Whitehead, Prakṛti, and the Śākta Tradition: A Process Imagining

Whitehead, Prakṛti,
and the Śākta Tradition:

A Process Imagining

When I enter the garden, I do not feel that I am entering a place where the Goddess occasionally appears; I feel that I am entering her life. She is present in the leaves, the scent of basil, the dark soil, the hidden roots, and the insects moving among the blossoms. She is also present in the act of cultivation—in my digging, planting, watering, pruning, and waiting. I do not make the garden grow; I cooperate with a creativity that is not mine alone, preparing a place and responding to possibilities already alive within the soil. As the soil clings to my fingers and the fragrance of leaves enters my breath, I realize that I, too, am one of her growing things. The Goddess is incarnate in the plants, but also in me—and in the relationship between us. She is the living energy by which the garden and I cultivate one another. She is what some philosophers call God.

Process Imaginings

This page is a process imagining sparked by ideas and practices in Hinduism.

A process imagining is not a theology or an argument. It does not claim finality. It is an open-ended and tentative exploration of possibilities that may or may not prove helpful. The aim of a process imagining is to explore, not proclaim. Whitehead is famous for saying that, in every moment of experience, the many of the world become one in the moment. A process imagining cannot "become one" without being indebted to a "many" to which it is responsive.

The best analogy I know comes from jazz. In improvisational jazz, musicians participate in a continuing movement of call and response. A phrase played by one musician becomes a call to which another responds with notes of their own. The response does not merely repeat the call. It receives it, interprets it, and carries it in a new direction. It is original but also indebted—something new made possible by something received.

The same is true of the process exploration offered here. Hindu ideas and practices provide the call; Whiteheadian philosophy offers one possible response. The response should not be confused with the call itself. Nor does it claim to disclose what Hindu traditions “really mean.” It is an act of philosophical improvisation: an attempt to listen carefully and then respond creatively, while acknowledging that other responses are possible and that practitioners of the traditions may hear the call differently.

The response I offer is itself a call of sorts: an invitation for others to respond in any way they see fit, adding their own calls, their own proposition. In Whitehead's philosophy a proposition is a proposal. Whitehead proposes that propositions have their primary value as “lures for feeling.” They invite us to perceive, feel, and imagine the world in new ways. Everything that follows is offered in this spirit. It is a tentative Whiteheadian imagining inspired by two important ideas in Hinduism: prakṛti and Śāktism, or the Śākta tradition.
The exploration of prakṛti is inspired by Ricardo S. Silvestre and Alan C. Herbert’s essay, “The Concept of God in the Bhagavad Gītā: A Panentheistic Account.” Silvestre and Herbert interpret prakṛti as naming the intimate relation between God and the cosmos—a relation that helps explain how the cosmos can be in God and pervaded by God, while God also differs from and transcends the cosmos. Their interpretation provides a point of departure for what follows: a Whiteheadian imagining of prakṛti.

The exploration of Śāktism has a different source. Over the years, I have known many people who believe that one of the most serious problems in the world—or at least in Abrahamic cultures—is the overwhelming emphasis on a spiritual power, God, imagined primarily in masculine terms. God is so often pictured as Father, Lord, King, or Ruler that masculinity can come to seem inherently divine, while talk of the divine Feminine appears secondary, metaphorical, or derivative.

I realize that this way of speaking carries at least two problems. First, “the feminine” at issue may itself be defined in patriarchal terms, becoming what some feminists call the patriarchal feminine: gentle, receptive, nurturing, and subordinate, but never fierce, independent, or fully powerful. Second, posing the question in terms of masculinity and femininity may reinforce the very binary that needs to be questioned. Divine reality, whatever it may ultimately be, cannot be contained by human categories of gender, perhaps especially binaries.

