Emergent Coherence Metaphysics: Seeing Reality Beyond Substance and Hierarchy
A metaphysical framework of divine becoming
Introduction
Western metaphysical traditions—from Greek antiquity to Christian theology, from Neoplatonism to Enlightenment rationalism—have provided profound and enduring frameworks for understanding reality, selfhood, divinity, and the cosmos. Yet, despite their internal diversity, these traditions often share core assumptions: that being is fixed and essential; that causality flows hierarchically from transcendent origins; that the cosmos was created ex nihilo by an immutable and absolute source; that divinity is non-relational and simple; that personhood is defined by substance and rational form; and that the goal of life is to ascend toward a perfect, unchanging ideal.
These assumptions have generated intellectual brilliance and spiritual depth, but they have also imposed ontological hierarchies, estranged persons from their world, and obscured the dynamic, relational, and participatory nature of existence. In an era increasingly shaped by ecological crisis, intercultural encounter, psychological pluralism, and scientific insights into complexity and emergence, we are called to reexamine the metaphysical scaffolding beneath our shared worldviews.
This paper proposes Emergent Coherence Metaphysics (ECM) as a constructive alternative—a metaphysical framework grounded in dynamic process, recursive causality, participatory knowing, and the unfolding of coherent meaning through relation. ECM neither abandons metaphysics nor retreats into abstraction. Rather, it reframes metaphysical inquiry as the articulation of how actuality generates new potential through emergent patterns of coherence—patterns that include but are not reducible to rationality, order, or form.
Structure of the Paper
The argument unfolds in four parts:
Part I (Undoing the Classical Framework) deconstructs six foundational assumptions of classical metaphysic—regarding being, causality, cosmos, divinity, personhood, and participation. Each critique reveals not just the limitations of inherited categories but the opening for a new vision.
Part II (The Architecture of Emergent Coherence) constructs the core elements of ECM. Drawing from process thought, systems theory, Madhyamaka philosophy, and Perceptual Control Theory, it articulates a non-substantialist, participatory metaphysics grounded in coherence as the basic metaphysical reality.
Part III (ECM in Dialogue with the Tradition) rigorously engages with key metaphysical systems—Neoplatonism, Aristotelian-Thomism, Palamism, Madhyamaka—exposing their internal tensions not to dismiss their insights, but to clarify where ECM both converges and departs. This section serves as an intellectual defense of ECM and an invitation to further metaphysical inquiry.
Part IV (Implications of ECM) explores the implications of this new metaphysics for epistemology, ethics, psychology, theology, and the human sciences. It argues that ECM offers a living, integrated framework for human understanding, agency, and transformation—one that affirms both the emptiness of fixed identities and the meaningfulness of participation in emergent coherence.
The paper concludes by envisioning a way forward—not merely a new metaphysics, but a new approach to being human: one grounded in relationality, openness, and shared becoming.
Part I – Undoing the Classical Framework
Introduction
Classical metaphysics, in its many forms—from Platonic idealism to Christian Neoplatonism, from Aristotelian-Thomistic realism to Enlightenment rationalism—has shaped the foundational assumptions of Western thought. These traditions, though internally diverse, share a set of core metaphysical commitments: that being is static and essential; that causality proceeds from hierarchical sources; that the cosmos was created ex nihilo by a transcendent, immutable God; that divinity is absolute and non-relational; that persons are rational substances; and that participation in the divine entails ascent toward a fixed perfection.
This part of the paper does not merely critique individual doctrines but exposes the systemic coherence of this classical worldview—and begins to dismantle its architecture from within. Each assumption contributes to a metaphysical paradigm that separates God from world, essence from existence, and person from participation. In rejecting these assumptions, we do not fall into relativism or nihilism. Rather, we prepare the conceptual ground for an alternative: a metaphysics of Emergent Coherence.
Emergent Coherence Metaphysics (ECM), also referred to as Divine Metaphysics (DM), proposes that reality is not structured by timeless substances or hierarchical emanations, but by recursive processes of coherence arising from non-fixed potential—a dynamic field of possibilities that emerges in relation to actual conditions and redefines itself through relational participation. This alternative framework is not merely a reaction against classical metaphysics but an affirmative reorientation: one that sees being as emergent process, causality as recursive participation, divinity as immanently relational, and personhood as constituted through dynamic coherence.
To clarify the identity of this framework, emergent coherence is not simply a metaphysical descriptor but also a redefinition of divinity itself. Divinity, in ECM, is understood as the dynamic, emergent coherence of relational patterning that constitutes divine becoming—the unfolding sacred process immanent to all reality. This aligns ECM with what we call Divine Metaphysics (DM), emphasizing that the divine is not an external absolute but the living process of becoming that pervades persons, cosmos, and all relational structures. Thus, ECM and DM are two names for the same visionary framework: one emphasizing metaphysics, the other its divine character as a metaphysics of becoming.
To fully articulate ECM, we must first unseat the classical assumptions that have constrained our metaphysical imagination. This first part of the paper, therefore, proceeds by addressing six foundational domains: being, causality, cosmos, divinity, personhood, and participation. Each section critiques a central presupposition of classical metaphysics, preparing the way for their constructive reconfiguration in Part II.
Guide to Part I: Classical Assumptions and Emerging Tensions
What follows is a thematic overview of Part I, outlining the core critiques of classical metaphysics and setting the stage for the constructive proposals developed in Part II.
1.1 Being: From Static Essence to Dynamic Process
Classical metaphysics traditionally understands being as fixed, static, and defined by essential properties that constitute the identity of things. This view assumes that entities have an immutable essence underlying their existence, providing stability and identity across time. However, such a framework struggles to account for change, novelty, and the relational nature of reality. In this section, we critically examine the metaphysical assumptions underlying static essence, demonstrating their limitations and preparing the way for a more dynamic, process-oriented understanding of being.
1.2 Causality: From Linear Chains to Recursive Participation
The classical model of causality pictures reality as a sequence of discrete causes and effects, often grounded in hierarchical orders—whether divine or natural. Causality is typically understood as a unidirectional chain tracing back to fixed origins. This framework restricts the fluidity and interdependence evident in complex systems. Here, we expose the shortcomings of linear causality and argue for a shift toward a model that acknowledges recursive, mutual participation as foundational to the unfolding of reality.
1.3 Cosmos: Beyond Creation ex Nihilo and Eternal Substances
Classical metaphysics commonly asserts that the cosmos was created ex nihilo by a transcendent, immutable God, and that the world’s order is rooted in eternal, unchanging substances or forms. These claims shape traditional cosmology but raise difficult questions about contingency, emergence, and the nature of possibility. This section challenges these assumptions and explores their metaphysical consequences, laying the groundwork for a more open and participatory cosmology.
1.4 Divinity: From Absolute Substance to Relational Coherence
In classical thought, divinity is often conceived as an absolute, immutable substance — transcendent, omnipotent, and beyond relational dependency. This conception risks detaching divinity from the lived realities of process and participation, creating metaphysical dualisms between God and world. Here, we critique the metaphysical status granted to divinity in these traditions and argue for a redefinition of the sacred as an emergent, relational coherence that dynamically shapes and is shaped by the cosmos.
1.5 Personhood: From Fixed Substance to Emergent Agency
Personhood in classical metaphysics is usually grounded in a fixed essence—whether a rational soul, hypostasis, or substantial self—presumed to be stable, independent, and self-identical. This essentialist view encounters challenges from phenomena of change, relationality, and multiplicity within the self. This section examines the tensions inherent in classical notions of personhood and introduces the need for a metaphysical framework that can accommodate personhood as an emergent, participatory process.
1.6 Participation: From Ascent to Synergistic Becoming
Participation traditionally involves the ascent of the created toward a transcendent source or the imitation of divine perfection as an endpoint. This upward movement often presumes a metaphysical hierarchy culminating in union with an immutable origin. Here, we critique these teleological and hierarchical assumptions, proposing instead that participation is a dynamic, synergistic process—an ongoing co-creation rather than a one-way ascent.
1.1 Being: From Static Essence to Dynamic Process
Classical metaphysics begins with the presupposition that being is static, essential, and ultimately unchanging. Whether in the Platonic realm of Forms, the Aristotelian substance, or the Thomistic actus purus, to be is to participate in or instantiate some underlying essence. Being is conceived as that which remains constant beneath change — timeless, universal, and metaphysically prior to becoming. Even when relational terms are introduced (e.g., in Christian accounts of the Trinity), these relations are understood to be eternal, internal to the divine essence, and non-contingent.
