“Reality is a process of becoming, and the becoming is the actualization of potentiality.”
- Alfred North Whitehead, Process and Reality (PR)“The many become one, and are increased by one.”- Whitehead, Process and Reality (1929)“Concrescence is the name for the process in which the universe of many data becomes the actuality of one experience. Each actual entity is a process, and the process is the becoming of the unity of the many.”- Whitehead, PR [1929] II.VI.2“Every act of experience is a concrescence - an inward unifying of the world’s many feelings into the one immediacy of a living occasion.”- a reflective process statement
Preface
In both philosophy and theology, few ideas have proved as revolutionary - or as unifying - as the claim that consciousness lies at the foundation of reality. Once the province of mystics and metaphysicians, this intuition has re-emerged in the twenty-first century within analytic philosophy, neuroscience, and cosmology. What was once called God - the living ground of all being - is now being re-imagined as a cosmic field of awareness, not outside creation but at its very bottom.
This essay explores that possibility: that consciousness is the universe’s first fact rather than its last accident. Such a view does not erase God but reframes divinity as the ground of awareness itself, open to scientific exploration and spiritual reflection alike.
Introduction
To say that consciousness is “at the bottom of the universe” is to invert a long intellectual hierarchy. Western materialism has long supposed that matter comes first and mind comes later... that consciousness is a late arrival in a mechanical cosmos. Yet the mystery of subjective experience - why there is something like consciousness that is likely to exist - has stubbornly resisted materialistic explanation. If consciousness cannot be reduced to matter, perhaps matter itself is a form of consciousness condensed into physical expression.
This suggestion, far from a retreat into mysticism, has become a serious metaphysical option. Philosophers, physicists, and theologians alike now ask whether the fabric of reality itself is experiential.... From this vantage, the word God regains philosophical coherence - not as an anthropomorphic agent manipulating nature, but as the grounding awareness in which nature continually unfolds.
This is the heart of process theology's vision: that God is not a distant cause behind the world, but the living depth within it - a dynamic field of creativity, relation, and feeling through which all things come to be and are held in becoming. In this view, divinity and cosmos are not separate orders of existence but interwoven dimensions of one process: the universe as God’s "body", and God as the universe’s soul. Consciousness, creativity, and relationality thus emerge not as anomalies within matter but as the very structure of reality itself.
From here, we enter the metaphysical question: if consciousness pervades the ground of being, what does that mean for our understanding of matter, mind, and meaning?
I. Metaphysics: Consciousness as Fundamental
Modern philosophy has offered several frameworks for this view:
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Panpsychism (Galen Strawson, Philip Goff) posits that every physical entity possesses a minimal interiority - a proto-experience corresponding to its physical form. (Goff, Galileo’s Error, 2019
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Neutral Monism (William James, Bertrand Russell) treats matter and mind as dual aspects of one neutral “stuff.”
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Ideal Realism (Bernardo Kastrup, Anil Seth) interprets the cosmos as a self-differentiating field of awareness.
Across these proposed positions lies a shared conviction: consciousness is not derivative. The universe is not a dead stage on which life briefly appears; it is a living process in which every event, from quark to galaxy, partakes of experience.
Alfred North Whitehead’s process philosophy provides perhaps the most rigorous articulation. Reality, he argued, consists of “actual occasions”—moments of experience that prehend and integrate the world into new acts of becoming. (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy). In this vision, experience is the substance of existence, and at the “bottom” of the universe is an infinite network of experiential relations.
II. Theology: God as the Ground of Awareness
If consciousness is fundamental, theology gains a new metaphysical grammar. Panentheism — the idea that all things exist in God, though God is more than all things — becomes a natural correlate. (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy)
Classical theism imagined a unipolar deity, an all-controlling source standing above creation. By contrast, Process theology, envisions a multi-polar God - a divine life expressed through many relational centers of awareness. Each living entity participates in divinity as a unique pole of feeling and creativity, while God encompasses and integrates them all. The divine life thus unfolds as a network of reciprocity rather than a hierarchy of command.
Originally, Whitehead described God as dipolar - having both a Primordial Nature (the eternal realm of potential value) and a Consequent Nature (the living response to the world’s unfolding). Building on this, later process thinkers such as John Cobb and Catherine Keller expand the image toward a multi-polar reality, where every creaturely experience adds its distinct tone to the divine symphony. God is the ongoing concrescence of all these poles: the one who both contains and is "contained" by the world. [Here, the word "contain" refers to God's relational participation with creation where every actual entity’s experience is felt by God and integrated into God’s own ongoing life.]