My sense, however, is that in many Indian contexts—especially among devotees of the Goddess and those attuned to the feminine power of the divine—these problems are less pronounced, though certainly not absent. Śāktism offers a powerful alternative. It invites people not simply to think about the divine in feminine terms but to encounter ultimate reality as Goddess: as creative energy, embodied presence, maternal tenderness, erotic vitality, fierce protection, transformative power, and the living energy of the world. The Goddess is not merely the feminine counterpart of an otherwise masculine God. She is herself divine reality in its fullness.

In any case, I venture forth boldly with this process imagining, hoping that some of the propositions I offer—some of the “lures for feeling”—may prove helpful, however partial or shortsighted they may be. Let me state my two proposals at the outset, should the reader wish me to cut to the chase:

Prakṛti can be understood as the nonmoral creative energy of the universe, of which both the cosmos and God are expressions. It is the creative abyss from which all things arise, including God. God can then be understood as the primordial expression of prakṛti: both a wellspring of possibilities for truth, goodness, beauty, adventure, peace, and spiritual growth, and a living, womb-like receptacle for all events in the universe. God receives their experiences, carries their memories, cherishes their lives, and transforms even the wreckage of existence into some kind of beauty. God is not the creator of creativity but its primordial and everlasting expression.
God can be understood as the divine Feminine, filled with eros and energy as well as tenderness and love. A Whiteheadian understanding of God can be seen as one way in which a Western philosopher—and those who find his ideas helpful—might find their way to the Goddess. The proposal is not that the Goddess fits neatly within Whiteheadian categories, as if those categories were a container into which she could be placed. It is that the Goddess is real, and that what Whitehead calls “God” offers one possible way of approaching her, responding to her, and being transformed by her.

The first two sections below introduce the many meanings of prakṛti and the Śākta tradition. The sections that follow offer several process imaginings inspired by them—improvisational responses to a call that remains richer than any response it may evoke.

Meanings of Prakṛti

The Sanskrit term prakṛti has been interpreted in several different, though overlapping, ways across Hindu traditions. The meanings below are drawn from multiple scholarly sources synthesized by AI. Specialists in Hinduism will rightly judge their adequacy.

Primordial material nature
In classical Sāṃkhya, prakṛti is the unmanifest source of the material and psychological cosmos. It consists of the three guṇas--sattva, rajas, and tamas—and evolves into intellect, ego, mind, the senses, and physical elements. It is active but unconscious, in contrast with conscious puruṣa.
Nature as the whole field of becoming
Prakṛti can mean more than physical matter. It encompasses the entire changing world, including bodies, emotions, thoughts, and mental activity. In this sense, much of what Western thought calls “mind” belongs to prakṛti, not to puruṣa.
The divine power of manifestation
In the Bhagavad Gītā, prakṛti is often understood as God’s creative power—the agency through which Krishna brings forth, sustains, and transforms the cosmos. Nature is therefore neither wholly independent of God nor merely inert matter.
God’s lower and higher natures
The Gītā distinguishes between Krishna’s “lower prakṛti,” consisting of earth, water, fire, air, space, mind, intellect, and ego, and his “higher prakṛti,” identified with the living principle that sustains the world. Prakṛti can thus include both materiality and life.
The divine feminine or Goddess
In Śākta traditions, prakṛti may be identified with Śakti, the Goddess as the dynamic power of reality. She is not merely the material used by a separate divine creator; she is herself divine creativity, agency, embodiment, and becoming.
Māyā or dependent manifestation
In Advaita Vedānta, prakṛti is often associated with māyā: the power through which the nondual Brahman appears as a differentiated cosmos. The world is experientially real but lacks independent, ultimate reality apart from Brahman.
A real attribute or body of God
In qualified nondualism, especially Rāmānuja’s Viśiṣṭādvaita, prakṛti is real and constitutes part of God’s body. It depends entirely upon Brahman but is not an illusion. God both includes the world and exceeds it.
A real energy distinct from God
In some dualistic and devotional traditions, prakṛti is God’s real but dependent energy. It is distinct from God without being autonomous, and God governs rather than becomes identical with it.
The ordinary nature or disposition of something
At the everyday level, prakṛti can mean a person’s or thing’s inherent nature, constitution, temperament, or characteristic mode of acting—roughly, “what something is naturally like.”