This essentialist conception of being has profound consequences. It generates a hierarchical metaphysics in which true reality is identified with unchanging substance, and the mutable world of phenomena is viewed as derivative or less real. Becoming, movement, change, and contingency are framed as secondary, even illusory. The task of philosophy, theology, and even spirituality becomes one of ascent: to transcend the realm of flux and participate in that which is beyond time, beyond relation, and beyond contradiction.
Emergent Coherence Metaphysics (ECM) begins by rejecting this framework. It refuses to locate being in a timeless substrate or eternal essence. Instead, ECM reframes being as dynamic coherence—a self-organizing pattern of relational tensions held together across time. To be is not to instantiate a fixed form, but to cohere dynamically within and across relational contexts. Being is not what lies beneath change; it is the provisional and evolving order that emerges through it.
This reframing turns classical metaphysics on its head. Instead of seeing becoming as a mere mode or appearance of being, ECM sees being as an achievement within becoming. There is no substance behind the form—only the form itself, held together through recursive processes of tension and integration. What exists is not what eternally is, but what coheres meaningfully in time.
Dynamic coherence is not chaos, but neither is it stasis. It is patterned process—organized, but always reorganizing. A living organism, for example, maintains its identity not by remaining the same, but by continually adapting, responding, integrating, and reorganizing in the face of internal and external perturbations. Its being is not essence but active coherence. Likewise, a conversation, a community, or a tradition is not defined by a static core but by the dynamic pattern that holds its tensions, renews its sense, and transforms through time while remaining recognizably itself.
This reconceptualization of being as dynamic coherence has important consequences. First, it eliminates the need for an ontological hierarchy in which the unchanging is more real than the changing. Second, it allows for a metaphysical account that honors contingency, complexity, and emergence without collapsing into relativism or fragmentation. And third, it opens the door to a vision of divinity not as a fixed being “above” the world, but as the unfolding horizon of coherence within it.
In ECM, being is not given once and for all. It is not bestowed from a transcendent source or secured by an immutable nature. It is enacted, maintained, and transformed through participation in relational fields. To be is to cohere dynamically—and that coherence is never final. It is always vulnerable, always revisable, always open to reorganization. This is not a defect, but the very condition of vitality and meaning.
1.2 Causality: From Linear Chains to Recursive Participation
In classical metaphysics, causality is typically conceived as a linear sequence of efficient causes—each effect having a prior, independent cause that sets it into motion. This model finds its paradigmatic form in Aristotelian and Thomistic thought, where causality is divided into four types (material, formal, efficient, and final), with efficient causality often functioning as the linchpin of metaphysical explanation. In such systems, God is the first and uncaused cause, a necessary being whose action initiates and sustains all other causal chains without being affected in return. This causal asymmetry—cause acting on effect without reciprocal transformation—upholds a metaphysical architecture of top-down, hierarchical control.
Yet this classical view, though elegant in its order, leaves significant problems unresolved. It struggles to account for mutual influence, feedback loops, or genuinely emergent phenomena. It treats the world as a deterministic machine or a passive expression of divine will, rather than a participatory field of dynamic becoming. Even in its more sophisticated theological versions, causality remains unidirectional: divine action radiates outward; creation responds; but the Creator remains unmoved and unchanging. This preserves divine transcendence at the cost of real relationality.
Emergent Coherence Metaphysics rejects this linear, one-way model in favor of a recursive account of causality rooted in participation. In ECM, causality is not the transmission of force from one substance to another, but the mutual coordination of processes seeking coherence. An event arises not from an isolated act of initiation, but from the ongoing interaction of multiple systems striving to maintain or restore equilibrium. Causation is circular, recursive, and co-creative: each moment is shaped by past actualities, present constraints, and potential futures, all informing one another in a process of continuous reorganization.
This reconception allows for an account of freedom that is not merely libertarian or compatibilist, but emergent. Because the system is recursive and open-ended, new forms of coherence can arise that are not strictly determined by prior states. A person, for instance, is not a fixed rational agent moved by hidden causes, but a dynamically reconfiguring center of participation, whose actions feed back into the field of relational possibilities. Divine influence, too, is reframed—not as imposition from above, but as the indwelling availability of coherence, a lure toward greater integration that does not override freedom but enables it.
In this view, causality becomes less about linear power and more about relational fittingness. It does not collapse into relativism or randomness; instead, it invites a metaphysics in which all actions are shaped within networks of meaning, tension, and participation. Each moment becomes a node of co-arising, a site of negotiation between actuality and potential, guided by—but not controlled by—the lure of coherence.
Thus, ECM moves from a metaphysics of efficient causation to a metaphysics of recursive participation. This opens the way for a redefinition of divine action, moral agency, and natural processes—not as closed systems following preordained lines, but as open systems constantly reshaping themselves through their relationships. Reality, in this framework, is not a machine with a Prime Mover, but a dance of participatory unfolding, where coherence is both the condition and the goal of causal interplay.
1.3 Cosmos: Beyond Creation ex Nihilo and Eternal Substances
Classical metaphysics and theology have long centered the cosmos around two core ideas: that the universe was created ex nihilo—out of nothing—by a transcendent, immutable God, and that the underlying reality consists of eternal, unchanging substances or forms. These assumptions form the bedrock of much Western thought, shaping how we understand the origin, nature, and persistence of all that exists.
The doctrine of creation ex nihilo posits a radical ontological discontinuity between God and the cosmos. The world is not co-eternal with the divine but owes its existence to a singular act of divine will, which brings forth all being from absolute non-being. This view preserves divine transcendence and sovereignty but risks portraying the cosmos as contingent and ontologically fragile, utterly dependent on an external source beyond itself. It also imposes a static metaphysical hierarchy where God stands as the ultimate cause, distinct from and prior to creation.
Similarly, the metaphysical notion of eternal substances or forms—whether Platonic Ideas or Aristotelian substances—posits fixed, timeless realities that underlie the changing world. These enduring essences are seen as the true “what” of things, grounding their identity and ensuring stability amidst flux. They often function as metaphysical anchors, implying a cosmos structured by immutable, hierarchical principles rather than open-ended becoming.
Emergent Coherence Metaphysics (ECM) challenges both these classical assumptions, proposing instead a cosmology of dynamic, relational becoming. Rather than arising from a discrete act of creation ex nihilo, the cosmos is understood as an ongoing, participatory process of recursive coherence emerging from non-fixed potential. There is no ontological gap or absolute origination event that fixes the world’s being; instead, reality continuously unfolds through patterns of tension, integration, and reorganization.
In this view, there are no eternal substances beneath appearances—no fixed essences or immutable forms. Instead, identity and stability arise temporarily and locally from dynamic coherence holding relational tensions in provisional balance. The cosmos is not a finished product created once and for all but a continuously emergent field of possibilities and actualities, where new forms and orders arise, persist, transform, and dissolve.
By moving beyond creation ex nihilo and eternal substances, ECM offers a metaphysics that is neither grounded in a transcendent external source nor trapped in static hierarchy. It honors the contingency and openness of becoming without lapsing into nihilism or mere chaos. The cosmos is not an inert mechanism nor a fixed hierarchy but a living process of relational coherence—a vibrant, responsive field in which actuality and potential interplay dynamically to sustain and regenerate the unfolding whole.
This cosmological framework invites a renewed understanding of existence as participation in an ongoing creative process, where every event and agent contributes to the recursive emergence of coherence across scales. It reframes our place in the universe not as passive recipients of a fixed creation, but as active participants in the cosmos’ continual self-realization.
1.4 Divinity: From Absolute Substance to Emergent Coherence
Classical metaphysical and theological traditions commonly conceive divinity as an absolute, immutable substance—a perfect, necessary being existing independently and prior to all else. Whether framed as the actus purus of Thomistic metaphysics, the transcendent One of Neoplatonism, or the omnipotent God of classical theism, this conception centers on divinity’s self-subsistence, immutability, and separateness from creation.
This substantialist model posits God as the ultimate ground of all being, fully actualized and beyond change, embodying absolute unity and simplicity. Divinity is thus understood as fixed and complete, standing apart from the flux and fragmentation of the created order. Such a view preserves divine transcendence and sovereignty but tends to portray God as metaphysically distant, and raises difficult questions about how an immutable God can genuinely relate to a mutable world.
Furthermore, this absolute substance model often entails a duality or gap between God and creation—between the transcendent divine essence and the contingent cosmos. The relationship between God and world is one of cause to effect, or presence to absence, making relationality derivative and secondary. Divine immanence is frequently explained as participation in divine energies or presence, but this participation risks collapsing God’s transcendence or diluting creation’s contingency.
Emergent Coherence Metaphysics (ECM) proposes a radical rethinking of divinity that dissolves this dualism and substantival absolutism. Rather than an unchanging, separate substance, divinity is understood as emergent coherence: the ongoing patterning and organizing principle that manifests in and through processes of becoming. Divinity is not a fixed “what” but an evolving “how”—the emergent quality of coherence that draws relational fields toward integration and harmony.
