Whitehead's Prime

We are always looking for Prime Patterns. Sensing these patterns allows us to understand complexity in a way that we can share the richness of this meaning with others.

And so it is with Whitehead. Reading Whitehead feels a bit like reading Jack Kerouac – a stream of consciousness that is forever interweaving and emerging. The process of understanding is non-linear, where one must dive in to each moment in the text to seek its essence – in the hope that that essence will begin to connect to other moments of discovery, forming patterns in a Metanoietic Consciousness.

Might there be an originating trivium from which these patterns emerged? That was my question as I traversed the text and commentary on it. And then I found it: something called the 'three ultimates': The Absolute, the World and Creativity.

You have to have all three, he is said to have argued. You cannot have the Absolute and the World, without Creativity. You cannot have Creativity and the World without the Absolute.

Let us not forget: it is Whitehead who coined the term 'creativity'. He created it for a very important reason. A word, now so common, did not exist before Whitehead imagined it as a key leg of his ultimate – that which made the prime pattern of this originating trivium.

But let's go back to that statement again: You cannot have Creativity and the World without the Absolute.

We know God is ladened word in our modern society: either clung to or rejected, but rarely simply accepted. For this reason we sometimes use 'divine', as in Divine Cadence.