The Śākta Tradition

The Śākta tradition is the broad family of Hindu traditions in which Śakti—the divine power, energy, or creative agency of reality—is worshipped as supreme. The term carries several related meanings: The meanings below are drawn from multiple scholarly sources synthesized by AI. Specialists in Hinduism will rightly judge their adequacy.

A Tradition Centered on the Goddess
Śāktas worship the Divine in feminine forms such as Durgā, Kālī, Pārvatī, Lakṣmī, Tripurasundarī, and the many regional goddesses of India.

A Theology of Divine Power
Śakti means power, energy, capacity, or potency. It is the power through which the universe arises, lives, changes, and returns to its source.

A Vision of Ultimate Reality as Feminine
In many Śākta traditions, the Goddess is not merely the female companion of a male deity. She is Brahman itself—the ultimate reality from which all gods, beings, and worlds emerge.

A Relational Understanding of Divinity
In traditions that unite Śiva and Śakti, Śiva represents pure consciousness and Śakti its active, creative power. Neither is complete without the other. A familiar Śākta saying holds that Śiva without Śakti is śava—a corpse.

An Affirmation of the Sacredness of the World
Because the cosmos is a manifestation of Śakti, nature, bodies, emotions, sexuality, creativity, and material existence can all possess religious significance. The world need not be regarded merely as an illusion to be escaped.

A Collection of Ritual and Contemplative Paths
Śākta practice can include devotional worship, temple festivals, mantras, visualization, meditation, yoga, sacred diagrams called yantras, and forms of Tantra. Some practices are public and conventional; others are esoteric and transmitted through initiation.

A Diverse Family Rather Than a Single System
Śākta traditions range from village-goddess worship to sophisticated philosophical schools such as Śrīvidyā and nondual Śākta Tantra. Some understand the Goddess personally, others cosmically, and still others as the nondual consciousness-energy present in everything.

Prakṛti and Panentheism

You will note that two of the meanings of prakrti offered above explicitly mention the Bhagavad Gītā, In the Bhagavad Gītā, prakṛti evokes God's, or Krishna's, creative power in the universe—a power expressed both materially (earth, water, fire, air, and ether) and spiritually in the life of sentient beings. The implication is that everything we encounter in the world, and everything we discover within ourselves, is an expression of Krishna's power.

This is how I understand the interpretation of the Bhagavad Gītā offered by Ricardo S. Silvestre and Alan C. Herbert in "The Concept of God in the Bhagavad Gītā: A Panentheistic Account." Their article is an excellent contribution to the philosophy of religion, combining careful textual interpretation with rigorous philosophical analysis. Readers interested in pursuing their argument in greater depth are encouraged to read the essay in full here. Notably, the essay appears as the opening chapter in the volume they co-edited with Benedikt Paul Göcke, Vaiṣṇava Concepts of God: Philosophical Perspectives (New York: Routledge, 2024), where it provides the conceptual framework for the essays that follow.

If, as they argue, the Gītā can be understood panentheistically, then the panentheism at issue is of a distinctive kind. In this form of panentheism, the world's powers - the entities and events of the cosmos - are fundamentally self-expressions of divine power. To my mind, this represents what might best be called emanationist panentheism, It begins with the image of an undifferentiated activity with agency of its own, albei with various modes and aspects, of which the cosmos, in its mental and material expressions, are manifestations.

By contrast, if we allow the word prakṛti to evoke another of the meanings offere above, namely nature as the whole field of becoming— a different kind of panentheism emerges, The field of becoming includes both finite creatures and the divine life itself. This means that each manifestation of prakṛti possesses an integrity of its own, whether the expression is finite or infinite. The divine reality has such integrity, and so does the smallest puff of energy in outer space. They are connected to one another, but not reducible to one another. This can be relational panentheism.