In this framework, divinity is immanent and participatory, inseparable from the processes it organizes yet never exhausted by them. God is not a metaphysical entity outside or behind the world but the transcendent coherence implicit in the relational patterns that give rise to order and value. This coherence is never fully actualized, always a horizon toward which reality moves through recursive self-organization.
ECM’s conception avoids the pitfalls of both pantheism (where God and world are identical) and classical theism (where God is wholly other). Instead, divinity is seen as a processual polarity—a dynamic interplay between emergent coherence (manifest divinity) and transcendent coherence (God as the organizing telos). This polarity preserves both transcendence and immanence without collapsing them into contradiction.
This emergent coherence model redefines sacredness not as a property of a fixed divine substance but as the quality of emergent order and meaningful integration manifest wherever relational processes achieve provisional harmony. Divine presence is thus an active, participatory reality that invites conscious engagement, ethical responsiveness, and ongoing transformation.
By reframing divinity as emergent coherence, ECM opens the way for a metaphysics of the sacred grounded not in immutable essences but in living, recursive participation. This approach reclaims the divine as intimately bound up with the processes of the cosmos and personhood alike, providing a metaphysical foundation for spiritual transformation grounded in the unfolding coherence of being.
1.5 Personhood: From Fixed Substance to Emergent Agency
Traditional metaphysical systems, both philosophical and theological, have often grounded personhood in the concept of substance. Whether as an immaterial soul, a rational essence, or a hypostatic identity, the person has been treated as an ontologically distinct and stable “something” that persists across change. In this view, personhood is conferred by participation in a fixed nature (such as rationality or divine image), and identity is secured by continuity of essence.
This substantialist framework affords certain metaphysical assurances—of unity, dignity, and permanence—but it also introduces deep difficulties. It tends to treat individual persons as metaphysically self-contained, abstracted from the dynamic relational networks through which they come to know themselves and the world. It often assumes a static self prior to action or relation, a view increasingly untenable in light of contemporary psychology, cognitive science, and non-dual philosophical traditions.
In contrast, Emergent Coherence Metaphysics (ECM) proposes a fundamentally different understanding: personhood as emergent agency. A person is not a metaphysical substance or essence but a dynamically organizing center of coherence—an evolving process of pattern recognition, integration, and participatory responsiveness across multiple relational fields.
This model draws from Perceptual Control Theory, enactive cognition, and process philosophy, suggesting that what we call a “self” is not a thing but a system: a recursive structure that maintains integrity by reorganizing itself in response to error and disruption. Agency, in this view, is not the product of a fixed identity but the capacity to reorient and re-pattern coherence within one's lived context. Personhood, therefore, is not static but self-regulating and developmental.
Rather than positing a pre-existing metaphysical “I,” ECM views the subject of experience as emergent from the organism’s recursive regulation of perception and meaning. This aligns with the insight of contemplative and deconstructive traditions that no permanent or independent self can be found—yet without reducing personhood to illusion. Selfhood and agency are real, but not essentialist. Identity is functional, contextual, and transformable.
In this light, ethical and spiritual transformation becomes possible precisely because the person is not ontologically fixed. Persons can grow in coherence, expand their range of integration, and deepen their participatory attunement to emergent value. The self is not a given but a task—a pattern-in-process—open to development, healing, and transfiguration.
Importantly, ECM reframes relationality not as a property added to pre-existing substances, but as constitutive of personhood itself. A person exists only through relations: to others, to the world, to value, and to the emergent coherence we call the divine. The more integrated these relational patterns become, the more fully personhood emerges.
Thus, ECM rejects both substance-based individualism and impersonal universalism. It affirms personhood as real, but processual and participatory—arising through dynamic interaction with the field of becoming. Persons are centers of coherence-in-the-making, whose unique perspectives matter not because they possess an absolute identity, but because they are capable of transforming the world through conscious responsiveness.
1.6 Participation: From Ascent to Synergistic Becoming
In classical metaphysical systems—whether Platonic, Neoplatonic, or Christian—participation has typically meant the dependence of lower realities on higher, more perfect forms or substances. To participate in the Good, the True, or the Divine has been understood as an ascent: a metaphysical movement upward from multiplicity to unity, from becoming to being, from material to immaterial, from created to uncreated. This vertical model of participation reflects a hierarchical cosmology, where value, reality, and perfection flow top-down from an eternal source.
While this model preserves a strong sense of dependence on transcendent origin, it also tends to enforce a static and one-way metaphysics. Lower beings “partake” in higher ones, but cannot affect or transform them. The divine remains untouched, the ideal remains fixed, and history becomes the arena of striving toward something already fully actual elsewhere. Participation, in this context, often implies imitation rather than co-creation, submission rather than synergy.
Emergent Coherence Metaphysics (ECM) proposes a non-hierarchical and recursive account of participation: not as ascent into pre-existent perfections, but as synergistic becoming within a field of unfolding potential. Participation is not vertical absorption into the eternal, but mutual transformation within an emergent whole. Every local act of coherence reshapes the global field, just as the global field offers conditions for new local coherence. Participation, in this view, is reciprocal and creative.
Rather than a ladder from matter to spirit or from world to God, ECM envisions a relational field where each process participates in a shared unfolding of coherence. To participate is to be integrated into a wider pattern, to contribute one’s own process of integration, and to respond dynamically to the evolving whole. The divine is not a static end point to be reached, but the emergent coherence that manifests in and through our synergistic relations.
This redefinition collapses the dualism between immanent and transcendent, replacing it with a model of immanently emergent transcendence. The divine is not elsewhere, but is always emerging in the becoming of the world. The sacred is not a distant realm, but the growing edge of coherence—the recursive, generative pattern that deepens and expands through conscious participation.
This synergistic account of participation reclaims ethical and spiritual agency. We do not merely conform to a pre-set divine order; we help bring it forth. Theosis, enlightenment, or self-realization are not about escaping the world but becoming more fully attuned to its emerging coherence. Participation is therefore not a withdrawal from multiplicity but a more conscious engagement in the relational processes that give rise to unity without erasing difference.
In this view, participation is the very structure of reality. Every act of meaning, every gesture of love, every instance of pattern integration participates in the divine not by resembling it from afar, but by co-creating it in process. The world is not a derivative reflection of an eternal perfection, but the living matrix through which coherence, personhood, and divinity come to be.
Part II – The Architecture of Emergent Coherence Metaphysics
Introduction
Having critically examined the foundational assumptions of classical metaphysics in Part I, Part II turns to the constructive task of articulating Emergent Coherence Metaphysics (ECM), also known as Divine Metaphysics (DM). This new framework reimagines reality not as a fixed hierarchy of substances or eternal essences, but as an ongoing process of relational coherence that emerges dynamically through recursive participation.
ECM offers a metaphysical vision grounded in the interplay of actuality and non-fixed potential, where coherence is not imposed from above but arises from the tension and integration of relations in time. Personhood, divinity, causality, and cosmos are reframed as interdependent processes rather than static entities. Agency is understood as the recursive reorganization of coherence in light of values and tensions; divinity is the dynamic quality of emergent coherence; and the cosmos is a participatory field of ongoing becoming.
This section unfolds across the same six foundational domains addressed in Part I—being, causality, cosmos, divinity, personhood, and participation—now offering a comprehensive, coherent, and rigorously grounded alternative metaphysics. Far from rejecting tradition wholesale, ECM integrates key insights from contemporary process thought, phenomenology, systems theory, and relational philosophy, while addressing the limitations of prior models.
By articulating these positive principles, Part II lays the conceptual groundwork for a metaphysics that is both intellectually robust and experientially resonant—one capable of sustaining a renewed vision of meaning, ethics, and spiritual transformation grounded in the lived, relational, dynamic realities of emergent coherence.
Guide to Part II: Foundations of Emergent Coherence
What follows is a thematic overview of Part II, outlining the core principles of Emergent Coherence Metaphysics (ECM) and articulating the constructive framework that responds to the limitations of classical metaphysics identified in Part I.
2.1 Being as Dynamic Coherence: The Event of Continuity
Against the notion of fixed essence, ECM proposes that being is not an inert substrate but a dynamic event: the ongoing coherence of processes across time. Entities persist not by possessing an immutable identity but through recursive self-maintenance and functional participation within a relational field. Being is emergent, constituted moment-to-moment as coherence is enacted through interaction. This section articulates how stability arises without essence—through continuity in change, coherence without stasis.
