’s universe is not static but in constant flux, and the Receptacle provides the creative field from which novelty emerges. It is where potentiality takes shape, allowing new forms, ideas, and experiences to come into being. In this sense, the Receptacle plays a crucial role in Whitehead’s metaphysics of creativity, as it is the space where the creative advance into novelty occurs. This nurturant aspect of the Receptacle emphasizes the potentiality inherent in the universe—the idea that the Receptacle provides an opening for new developments, facilitating the unfolding of future possibilities. Without this creative space, the dynamic evolution of the universe would not be possible. The Receptacle, in this sense, is a womb for creation.
The Receptacle as Mutual Communication of Actualities
The second interpretation emphasizes the Receptacle as the medium through which actualities communicate and become immanent with one another. Here, the focus shifts from potentiality to relationality. For Whitehead, actual entities are interconnected, and the Receptacle serves as the space where this interconnection is actualized. It is not a passive backdrop, but an active medium through which actual entities prehend, or take in, the reality of others. This relational view of the Receptacle highlights the importance of mutual communication. Each actual entity, in its becoming, influences and is influenced by others, creating a web of relationships that gives shape to the universe. Through this process, the actualities become immanent with one another, meaning they are embedded in and constitutive of each other’s reality. The Receptacle, then, is the very space of this immanent relationality.
Affirming both interpretations
The key to understanding the Receptacle lies in the integration of these two perspectives. The nurturant space, where novelty arises, is not an abstract or independent domain but is actualized through the mutual communication of actualities in the world. In other words, the Receptacle becomes real through the interactions and relationships of actual entities, which are always in process, shaping and reshaping one another. The nurturant space exists in and through this relationality.
By viewing the Receptacle in this way, we recognize that creativity and interconnection are inseparable in Whitehead’s universe. The emergence of novelty is always tied to the dynamic interplay of actual entities, whose mutual immanence brings forth new possibilities. The Receptacle, as both a space for novelty and a medium for communication, reflects the deeply relational and processual nature of reality in Whitehead’s thought.
Whitehead’s Receptacle can be viewed both as a nurturant space for the emergence of novelty and as the medium of mutual communication between actualities. Understood in this way, the Receptacle or Khora includes what Whitehead means by God: the Eros of the universe ingredient in each actual entity as a lure for creative becoming, the companion of the universe which shared in, and is partly constituted by, the feelings and experiences of all actual entities, and the apotheosis of the universe, an everlasting activity of weaving what is given by the world into a living tapestry, filled with tragic beauty, and never fully complete. The Receptacle or Khora also includes what the leading process philosopher of our time, Roland Faber, calls Ideas. But it includes much more. It includes the self-creative responsiveness of each actual entity to others, which is not determined by God, and which can unfold in many different ways, including ways that are violent and tragic. The Receptacle, thus understood, is creative, but neither good nor evil.
The Receptacle as Creativity
Among process philosophers, Roland Faber more than others has developed this understanding of the Receptacle in light of Whitehead's understanding of Creativity as the ultimate reality of the universe. Faber speaks of Creativity as the formless activity of which all things are expressions, transcending all finite actualities as a kind of nurturant potentiality and yet entirely immanent in the creative unfolding of the universe. Understood in this way Creativity is not God, not the Big Bang, and not even the energy of the physical world, although closely connected to it. It is not a substance, either, understood as something self-contained. It is not a creator. It is not an abstract idea. It is not an eternal object. Indeed, to substantialize Creativity or to turn it into a mere concept is a serious mistake. An extended quotation from Faber is in order, with his citations to particular texts in Whitehead omitted for the sake of readability:
Creativity transcends any Event or Concept
"While Creativity is completely without character, if it becomes “substantialized” as its own “reality,” its “abstract form” inevitably will be mis-established as more concrete than the accidents in which it appears—it transfigures into the specter of a “hyper-reality.” Then Creativity is misconstrued as a “perfect being” (say, God) or a “fact” (say, the Big Bang) or a Platonic “Idea” (say, the Good), or a “characteristic, pattern, or formula” (say the world-formula of the Grand Unified Theory of physics), from which the world of becoming is now derived. Then Creativity has been elated to the Creator (AI, 236)—a complete reversal of Whitehead’s philosophical intention and the metaphysical meaning of Creativity." In Whitehead’s universe, it is the world of actualities that qualifies Creativity. In a peculiar sense, Creativity is trans-categorial, a non-concept—one is remined of Derrida’s non-concept of différance and his rendering of Plato’s khora. Creativity completely transcends any event and concept, as it is neither. In this sense, it cannot be restated by anything else, whether concrete or abstract. Consequently, Creativity is completely immanent, as it is only by its immanence that it is neither an abstraction from the Process nor identical to any concrete process (prehension, event, nexus). Creativity is the creative passage of becoming. Several important insights follow from this peculiar transcendent immanence of Creativity. To name three:
Creativity is formless activity
First, Creativity is, like Aristotelian “matter” (materia prima), without any characteristics, but instead is qualified by the becoming of events and nexuses. “Matter,” here, is pure potentiality of actualization, but without any form. Yet while it is, as in Aristotle, formless, it is also, like Plato’s Forms, active—formless activity!
Creativity is expressed in emotional as well as physical energy
Second, as in Spinoza, Creativity is a “substantial activity"; but in a completely non-substantial(ist) way, it is ultimately only activity: things are the individualization of this creative activity, and “substance,” here, transmutes into the pure movement in need of attributes as its limitation, which Whitehead defines as “eternal objects” (PR, 220) and circumscribes with the “principle of concretion.". As today conceptually matter and energy have become indistinct (PR, 109), Creativity appears as an “underlying energy, or activity", allowing for the physical energy and the quanta of the flux of energy, but also for their complexification with emotional energy, the vector character of feelings (PR, 55) and their transition: the past “energizing” the present.