This view does not imply that things are isolated from one another. Rather, it affirms their uniqueness in the ways they creatively respond to other influences and yet proposes, at the same time, that those other other influences, coming from other entities, are present within them. The very existence of each reality—finite or divine—depends partly on its relations with others.

In short, God and the cosmos are mutually immanent and mutually transcendent. Each finite being exercises its own measure of creativity and interior freedom even while participating in the larger creative life of the cosmos. And the divine reality - however else understood - does the same. God is not prakṛti as such, but rather, to quote Whitehead, its "primordial" but not exlusive expression,

What is prakrti, then? In a Whiteheadian context we can envision it is a fathomless depth, a creative abyss, of which all things, including God, are expressions. It might be compared, in a certain way, to Brahman without attributes. These expressions do indeed include everything. They include illusions as well as wisdom, disharmony as well as beauty, hatred as well as love, violence as well as peace, tragedy as well as hope. As a primordial expression of prakṛti the divine reality is the inwardly felt lure toward goodness, truth, and beauty within the human mind and heart, as well as the encompassing life, the cosmic womb, in which all things unfold. Whitehead speaks of the inwardly felt lure as one way that the primordial nature of God is incarnate in each creature; and he speaks of the encompassing womb in which all things unfold as the consequent nature of God: a side of God what "feels the feelings" of each and every being with empathy and care.

This, I suggest, is a Whiteheadian way of understanding prakṛti. It is not a creator or a source, a divinity or a demon; it is the undefinable creativity of which they are expressions. It is the very being, the very happening, of each entity, including the divine life.

There is, however, one further point. In Whitehead's philosophy, As the womb in which all things unfold, God is the subjective unity of the universe. The very word universe suggests unity, and for Whitehead God is the living unification of the world's many actualities into a single ongoing experience. This unity does not erase plurality; rather, it is constituted by it. God's life is the concrescence of the universe itself. In this important sense, the cosmos is God—not because the cosmos exhausts God's reality, but because the cosmos constitutes the ever-growing content of God's experience.

For this reason, it seems to me that the five propositions identified by Silvestre and Herbert as at the heart of the Bhagavad Gita can all be affirmed within a Whiteheadian framework:

The cosmos is in God.
God is different from the cosmos.
God is the source of the cosmos.
God is the cosmos.
The cosmos is pervaded by God.

The difference lies not in the five propositions themselves but in the metaphysical framework through which they are interpreted. Here is how each proposition can be understood in a Whiteheadian, relational spirit. These intepretive affirmations would go something like this:

The cosmos is in God. Every actual occasion is prehended and preserved in God's consequent nature, so that nothing is lost from the divine life. The universe exists within God's ongoing experience as the ever-growing content of God's subjective unity.

God is different from the cosmos. God is not identical with the aggregate of finite beings but is the living unity that embraces them while also possessing a primordial nature that is not derived from the world. God transcends the cosmos even while being intimately present within it.

God is the source of the cosmos. God is not the creator of Creativity itself or of the self-creativity of finite beings. Rather, God is the primordial source of order, possibility, value, and purpose, continually luring the universe toward richer forms of beauty, intensity, and harmony.

God is the cosmos. The cosmos is God insofar as it is the living content of God's consequent experience. The many creatures become one in God without ceasing to be themselves, so that God's very life includes the world's unfolding history. In this sense, says Whitehead, God is many as well as one.

The cosmos is pervaded by God. God is present to every actual entity as an inward lure toward its best possible becoming and as the compassionate recipient of all that it experiences. Divine presence is thus universal, persuasive rather than coercive, and relational rather than controlling.

Process and Śākta

Śakti as Poet and Eros: The Divine Feminine

The Śākta traditions introduce yet another meaning of prakṛti. Here prakṛti is identified with Śakti, the Divine Feminine or Goddess, whose very being is creative activity.