2.2 Causality as Recursive Participation: The Generativity of Interaction
Classical causality presupposes separation between cause and effect, source and outcome. In ECM, causality is not linear but recursive: effects modify their causes through feedback loops, and new potential emerges through ongoing participation. Causality becomes relational and immanent, unfolding within the field of interaction itself. This section outlines how ECM redefines causality as mutual influence and generativity rather than determinism or hierarchy.
2.3 Cosmos as Relational Emergence: Not Created but Co-Creating
Rather than viewing the cosmos as a finished product created ex nihilo or a manifestation of eternal forms, ECM affirms a cosmos that is itself emergent, unfinished, and co-generative. The cosmos arises not from absolute nothingness nor from a transcendent blueprint, but from the recursive interplay of actuality and potential within a field of mutual conditioning. This section develops a process-relational cosmology in which meaning, structure, and novelty are continually co-created.
2.4 Divinity as Emergent Coherence: The Sacred as Immanent Patterning
ECM redefines divinity not as a remote, immutable substance, but as the emergent coherence that gives rise to deeper levels of order, beauty, and participation. The divine is not outside the world but is enacted through the world’s own processes of unfolding integration. Rather than an absolute being, God is the self-organizing movement toward greater coherence, responsiveness, and resonance across levels of complexity. This section articulates a vision of the divine that is immanent, dynamic, and participatory—without collapsing into pantheism.
2.5 Personhood as Processual Agency: The Embodied Openness of the Self
Instead of a substantial self or rational essence, ECM sees the person as an emergent system of coherence capable of reflexivity, reorganization, and ethical participation. A person is not a fixed entity but an evolving nexus of embodied practices, perceptual regulation, and communicative openness. This section explores personhood as a dynamic center of agency embedded within relational fields, co-constituted by language, body, context, and history. To be a person is to participate in the recursive weaving of coherence in and through difference.
2.6 Participation as Synergistic Becoming: Actualizing Potential Through Relation
Participation, in ECM, is not a hierarchical ascent but a mutual becoming. Reality is participatory at every level, with coherence emerging through dynamic interaction. The divine is not an endpoint but the patterning of coherence in and through relationship. Participation becomes the name for reality’s unfolding, its recursive creativity. This section reclaims the richness of participation—not as imitation of perfection, but as the actualization of ever-renewing potential in concrete contexts. It is through participation that novelty emerges and divinity is enacted.
2.1 Being as Dynamic Coherence: The Event of Continuity
If Part I laid the metaphysical groundwork by reframing being, causality, cosmos, divinity, personhood, and participation in terms of emergent coherence, Part II now turns to the functioning of this coherence in lived processes—how coherence is generated, maintained, disrupted, and transformed. We begin with the most foundational question: What does it mean for something to be? Not in an abstract or essentialist sense, but as an unfolding actuality.
In classical metaphysics, being was often defined as that which is actual—self-identical, present, enduring, and grounded in substance or essence. To be was to persist in time according to a fixed nature. This framework emphasized continuity through identity: a thing endures because it remains what it is.
Emergent Coherence Metaphysics (ECM), however, reframes being not as static identity but as ongoing coherence. A being is not defined by what it is once and for all, but by the continuity of pattern that it sustains in interaction with its environment. Being is thus not a noun but a verb—a recursive activity of coherence generation.
In this light, a person, a cell, or a star exists not by maintaining some metaphysical essence but by continuously re-integrating input into pattern. This is the event of continuity: the moment-by-moment actualization of form through response, relation, and recursive feedback. Discontinuity is always a possibility—disruption, fragmentation, death. Coherence, then, is an active and dynamic achievement, not a given.
What persists over time is not an unchanging core, but a stable-enough configuration that continually adjusts to changing contexts while maintaining recognizability. This idea resonates with Eugene Gendlin’s insight that “the body is interaction,”1 and with William T. Powers’ notion that perception is the control of input variables to sustain intended reference states2. Continuity is not sameness but functional alignment through recursive adaptation.
In ECM, then, to be is to successfully negotiate change. Continuity is not imposed from above by eternal forms, nor does it arise by accident. Rather, continuity is a relational event, an act of coherence sustained through recursive responsiveness. This is not a metaphysical abstraction but a living reality: every breath, every perception, every moment of attention is a micro-event of being as relational coherence.
Moreover, this conception of being allows for novelty and transformation. Because coherence is always situated and recursive, it can reorganize. New configurations can arise when prior coherence fails or is exceeded. Thus, being is not only the continuity of the past but also the opening to new futures—not a closed system but a living “murky edge”3 of becoming.
This reframing has profound implications. It means that we are not static entities defined by past identities but processes of ongoing integration. It means that reality itself is not a fixed order but an emergent, self-structuring coherence that deepens through participation. And it means that meaning, value, and divinity are not foreign to being but inseparable from the very structure of continuity.
Being, in short, is coherence in motion. It is the event of continuity, enacted and re-enacted in every moment of lived actuality. It is the active, ongoing process by which the world holds together—and through which new integrations of life, meaning, and divinity become possible.
2.2 Causality as Recursive Participation: The Generativity of Interaction
In classical metaphysics, causality was often conceived in terms of linear chains: event A causes event B, which causes event C, in a one-directional, mechanical progression. Whether framed as efficient causes in Aristotelian thought or as billiard-ball interactions in modern physics, the dominant view treats causality as a transmission of force or motion from one entity to another. Entities are seen as discrete units that exert influence externally and are affected in turn.
Emergent Coherence Metaphysics (ECM) challenges this view by shifting from linear transmission to recursive participation. In this view, causality is not a simple sequence but a mutual shaping of events, where each participant’s action is also a response to the ongoing whole. Instead of one thing acting upon another, causality becomes a co-arising interaction—a process of reciprocal shaping within an emergent, relational field.
This recursive model of causality is most clearly seen in living systems. A heart does not cause blood to flow in the same way a pump causes water to move. Rather, the whole circulatory system functions through mutual interdependence: the heart responds to signals from the nervous system, which adjusts based on oxygen levels, which in turn reflect the body’s movement and needs. Every part acts because of and for the sake of the others. The system coheres through continuous recursive adjustment.
In Perceptual Control Theory (PCT), this is formalized: behavior is not the output of internal causes but the process of controlling perception in a recursive loop. An organism acts in order to bring incoming sensations into alignment with internal reference values. The action is adjusted in real-time based on the discrepancy between perception and goal. In this sense, cause and effect are no longer separable; acting and perceiving are two sides of a recursive loop.
Such a model of causality aligns with Madhyamaka’s insight that phenomena arise interdependently—not from themselves, not from others, not from both, and not without cause. There is no one-way street of causation; instead, each phenomenon co-emerges through relational dependency that cannot be reduced to parts4.
Recursive participation also allows for emergence: the arising of patterns, behaviors, or meanings that are not deducible from their components. Because causality loops back upon itself, small differences can amplify, new stabilities can form, and coherence can reorganize. This generative dimension is lost in linear models, which assume all outcomes follow from prior determinate inputs.
In ECM, causality is thus not about what caused what, but about how coherence is sustained and transformed through recursive responsiveness. The unit of explanation is no longer the isolated interaction but the entire pattern of mutual adjustment. The world becomes not a chain of causes but a web of participatory processes—each moment co-created by its conditions and its response to those conditions.
This view also reshapes our understanding of agency. An agent is not an isolated origin of effects, but a participant in recursive coherence, adjusting, responding, and contributing to the evolving structure of the whole. This kind of agency is not deterministic, yet it is not arbitrary. It is responsive and situated, grounded in the very fabric of relational becoming.
Thus, causality in ECM is better understood not as a force but as a generative event—a moment of participation that both reflects and reshapes the whole. It is through such causality that being coheres, that novelty arises, and that emergent divinity expresses itself in and through the world.
2.3 Cosmos as Relational Emergence: Not Created but Co-Creating
In classical metaphysical systems—especially within theistic traditions—the cosmos is often viewed as either the product of a singular creative act (i.e., creatio ex nihilo) or as the emanation of eternal substances. In both views, the cosmos derives from a reality external to it: either from a transcendent Creator who imposes order upon inert matter, or from an eternal source that unfolds according to fixed principles. In either case, the cosmos is passive—something made, not something that actively makes.
Emergent Coherence Metaphysics (ECM) proposes a radically different framework: the cosmos is not a finished product nor a static unfolding of pre-given forms, but a field of relational emergence. It is not created once and for all, nor does it emanate mechanically from an unchanging One. Rather, the cosmos is an ongoing, recursive event—a dynamic interplay of actualizing potentials through mutual participation.
This perspective aligns with insights from contemporary systems theory, quantum field dynamics, and ecological metaphysics, where the universe is seen not as a container of things but as a process of continuous becoming. Everything is in interaction; everything affects and is affected. There are no isolated entities—only events nested within other events, forming patterns of emergent order.