Creativity is neither a "universal" nor a "particular"
Creativity is the “universal of universals characterizing ultimate matter of fact.". However, as Creativity is neither a “universal” nor a “particular,” wrongly dividing reality into actualities actualities and eternal objects , but “the ultimate behind all forms”—the formlessness beyond all forms—and, therefore, only immanent in actualities), it cannot be captured by any known element of being or thought—which is the reason that it is related to the mystery of novelty and expresses the “incompleteness” of both rationality and mysticism.
Creativity harbors all forms and actualities
Instead, “creativity is the ultimate behind all forms, inexplicable by forms, and conditioned by its creatures” (PR, 20). Balancing these potential tensions, Creativity appears, in Whitehead’s text, as that somewhat paradoxical ultimate of formlessness and activity that harbors all forms and actualities, but also transcends their limitations; while it is always pregnant with them, it is always ready to let them transcend into their novelty. In its paradoxality, it eludes all conceptual grasp in the same way that it eludes all categorization while enacting their limited modes of understanding. (Roland Faber, the Mind of Whitehead)
Beyond Creativity
There are many people in the world for whom the discussion above seems irrelevant. They struggle day by day to survive amidst violence, oppression, lack of health care, and limited opportunities. They are not concerned with a "formless activity" that all things express; they seek meaningful ideals by which to live: goodness, beauty, compassion, and care. How, then, is this discussion relevant to them?
At a metaphysical level, the discussion becomes relevant only when it it recognized that it is not enough to talk about the Receptacle, which turns it into a mere concept in the mind. The Receptacle (Creativity) is actual through its actualizations, one of which, from Whitehead's perspective and from Faber's perspective, is a divine actualization that carries within itself ideals such as goodness, beauty, compassion, and justice. In a certain sense the Receptacle itself, while ultimate, is incomplete without these ideals. It does not lead to positive nurturance unless the ideals are felt and responded to. hese ideals are indeed relevant to people in need. A meaningful and life-nourishing religious perspective becomes available only when the formless activity - the placeless Place from which all things emerge - is understood to include a divine instantiation that gives life, itself felt through the ideals. Then the discussion becomes relevant, offering guiding principles for action, empowerment through possibility, a sense of community and solidarity, and a call to compassionate action. The Receptacle doesn't do anything of its own accord. If we speak of it as "nurturant," we can only see its nurturance in the concrete embodiments of the nurtured and the nurturers. It is we and the other creatures in the world, indeed in the universe in all of its dimensions, who bring the Receptacle to life. We need it, yes, but it needs us, too. And it is not really an "it."
The Moment as Ultimate
Process philosophers and theologians often propose that there are multiple ultimates—most notably, Creativity and God. These ultimates do not compete with one another but are ultimate in distinct yet complementary ways. Creativity is placeless place from which all emerges and a creative advance into novelty. God, on the other hand, represents a calling and loving presence, a lure toward love and goodness, and a companion to all of life. This divine presence embodies the relational, guiding force that nurtures and sustains the flourishing of existence.
One could think of these ultimates in terms of the Godhead and God, where the Godhead is the formless source, and God is its personal, relational manifestation. This notion finds parallels in other religious traditions: in Buddhism, Emptiness and Amida Buddha reflect a similar duality of the formless and its compassionate expression; in Hinduism, the concepts of Nirguna Brahman (the impersonal, formless absolute) and Saguna Brahman (the personal God with qualities) echo this same relationship. In each case, the formless activity of becoming and its primordial form of relational presence coexist, distinct yet inseparable.
And yet, these two ultimates—Creativity and God—are not enough to fully capture the depth of reality. As Faber often emphasizes, there is also the ultimacy of multiplicity itself, the universe in its vastness and diversity, unfolding in a continuous process of becoming, with mutual immanence through prehensive interactions. This relational multiplicity, the interconnected web of life and existence, is not just a backdrop or a canvas on which Creativity and God act, but an ultimate in its own right. It is the dynamic, ever-changing tapestry where both Creativity and God find their home and expression.
The universe, with its endless variety and mutual unfolding, represents the third ultimate: the multiplicity of actualities, where Creativity unfolds and God’s loving presence moves through relationships, events, and beings. This triadic vision—Creativity, God, and the relational multiplicity of the universe—offers a fuller understanding of existence. It shows that reality is not just shaped by a formless ground and a personal divine presence but is also woven through the mutual interdependence of all things, where each entity participates in the ongoing creation of the whole.
Thus, the three ultimates of Creativity, God, and the multiplicity of can be seen as distinct but deeply interwoven—together yet different. They form a choreography of becoming, where the formless gives birth to the form, the divine guides and nurtures, and the universe in its diversity unfolds in a continuous and ever-evolving process. This triad reflects the fullness of existence, inviting us to recognize our own participation in this ongoing creative advance into novelty.
And where do they come together? The answer is Zen-like. They come together in the concreteness of the present moment, in the immediacy of concrescence, which is where all three are found. This moment is where the many become one, expressed in the self-creativity of the moment, as it is lured by the ideals provided by God. This concrescence is ultimate in its own right. It is the novelty of the Receptacle, the place where the multiplicity becomes a novel thing, the occasion for receiving ideals from God. Let Whitehead have the last word:
"Each instance of concrescence is itself the novel individual ‘thing’ in question. There are not ‘the concrescence’ and ‘the novel thing’: when we analyse the novel thing we find nothing but the concrescence. ‘Actuality’ means nothing else than this ultimate entry into the concrete," (Whitehead, Process and Reality)