Śakti is not merely the material through which a separate divine creator works. She is herself divine creativity, agency, embodiment, and becoming. The universe is her living expression, and every creature participates in her power. The world is not outside her but unfolds within her inexhaustible creativity.

This understanding shifts the question. Rather than asking simply, "What is prakṛti?" we begin to ask, "Who is Śakti?" The answer is not merely a definition but a relationship, and not merely a relationship but also a center of experience. Śakti is encountered as mother, companion, guide, and object of devotion. Divine creativity is understood not only as metaphysical but also as personal.

What might Whitehead contribute to this vision of the Goddess? This may not be the right question. Rather it is how might Goddess traditions enrich Whitehead. He is well known for describing God as the Poet of the World, albeit using masculine language, and of describing God in Adventure of Ideas as the Eros of the universe,

My suggestion is not that Śākta traditions should be interpreted through Whitehead's philosophy or reduced to his metaphysics. Rather, Whitehead's understanding of God can be understood as one attempt, by a Western philosopher, to understand and interpret a creative and cosmic womb in whose life the universe unfolds: a womb who may better be presented in female than male terms:

'Another image which is also required to understand his consequent nature is that of his infinite patience...He is the poet of the world, with tender patience leading it by his vision of truth, beauty, and goodness."

- AN Whitehead, Process and Reality

Whitehead also imagines God as the Eros of the universe, which "incarnates itself" as the first phase of every moment aiming at intensity relative to the situation at hand.

The initial phase of each fresh occasion represents the issue of a struggle within the past for objective existence beyond itself. The determinant of the struggle is the supreme Eros incarnating itself as the first phase of the individual subjective aim in the new process of actuality.

AN Whitehead, Adventures of Ideas

As noted above, Whitehead distinguishes between Creativity, the ultimate principle of becoming, and God, the primordial and everlasting embodiment of Creativity. Creativity by itself is neither purposive nor compassionate. God is the actuality in whom Creativity is ordered toward beauty, relationship, and the flourishing of the world. God continually offers fresh possibilities to every creature, receives every creature's experience into the divine life, and transforms the world's achievements and sufferings into an ever richer harmony.

Seen through this lens, Śakti can be understood as the living embodiment of divine creativity: it's incarnation, to use Whitehead's term. She is not simply the power that gives rise to the universe but the loving presence through whom new possibilities continually arise, every creature is inwardly cherished, and the many lives of the cosmos are woven into an ever-deepening unity. Whitehead thus offers a philosophical vocabulary for understanding divine creativity as relational, persuasive, nurturing, and responsive and female: thereby helping people around the world reimagine images of the divine that have too often been restrictively male in image and energy.

Whether this interpretation remotely captures the richness of Śākta traditions is for their scholars and practitioners to decide. My hope is simply that Whitehead's doctrine of God opens a fruitful dialogue in which his relational panentheism and the theology of the Divine Feminine illuminate one another while each retains its own integrity.

The Gita as a Melting Pot
of Ideas about God

"From these examples it is evident that the Gita does not know that pantheism, deism, and theism cannot well be jumbled up into one consistent philosophic creed. And it does not attempt to answer any objections that may be made against the combination of such opposite views. The Gita not only asserts that all is God, but it also again and again repeats that God transcends all and is simultaneously transcendent and immanent in the world. The answer apparently implied in the Gītā to all objections to the apparently different views of the nature of God is that transcendentalism, immanentism and pantheism lose their distinctive and opposite characters in the melting whole of the superpersonality of God."

- Dasgupta, Surendranath. A History of Indian Philosophy. Vol. 2. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1922, 527.

Five Claims about God in the Gita
Forming a Panentheistic Outlook

"The task we propose to undertake in this chapter is an explanatory one. We want to explain the Gita's panentheism. As an additional by-product, we relate the Gītā's concept of God to some key notions in contemporary metaphysics, such as ontological dependence and fundamentality. As far as this explanatory endeavor is concerned, we basically look for a single principle, or a small set of principles, to be found in the Gita itself, which can consistently explain both the Gita's immanence and the Gita's transcendence.