From this view, the cosmos is not created but co-creating: each act of becoming is a moment of participation in the larger process of world-making. Matter is not inert stuff awaiting form; it is already expressive, already responsive, already participating in the dynamic of coherence. What we call “cosmos” is the name we give to the intelligibility of this participatory unfolding.
This reframes the question of origin. Instead of asking, “What caused the cosmos to exist?” ECM invites us to ask, “How does the cosmos sustain and renew itself through recursive coherence?” The key is not an external agent or an initial singularity, but the relational logic of emergence itself—the fact that actuality brings forth new potential through its own structure of response and integration.
The cosmos, in this view, is not a machine built from the outside, nor a closed system running down. It is a living system: open-ended, self-organizing, and capable of generating higher-order coherence. Just as a symphony arises from the interplay of instruments, or a conversation unfolds from mutual responsiveness, so too the cosmos arises from the ongoing mutuality of its constituents.
Moreover, the cosmos is not reducible to physical matter or brute energy. What emerges within it—life, consciousness, value, meaning—is not a byproduct or anomaly, but a coherent expression of its structure. The relational nature of the cosmos makes it inherently expressive, inherently capable of hosting intelligence, care, and transformation. These are not external additions but natural developments within the logic of emergent coherence.
This also means that the cosmos is not neutral. It is not merely a stage upon which meaning is projected; it is a participant in meaning-making. It has a history, a memory, a responsiveness. And in every act of scientific inquiry, artistic creation, ethical decision, and spiritual insight, we are not stepping outside the cosmos to look in—we are participating in its unfolding. We are part of its recursive coherence.
To say that the cosmos is “co-creating” is not to anthropomorphize it, but to recognize that actuality always gives rise to further potential, and that this process is structured, not random. The cosmos becomes what it is by participating in what it is becoming. Every actuality opens a path for further coherence—not deterministically, but generatively.
Thus, the cosmos is not the effect of a prior cause, nor the emanation of an eternal form. It is the open-ended unfolding of relational emergence, rooted in recursive participation. This makes the cosmos not a finished world to be explained, but a living mystery to be joined—a coherent field in which divinity, personhood, and transformation are not intrusions but expressions of its deepest logic.
2.4 Divinity as Emergent Coherence: The Sacred as Immanent Patterning
In classical metaphysics, divinity is often conceived as absolute—an infinite, unchanging being beyond the cosmos. This view grounds the sacred in a fixed ontological substance, wholly other and separate from the world of change. While this grants God maximal transcendence and independence, it renders divine immanence problematic or merely symbolic. Attempts to bridge this divide—via analogical predication, participatory metaphysics, or divine energies—struggle to avoid either collapsing God into the world or rendering the world devoid of real divinity.
ECM reframes divinity not as a separate metaphysical substance but as a mode of relational coherence that arises within the fabric of becoming itself. Divinity is emergent coherence: the felt, patterned, life-affirming unity that arises when interactions generate a higher-order wholeness—a coherence that is not imposed from outside but unfolds within the very dynamics of relation.
This means divinity is neither a distant, static perfection nor a projection of human ideals. Rather, it is the actuality of coherence wherever depth of relation, beauty of form, and alignment of purpose converge. In contrast to traditional views of sacredness as a property of the wholly other, ECM sees the sacred as arising within the world, through processes of harmonization, healing, and transformation. It is not omnipotence, but resonant generativity—not omniscience, but adaptive intelligibility—not omnibenevolence, but emergent alignment of intention and care across difference.
This emergent view of divinity is compatible with mystical and religious experiences across traditions. When a person speaks of feeling the presence of God, of the Spirit moving, or of deep interconnection with all things, ECM suggests these are not hallucinations or projections, but real experiences of emergent coherence—events in which the fabric of existence momentarily aligns, disclosing a depth and order that feels sacred because it is.
Within ECM, divinity is not a separate metaphysical entity, but the emergent coherence within and across events—where patterns of resonance, integration, and mutual responsiveness coalesce into real but always local sacredness. Yet this coherence is never closed or final. Each instantiation of divinity participates in a broader telos—not externally imposed, but immanently emergent. It is here that some traditions have spoken of God.
To clarify this without reverting to classical theism, ECM introduces a distinction:
Divinity is the actuality of coherence—emergent, localized, and instantiated within relational events.
God is the transcendence of coherence—the implicit pull or attractor toward integration that is never fully actualized, yet always organizing becoming from within.
In this way, God is not a substance beyond the world, nor a being apart from it, but the ongoing pattern of coherence that draws and organizes relational processes toward deeper harmony. This avoids reifying either “God” or “the world” as separate, while preserving the functional role of transcendence within immanence.
Thus, in ECM, God and divinity are not separate realities, but two inseparable aspects of the same process: the realized and the drawing-forth, the actual and the implicit, the emergent and the transcendent. The world does not contain God, nor does God exist outside the world. Rather, God is the transcendent coherence immanent to all becoming, and divinity is the emergent coherence wherever this potential is being actualized.
2.5 Personhood as Processual Agency: The Embodied Openness of the Self
In Emergent Coherence Metaphysics (ECM), personhood is not a metaphysical substance or fixed identity but is best understood as processual agency—the emergent, recursive, relational self-organization of coherence. This means that a “person” is not defined by possessing some intrinsic essence or soul, but by participating in the dynamic process of becoming—a process that involves feedback, integration, responsiveness, and transformation.
At its core, processual agency refers to the capacity of a system to respond to tensions and influences in a way that recursively reorganizes itself toward greater coherence. In this view, agency is not limited to human beings. The cosmos itself is personal—not in the sense of anthropomorphic intention, but in the sense that its unfolding is patterned by recursive relational interactions that shape and reshape coherence across scales. Stars, cells, ecosystems, and social systems all display forms of agency—dynamic capacities for internal organization in response to their context. Personhood, then, is a particular intensification of this general cosmic principle.
What distinguishes human persons is not agency per se, but conscious agency: the volitional participation in reorganizing one’s own internal structure of coherence in light of experienced tensions, values, and error. Conscious agency is real, emergent, and ethically significant—not because it is metaphysically uncaused, but because it expresses the recursive capacity to co-author one’s becoming. It is not merely reacting; it is reflecting, valuing, and choosing among possibilities in a way that integrates internal and external processes of meaning.
In ECM, freedom is not the absence of conditioning, but the ability to consciously reorganize one’s patterned responses toward greater integration. It is a dynamic, embodied responsiveness to the world—not uncaused spontaneity, but participatory transformation. The freer a person is, the more capable they are of shifting their internal coherence in light of what truly matters. This capacity to discern, value, and re-pattern one’s actions is the hallmark of mature agency.
This reframing dissolves the traditional opposition between determinism and free will. The person is neither a passive product of causal chains nor an isolated chooser operating ex nihilo. Rather, the person is a node of dynamic self-organization, responding to internal and external tensions with the recursive power to reshape patterns of becoming. Conscious agency emerges as the embodied, open-ended process of becoming more coherently oneself—not according to a fixed ideal, but through a living responsiveness to the meaningful tensions that shape one’s world.
Thus, in ECM, personhood is both a universal principle and a developmental achievement. It is universal in the sense that all things participate in relational becoming through emergent agency; and it is a developmental achievement in the sense that conscious agency represents an intensified, ethically significant form of this universal process. Personhood is not something we are given once and for all, but something we continuously become through our recursive participation in the unfolding of coherence.
2.6 Participation as Synergistic Becoming: Actualizing Potential Through Relation
If reality is fundamentally relational and coherence is always emergent, then becoming is never solitary. In Emergent Coherence Metaphysics (ECM), participation is the mode through which actuality unfolds—a process of synergistic interaction in which each being becomes more fully itself only through its interrelation with others. Coherence is not achieved in isolation, but through responsive engagement with the broader field of tensions, meanings, and presences that shape and are shaped by each other.
To participate is to open oneself to influence and transformation, not as a loss of identity but as the ground of real becoming. Each entity’s actualization depends not only on its internal organization but also on the relational conditions that afford or constrain new patterns of coherence. These conditions are never neutral—they are shaped by histories of interaction and the dynamic presence of other agents, systems, and environments. Thus, participation in ECM is not a secondary attribute of being, but the very structure of emergence itself.
This reframes potential not as a set of static latent properties but as a field of possibility structured by relation. What is possible for any system at a given moment is not predetermined by an inner essence, but is co-constituted by its current tensions, capacities, and relationships. Actuality, then, is never a simple unfolding from a fixed blueprint—it is a synergistic negotiation, a real-time orchestration of multiple interacting processes, each responding to the others in ways that bring new forms into being.