In this vision, divinity and cosmos interpenetrate one another, as would be naturally/spiritually expected. God is not an external artificer but the living depth within every act of becoming - the conscious field through which all things relate, feel, and realize value. Prayer, creativity, and ethical action are participations in this multi-polar consciousness: ways of attuning one’s personal center to the wider divine harmony. God, then, is the multi-polar ground of awareness - a relational unity continually enriched by the world’s diversity, drawing all things toward deeper communion and beauty.
III. Science: Bridging Empiricism and Spirituality
Science approaches consciousness through its measurable correlates. Yet even here the language of integration and information hints at deeper metaphysical continuity. The Integrated Information Theory (IIT) of Giulio Tononi and Christof Koch proposes that consciousness corresponds to the degree of a system’s intrinsic causal integration (arXiv).
If such theories hold, consciousness is not a ghost in the machine but an intrinsic dimension of complex systems, scaling upward from atomic coherence to neural awareness. Physics, too, is re-examining the role of the observer in quantum measurement - suggesting that mind and matter may be entwined in a single process of realization.
From a process-theological stance, this is not an intrusion of mysticism into science but its natural evolution: as the scientific lens widens, it encounters the experiential interior of reality that religion has long intuited. Consciousness “at the bottom of reality” thus becomes a meeting ground where empirical investigation and spiritual reflection converge.
Conclusion
To affirm consciousness at the foundation of being and becoming is to rediscover the sacred in rational form. The universe ceases to be a mechanism and becomes a communion of experience. God ceases to be a hypothesis and becomes the immanent depth of awareness by which the cosmos knows itself.
Science and faith, far from adversaries, appear as complementary languages describing the same reality - one exterior, one interior. Their reconciliation does not require abandoning reason or belief, but widening both until they meet in wonder.
Coda
If consciousness is the universe awake to itself, then faith is consciousness learning to love its own depths. The divine is not elsewhere - it is here, in every pulse of awareness, in every creative act that draws the world forward. To know this is not to escape matter, but to sanctify it; not to leave science behind, but to fulfill its longing for coherence. In this realization, theology becomes a branch of cosmology, and cosmology a form of prayer.
1. Value is at the Heart
For Whitehead, the ultimate aim of the universe is the production of value - or, as he says in Process and Reality, “the teleology of the Universe is directed to the production of Beauty.”
Beauty, in Whitehead’s metaphysical language, is the harmony and intensity of experience: the most adequate expression of value realized through feeling.
So when you place “value” at the heart of cosmic consciousness, you’re aligning with Whitehead’s own deepest intuition. Value, in this context, is not a moral or aesthetic preference - it is the qualitative depth of existence itself. The cosmos evolves toward richer, more intense forms of experience - more value.
2. Creativity, Relationality, and Experience as the Means
The process words - creativity, relationality, and experience - describe how value is realized.
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Creativity is the ultimate metaphysical principle: the fact that there is ongoing becoming at all. It’s the power of the universe to produce novelty.
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Relationality (or “prehension”) is the mode of that creativity — the way each actual entity feels, inherits, and integrates the others.
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Experience is the inner life of these relations — what it feels like for the many to become one.
In short:
Creativity is the process, relationality is the pattern, experience is the texture, and value is the goal.
3. God as the Lure Toward Value
For Whitehead and later process theologians, God is not the origin of creativity but its chief harmonizer and aim - the one who lures the world toward greater value. God holds the eternal possibilities (potential forms of value) and persuades the cosmos toward their realization.
Thus:
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God’s Primordial Nature = the realm of potential value.
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God’s Consequent Nature = the loving reception of all achieved value.
The divine life is, therefore, the perfect integration of the world’s experiences into ever-deepening harmony.
4. Summing Up
Process theology is often described by three interlocking centers:
| Core Term | Function | Relationship to Value |
|---|---|---|
| Creativity | The fact of becoming | The generative power enabling new value |
| Relationality | The interconnectedness of all entities | The medium through which value is shared |
| Experience | The feeling of existence | The substance in which value inheres |
| Value (Beauty) | The telos of all becoming | The ultimate aim — the realization of divine satisfaction |
So, when you foreground “value” as the heart of cosmic consciousness, you’re articulating the end toward which all process moves - exactly as Whitehead intended.
Creativity, relationality, and experience are the grammar of the process; value (beauty, intensity, harmony) is its poetry.
Selected Online Bibliography
Metaphysics & Panpsychism
Process Theology & Panentheism
Science of Consciousness
Integrative & Comparative Works