We lay down five claims which are found in the Gita that relate God and the cosmos and which need to be explained, namely:

(G1) The cosmos is in God.
(G2) God is different from the cosmos.
(G3) God is the source of the cosmos.
(G4) God is the cosmos.
(G5) The cosmos is pervaded by God.

The Gita's panentheism can be seen as the conjunction of these five claims. But, as we said, they need to be explained. To this, we lay down some ontological theses which, we argue, are supported by the Gitas and explain G1–G5. The key thesis is one which states that the cosmos is God's prakṛti, where we consider prakṛti in the Gita to be a metaphysical primitive denoting the intimate relation that exists between matter and conscious living beings on one hand, and God on the other."

- Silvestre, Ricardo S., and Alan C. Herbert. "The Concept of God in the Bhagavad Gītā: A Panentheistic Account." In Vaiṣṇava Concepts of God: Philosophical Perspectives, edited by Ricardo Sousa Silvestre, Alan C. Herbert, and Benedikt Paul Göcke, 15–32. New York: Routledge, 2024.

Vaiṣṇava Concepts of God

Vaiṣṇava Concepts of God: Philosophical Perspectives (Routledge, 2023) analyses the concepts of God in Vaiṣṇavism, which is commonly referred to as one of the great Hindu monotheistic traditions. Addressing the question of what attributes God possesses according to particular textual sources and traditions in Vaiṣṇavism, the book analyses Vaiṣṇava traditions and texts in order to locate them within a global philosophical framework.

The book is divided into two sections. The first one, God in Vaiṣṇava Texts, deals with concepts of God found in the canonical Vaiṣṇava texts: the Bhavagad Gītā, the Bhagavata Purāṇa, the Pāñcarātras, and the Mahābhārata. The second section, God in Vaiṣṇava Traditions, addresses concepts of God found in several Vaiṣṇava traditions and their respective key theologians. As well as the Āḻvārs, five traditional Vaiṣṇava schools- the Śrī Vaiṣṇava tradition, the Madhva tradition, the Nimbārka tradition, the Puṣṭimārga tradition, and the Caitanya Vaiṣṇava tradition- and two contemporary ones Ramakrishna's and Swami Bhaktivedanta's are considered.

The book combines normative, critical and descriptive elements. Some chapters are philosophical in nature, others are more descriptive, unpacking a specific Vaiṣṇava concept of God for future philosophical analysis and critique. Written by experts who break new ground in presenting and representing a diversity of Vaiṣṇava texts and tradition, the book presents approaches that reflect the amount of philosophical and historical deliberation on the specific issues and divine attributes considered. This book will be of interest to researchers in the fields of philosophy of religion and Indian philosophy, cross-cultural and comparative philosophy, analytic philosophy of religion, Hindu studies, theology and religious studies.

Raj Balkaran is a scholar of Sanskrit narrative texts. He teaches at the Oxford Centre for Hindu Studies and at his own virtual School of Indian Wisdom. For information see rajbalkaran.com.

Interview with the Authors

Whitehead's Antitheses

"The final summary can only be expressed in terms of a group of antitheses, whose apparent self-contradictions depend on neglect of the diverse categories of existence. In each antithesis there is a shift of meaning which converts the opposition into a contrast.

It is as true to say that God is permanent and the World fluent, as that the World is permanent and God is fluent.

It is as true to say that God is one and the World many, as that the World is one and God many.

It is as true to say that, in comparison with the World, God is actual eminently, as that, in comparison with God, the World is actual eminently.

It is as true to say that the World is immanent in God, as that God is immanent in the World.

It is as true to say that God transcends the World, as that the World transcends God.
It is as true to say that God creates the World, as that the World creates God."

—Alfred North Whitehead, Process and Reality: An Essay in Cosmology, Corrected Edition, ed. David Ray Griffin and Donald W. Sherburne (New York: Free Press, 1978), 348.