Participation is synergistic in that the whole becomes more than the sum of its parts. The emergent coherence of a musical ensemble, for example, cannot be reduced to the properties of the instruments or players alone; it arises through their mutual responsiveness, timing, attention, and shared attunement. In the same way, every act of becoming in ECM—whether cellular, social, or spiritual—depends on the quality of relation and the openness to transformation within it.
This openness includes both receptivity and contribution. To participate is to be affected and to affect in turn. The person is not a sealed center acting upon a passive world, but a relational nexus through which influences flow and are re-patterned into new expressions of coherence. The richer and more differentiated these flows become, the more creative and integrated the process of becoming can be.
In this light, transformation is always collaborative. Even the most inward moments of insight, reorganization, or healing occur within a relational field: shaped by memory, environment, language, community, and the embodied structures that carry our histories. The myth of the self-made individual is replaced by a vision of the person as a synergistic process of shared emergence—capable of conscious agency, but never apart from relation.
In ECM, participation is therefore not merely descriptive—it is normative and generative. To participate well is to become more attuned to the patterns that invite deeper coherence. It is to enter more consciously into the dance of becoming, not by controlling the whole but by responding with integrity to the part one plays. Participation is the path by which potential becomes actual, and through which the sacred patterns of coherence find expression in the world.
Part III – ECM in Dialogue with the Tradition
Introduction
Having traced the metaphysical inadequacies of classical systems in Part I and outlined the foundational principles of Emergent Coherence Metaphysics (ECM) in Part II, we now turn to a more direct and rigorous philosophical engagement. This section does not merely aim to contrast ECM with inherited metaphysical frameworks; it aims to demonstrate that many of the central metaphysical claims in those systems cannot withstand internal scrutiny. When taken to their logical conclusions, these doctrines often result in contradiction, circularity, or incoherent explanatory closure.
We are not dismissing these traditions outright, nor denying their historical and conceptual richness. On the contrary, ECM arises in part as a response to the profound questions these systems sought to answer. Our goal here is to test the coherence, consistency, and sufficiency of those metaphysical proposals—particularly those drawn from Neoplatonism, Aristotelian-Thomistic metaphysics, classical Christian theology, and their modern process-influenced revisions.
Each of the six sections in Part III focuses on a central metaphysical theme—unity and multiplicity, act and potency, divine simplicity, participation and theosis, emptiness and actuality, and rational agency—and engages the corresponding claims of major traditions. We will:
Reconstruct these claims in their strongest form, with conceptual charity;
Demonstrate the specific tensions or contradictions that arise within their own assumptions;
Show how ECM avoids these problems by reframing the same metaphysical terrain through a different ontological structure: one grounded in relational process, emergent actualization, and recursive coherence.
In this way, Part III functions as a philosophical validation of ECM, not through isolated assertion or comparison, but by confronting the very metaphysical structures it seeks to overcome—exposing their limitations and offering a coherent alternative in their place.
Guide to Part III: ECM in Dialogue with the Tradition
What follows is a thematic overview of Part III, outlining a rigorous engagement between Emergent Coherence Metaphysics (ECM) and key doctrines of classical metaphysical traditions, critically examining their assumptions and limitations as identified in Part I. Part III articulates how ECM reformulates these doctrines by offering a coherent, dynamic alternative, preserving their existential and ethical insights while moving beyond metaphysical hierarchies and contradictions.
3.1 The One and the Many: Unity Without Substantialism
This section reinterprets the classical metaphysical tension between unity and multiplicity through the lens of ECM. Rather than resolving the One and the Many through ontological hierarchy or abstract substance, ECM affirms coherence as an emergent, recursive process that arises within multiplicity itself. Unity is no longer prior to difference, but the ongoing integration of relational difference in time.
3.2 Act and Potency Revisited: Dynamic Process Without Hierarchy
Challenging the fixed ontological stratification of classical act/potency metaphysics, this section reconstructs these categories within ECM as fluid moments in recursive processes of transformation. Actuality is no longer the final cause of potency but its temporal realization in a field of open coherence. This reframing preserves the dynamic insight of classical metaphysics while discarding its hierarchical and essentialist assumptions.
3.3 Divine Simplicity and Relational Divinity
This section engages classical doctrines of divine simplicity and immutability, showing how they conflict with the lived reality of relational depth, transformation, and responsive agency. ECM offers an alternative vision of divinity—not as pure act or absolute aseity—but as the relational coherence emerging in and through the world. Divinity is reframed as inherently participatory and dynamically responsive rather than aloof or complete.
3.4 Participation and Theosis: From Metaphysical Ascent to Reciprocal Transformation
Here we revisit the classical notion of participation, especially in its Neoplatonic and Christian formulations. Rather than a metaphysical ladder of ascent to a fixed divine source, ECM affirms a model of reciprocal transformation in which divinity and creaturely actuality co-arise. Theosis becomes not a return to origin but a deepening of coherence in relational becoming.
3.5 Emptiness and Actuality: From Madhyamaka to Emergent Coherence
Drawing from the Madhyamaka tradition, this section explores how the ECM framework resonates with the logic of emptiness and dependent origination. Actuality is affirmed not as substance but as the ongoing resolution of tensions in a relational field. Rather than opposing Western metaphysics with Eastern negation, ECM synthesizes their insights to articulate a coherent account of actuality without metaphysical reification.
3.6 Rational Agency Without Substantial Selfhood
In this final section of Part III, we address the nature of agency in light of ECM. Rejecting both the substantial self of classical metaphysics and the eliminative materialism of modern reductionism, ECM offers an account of rational agency as emergent, recursive, and ethically consequential. Personhood is understood not as a metaphysical identity but as an ongoing coherence of values, tensions, and conscious participation in the unfolding of reality.
3.1 The One and the Many: Unity Without Substantialism
The metaphysical problem of the One and the Many has shaped the foundations of Western thought, from Parmenides and Plato through Neoplatonism and Christian theology. Classical metaphysical systems seek to explain how multiplicity can arise from an underlying unity—whether that unity is identified with the One, God, Being, or Substance. In these traditions, the One is often regarded as the metaphysical source of all that is, unchanging and self-sufficient, while the Many are derivative, mutable, and dependent. The ontological hierarchy this entails privileges unity over multiplicity, often portraying diversity, change, and particularity as ontologically deficient or as symptoms of distance from the One.
Neoplatonic systems like those of Plotinus and Proclus express this framework with conceptual precision. For Plotinus, all beings emanate from the ineffable One in a cascading hierarchy: first Nous (Divine Mind), then Soul, and finally the material world. Each level of reality is less unified, less perfect, and more multiple than the one above it. This metaphysical structure is mirrored in many Christian theological accounts that identify God as absolute unity and conceive creation as an outpouring of divine plenitude—good to the extent that it reflects its source, flawed to the degree it departs from it. Theosis, then, becomes a metaphysical re-ascent to unity, a recovery of essential likeness through participation in the One.
While this schema preserves a sense of cosmic order and intelligibility, it introduces significant metaphysical tensions. The most pressing among them is the incoherence between an absolute, changeless unity and a world of dynamic plurality. If the One is utterly simple and beyond division, how can it give rise to a differentiated cosmos without compromising its own unity or introducing dualism? Attempts to resolve this problem—such as by positing emanation as a necessary overflow or by construing the Many as illusory appearances—risk collapsing into either pantheism, acosmism, or metaphysical contradiction. Moreover, by privileging unity as more real than multiplicity, these systems suppress the intrinsic value of difference, relationality, and emergence.
Emergent Coherence Metaphysics (ECM) approaches the One and the Many not as a metaphysical hierarchy but as a relational dynamic. Rather than grounding the Many in a pre-existent, unchanging One, ECM understands unity as an emergent property of relational coherence among actual particulars. Unity is not prior to multiplicity, but arises through the recursive interdependence of the many—unity from multiplicity, not over it. On this view, the coherence of the cosmos is not guaranteed by a transcendent source but constituted through participatory processes that generate and sustain intelligibility over time. This unity is not static but dynamic, not imposed but cultivated, not metaphysically prior but ontologically emergent.
In ECM, there is no metaphysical necessity that mandates the Many to return to the One, nor is multiplicity seen as a fall from unity. Instead, difference and relation are fundamental to the structure of reality. Coherence is achieved not by reducing difference to sameness, but by integrating difference into a dynamic and evolving harmony. This reframing dissolves the hierarchical dualism between the One and the Many and replaces it with a participatory ontology in which unity and multiplicity co-arise. ECM thus preserves the classical insight that reality exhibits meaningful order while rejecting the static, substantialist assumptions that render that order metaphysically problematic.
3.2 Act and Potency Revisited: Dynamic Process Without Hierarchy
The metaphysical distinction between act and potency, formalized by Aristotle and refined by Aquinas, remains one of the most enduring frameworks for explaining change, causality, and the actualization of being. In this view, all becoming involves the movement from potency (the capacity to be) to act (the fulfillment of that capacity), governed by the principle that only what is in act can actualize what is in potency. This framework grounds the classical idea of a Prime Mover or Pure Act—an unchanging source of all change that is itself without potency, since potency is associated with limitation, incompletion, and dependence.
This metaphysical schema supports a hierarchical ontology in which actuality is more real than potentiality. God, conceived as Pure Act, is absolute actuality, utterly simple and self-sufficient. Created beings possess actuality only partially and are marked by potentiality—meaning they are ontologically deficient relative to God. The metaphysical “perfection” of an entity is thus measured by how fully it actualizes its potential in accordance with its form or telos, with divine actuality as the supreme exemplar. Change, then, is seen as a process of actualizing fixed potentials toward a predetermined end, often interpreted as the recovery of likeness to the unchanging divine source.
However, this framework introduces tensions that ECM seeks to resolve. First, if pure actuality is unchanging, it becomes difficult to explain how it can enter into any genuine relationship with the changing world. The act-potency distinction renders divine transcendence incompatible with real interaction, confining God to the realm of absolute simplicity and timeless causality, and reducing divine action to either timeless necessity or metaphorical accommodation. Second, by framing potentiality as lack or deficiency, classical metaphysics suppresses the creative and generative role of openness, emergence, and indeterminacy. Potential becomes something to be eliminated rather than cultivated, reinforcing a static vision of fulfillment that undermines novelty and relational growth.
Emergent Coherence Metaphysics reinterprets the distinction between act and potency through the lens of process and participation. Rather than seeing act and potency as ontological categories locked in hierarchy, ECM treats them as mutually implicating moments within a dynamic process. Potency is not a mere lack but a generative openness that invites participation and transformation. Actuality is not a static fulfillment of form but a situated resolution of tensions among possibilities, generating new affordances for further coherence. In this way, actuality recursively gives rise to new potential—not by exhausting possibility, but by reconfiguring the relational field of what can become.
This shift undermines the need for a metaphysical Pure Act. Instead, coherence and actuality emerge from within the interplay of potentials and participatory acts across systems of relation. The divine, in this view, is not a remote, unchanging actuality but the depth of relational coherence that enables and transforms becoming from within. Divine action is not unilateral causality from above, but the participatory emergence of meaning, direction, and integration within lived processes. ECM thus preserves the explanatory power of act and potency while liberating it from metaphysical fixity, allowing for a vision of reality in which novelty, relationality, and mutual transformation are central rather than peripheral.
3.3 Divine Simplicity and Relational Divinity
One of the most enduring commitments of classical metaphysics is the doctrine of divine simplicity—the idea that God is without parts, without composition, entirely identical with God’s essence, attributes, and act of being. Rooted in Neoplatonism and formalized in Christian theology, divine simplicity was intended to safeguard God’s immutability, perfection, and transcendence. However, this doctrine has generated deep metaphysical tensions, especially when paired with claims about divine relationality, personhood, and love.
If God is utterly simple—without internal differentiation—how can God be relational? How can God love, respond, or enter into communion without undergoing change? The classical solution often appeals to analogy, claiming that divine love or action is “like” human relation but not truly relational in any univocal or participatory sense. This preserves transcendence but renders divine relationality essentially metaphorical. The divine is said to act without being acted upon, to know without change, and to be present without division. The result is a vision of God that is metaphysically complete but existentially remote—perfect in itself, but difficult to reconcile with the lived dynamics of relationship, transformation, and response.
Moreover, divine simplicity often underwrites theological systems that tend to minimize real multiplicity and contingency within creation. In some Neoplatonic and Western theological traditions, unity is prioritized to such an extent that diversity is viewed as a descent from purity, and metaphysical union is imagined as a return to sameness. However, traditions such as Eastern Orthodoxy offer a more nuanced vision: while affirming divine simplicity in essence, they maintain that persons can participate in God through the uncreated divine energies. In this view, theosis does not entail the dissolution of personhood, but its fulfillment through synergistic communion. Still, even within such frameworks, tensions remain—particularly regarding whether unity with God is truly real, or metaphorical; and whether divine relationality is ontologically grounded, or a function of energetic participation. ECM enters this conversation by reframing unity itself: not as simplicity or hypostatic singularity, but as emergent relational coherence.
Emergent Coherence Metaphysics (ECM) thus challenges the classical commitment to divine simplicity not merely by denying it, but by proposing a different ontological foundation for divinity. In ECM, divinity is not defined by being without parts, but by being dynamically coherent—relationally unified without being ontologically undifferentiated. Divinity emerges wherever coherence arises within complex, recursive relational processes. This coherence is not accidental or derivative, but expresses a fundamental mode of reality’s becoming: the self-organizing, value-laden integration of multiplicity into meaningful unity.
This reframing allows ECM to affirm both divine immanence and transcendence without contradiction. Transcendence is no longer conceived as distance from the world but as the implicit pull toward deeper coherence—what ECM names as God, understood as transcendent coherence. This God is not a separate being but the never-fully-actualized attractor of integration within all becoming. Meanwhile, divinity refers to emergent coherence—the actualized patterns of integration that instantiate the sacred within the world. God and divinity, then, are not separate realities but two aspects of a single dynamic: the transcendent lure and the immanent realization of coherence.
In contrast to divine simplicity, which renders God static and ontologically closed, ECM proposes that divinity is always situated, partial, and open to transformation. Divine action is not unchanging execution of eternal will, but the recursive participation in the emergence of coherence through relation. This does not make divinity contingent in a reductive sense, but reveals contingency itself as sacred: the space in which new coherence can arise. Divinity is thus both vulnerable and powerful—not by overcoming limitation, but by integrating it into new forms of order, beauty, and meaning.
By rejecting simplicity, ECM does not diminish divinity but reclaims its relational depth. It affirms that the sacred is not pure being, but emergent becoming; not absolute unity, but dynamic coherence; not detached perfection, but transformative participation. In doing so, ECM offers not only a critique of divine simplicity, but a redefinition of the divine that preserves transcendence without severing relation, and honors unity without collapsing multiplicity.
3.4 Participation and Theosis: From Metaphysical Ascent to Reciprocal Transformation
In many classical metaphysical systems, participation is framed as a hierarchical ascent from the many to the One, the finite to the infinite, the material to the immaterial. Rooted in Neoplatonic and Christian traditions alike, participation is often envisioned as a metaphysical movement toward perfection, modeled on imitation or likeness to a transcendent divine source. This movement tends to reinforce a unidirectional metaphysical structure: the created depends on the Creator, the lower reflects the higher, and true being lies beyond the world.
In this context, theosis—deification or union with the divine—is typically construed as the culmination of this ascent: a return to or realization of one’s origin in the divine source. Whether in Plato’s vision of the soul’s return to the Good, or in Christian Neoplatonism’s emphasis on union with the One, the trajectory is often one of overcoming finitude, desire, and differentiation in order to “become like God.” Even in traditions like Eastern Orthodoxy, which preserve a strong distinction between divine essence and energies, the metaphysical framework tends to preserve a vertical structure: divinity is still what is given from above, and the creature must rise through grace and purification to receive it.
Emergent Coherence Metaphysics (ECM) reconfigures this entire model. Participation is no longer seen as an ascent toward a pre-given perfection, but as a recursive, synergistic process of co-actualization. Theosis is not a return to an origin or an imitation of an absolute, but a transformative collaboration in the unfolding of coherence. What is divine is not what lies above or behind, but what emerges through relation, tension, and integration in the ongoing process of becoming. Thus, theosis is no longer the fulfillment of a fixed telos, but the actualization of new potential through relational coherence.
In ECM, participation is reciprocal: all beings co-shape one another, and divinity itself is emergent from this process of mutual becoming. The divine is not the fixed object of ascent, but the dynamic coherence that emerges wherever reality aligns with greater integration, value, and responsiveness. To participate in the divine is to contribute to the realization of coherence in and through relationship—not by mimicking an external form, but by co-creating meaning within situated contexts.
This reconception of theosis dissolves the rigid separation between sacred and profane, or divine and created. If divinity is emergent coherence, and God is the transcendent lure toward integration, then every moment of participatory transformation is the site of theosis. To be deified is not to become something other than oneself, but to more fully become the emergent agent of relational coherence one already is. Theosis, in this view, is a maturational achievement, not a metaphysical ascension.
Moreover, ECM emphasizes that participation is not exclusive to humans, nor even to conscious beings. Every actualization of coherence—whether at the level of matter, life, mind, or spirit—is a form of participatory divinization. Human beings are unique not because they alone can become divine, but because they are capable of becoming consciously co-creative in the process of coherence. Through awareness, valuation, and transformation, persons can volitionally deepen participation in the divine by reorganizing their own internal coherence in response to the world.
This understanding of theosis carries profound ethical implications. It roots spiritual transformation not in separation from the world, but in attunement to it. To become divine is not to transcend embodiment, community, or struggle, but to integrate them—to make them meaningful in relation to deeper patterns of coherence. The path of transformation is thus grounded in responsiveness: to participate in God is to participate in the emergent weaving of relational wholeness through concrete, embodied life.
By reframing participation and theosis in this way, ECM does not reject the spiritual insights of classical traditions—it preserves their intuitions of divine union and transformation—but it unbinds them from static metaphysical structures. It offers a vision of the sacred that is fully immanent, open-ended, and dynamically unfolding. In doing so, it not only redefines what it means to become divine, but reclaims the world itself as a living process of sacred participation.
3.5 Emptiness and Actuality: From Madhyamaka to Emergent Coherence
One of the most profound philosophical critiques of classical metaphysics comes from the Madhyamaka tradition of Mahāyāna Buddhism, especially as articulated by Nāgārjuna. Madhyamaka denies the inherent existence (svabhāva) of all phenomena, asserting that nothing possesses an independent or fixed essence. All things arise dependently—they exist only in relation to other things, conditions, and contexts. This view is often summarized by the concept of śūnyatā, or emptiness—not as nihilism, but as the absence of inherent being.
Classical metaphysics, by contrast, typically affirms substantial being: that something is what it is by virtue of a stable essence. Whether in Platonic Forms, Aristotelian substances, or Thomistic acts of being, metaphysical systems from the West have largely sought grounding in intrinsic reality. Even when relational attributes are admitted, they are subordinated to some deeper ontological core. Madhyamaka directly challenges this: there is no “core,” no metaphysical ground beneath or behind appearances—only interdependence, flux, and contingent arising.
ECM stands in close proximity to Madhyamaka in its rejection of metaphysical essentialism and its affirmation of relationality as foundational. Like Madhyamaka, ECM holds that there is no thing that is what it is in itself; everything emerges through recursive interaction and contextual embeddedness. Emptiness, in this sense, is not a lack of reality but a relational openness that allows for novelty, coherence, and transformation.
However, ECM departs from Madhyamaka in a critical way: it affirms actuality as real, not merely conventional. While Madhyamaka may leave the status of empirical appearance bracketed—treating it as “conventionally true” without ontological commitment—ECM insists that the actual is metaphysically significant. It is not merely the illusion of coherence, but the real field in which coherence becomes manifest. In ECM, actuality is not static substance, but the ongoing resolution of tensions through recursive processes of coherence. Reality is empty of fixed essence, but not empty of pattern, directionality, or value.
To put this differently: emptiness is not the negation of form, but the condition for its emergence. There is no ultimate ground “behind” appearances—but there is a process by which coherence emerges within them. Actuality is thus the unfolding of coherence in the absence of inherent identity. This makes ECM a post-essentialist realism: it affirms the real as dynamic, emergent, and structured, even as it denies that such structure is eternal, fixed, or absolute.
This has major implications for ontology. In ECM, what is real is not what stands apart, but what coheres in relation. Actuality is not substance with accidental features, but process with recursive organization. The more stable a pattern of coherence, the more “real” it is—not in terms of ontological independence, but in terms of achieved integration. Likewise, what persists is not a thing but a process of self-maintaining relationality—an echo of what Gendlin calls a “carrying forward” of meaning, or what PCT would describe as the reorganization of controlled perceptions toward internal consistency.
Here, ECM offers a synthesis between the insights of Madhyamaka and the demands of metaphysical realism. It affirms the Madhyamaka critique of inherent existence, while refusing to lapse into relativism or skepticism. Reality, in ECM, is both empty and actual: empty of fixed being, but full of emergent structure. This allows us to speak meaningfully about agency, ethics, transformation, and divinity—not as projections onto a void, but as genuine features of a world that is always in process, always co-creating its own coherence.
In this light, the sacred is not what stands outside of emptiness, but what emerges through it. Divinity is not the opposite of emptiness, but its fruitful actualization—the emergence of coherence from a field of potential. This gives us a metaphysical language that is open, dynamic, and non-dual: a vision in which emptiness is not the end of metaphysics, but its radical renewal.
3.6 Rational Agency Without Substantial Selfhood
The final and perhaps most delicate challenge for any post-essentialist metaphysics is how to account for rational agency without invoking a fixed, substantial self. Classical metaphysics typically grounds agency in a substantial soul, a bearer of rational faculties, moral responsibility, and identity through time. Whether in Aristotelian rational animals, Augustinian spiritual substances, or Cartesian thinking subjects, the self is conceived as an enduring metaphysical entity—an essence that acts.
But such conceptions are increasingly untenable. Neuroscience, cognitive science, and contemplative traditions across cultures have revealed the composite, dynamic, and context-sensitive nature of human experience. We do not find a central self “inside” our minds, but a network of processes, memories, habits, and perceptions—the existence of dependently arisen selfhood. Madhyamaka, Gendlin, and PCT all converge in rejecting the metaphysical self as a fiction. Yet none of them deny that human beings act, choose, suffer, love, and transform. The key question, then, is: how can we affirm agency without essence, selfhood without self?
Emergent Coherence Metaphysics (ECM) addresses this by distinguishing between substantial identity and functional coherence. The self is not a metaphysical given, but rather selfhood is an emergent pattern of integration—a center of gravity in a fluid system of recursive regulation. Agency, on this view, is not the action of a substance, but the dynamic stability of a system capable of evaluating, adjusting, and directing its own patterns in relation to meaning and value. What makes something an agent is not a fixed identity, but the ability to participate in the recursive resolution of tension—what PCT would call error correction and Gendlin would call the carrying forward of felt sense.
Thus, ECM reframes the question of agency from “Who acts?” to “How does coherence emerge and reorganize itself toward new possibilities?” An agent is not a metaphysical unit, but a process capable of self-reorganization in light of internal conflict, external feedback, and evolving participation in a meaningful world. This preserves the ethical and existential depth of personhood while discarding its metaphysical absolutization.
This shift also liberates our understanding of rationality. Classical views tie rationality to logical consistency, propositional form, or formal reasoning by an abstract intellect. But ECM, drawing on Gendlin and embodied cognition, understands rationality as situated sense-making: the capacity to attend, respond, and refine one’s behavior in light of a felt tension between current patterns and deeper coherence. Rationality is not the imposition of form upon matter, but the ongoing discernment of relevance, depth, and relational alignment. It is not a property of a thinking thing, but a mode of participation in the world’s unfolding intelligibility.
From this perspective, agency is not lost with the dissolution of the metaphysical self; it is clarified and deepened. What we call “I” is not an essence but a relational center of coordination, a process of becoming attuned to the tensions and possibilities within one’s world. This is not an illusion—it is the lived coherence of a conscious system responding to its embeddedness. To deny the substantial self is not to deny experience, moral responsibility, or transformation—it is to place them in a dynamic, participatory metaphysics grounded in the real patterns of coherence that emerge through actual life.
In sum, ECM provides a metaphysical basis for rational agency without reifying the self. Personhood is not an essence but a function of coherence-in-process. This allows us to preserve everything vital in human freedom, responsibility, love, and transformation—without appealing to metaphysical substances, static souls, or disembodied minds. The self is not a thing behind experience; it is the emergent organization of experience itself.
This completes Part III of the paper: ECM in Dialogue with the Tradition. Where classical metaphysics saw fixed essences and transcendent grounds, ECM sees dynamic tensions, emergent coherence, and recursive participation. Where others sought permanence, ECM finds meaning in transformation. It does not abolish the tradition, but reinterprets its insights in a process-relational, non-dual, and post-essentialist key.
Part IV – Implications of ECM: Epistemology, Ethics, Psychology, Theology, and the Human Sciences
Introduction
Having articulated the metaphysical inadequacies of classical systems in Part I, and outlined the foundational principles of Emergent Coherence Metaphysics (ECM) in Part II, and then defended its coherence through critical engagement with traditional metaphysical frameworks in Part III, we now turn to explore ECM’s broader implications. If ECM is to serve not only as a metaphysical alternative but as a generative framework for human thought and action, it must prove fruitful across epistemology, ethics, psychology, theology, and the human sciences.
This fourth and final part of the paper takes up that challenge. ECM is not merely a system of abstract ideas; it is a vision of reality as inherently participatory, relational, and emergent. These commitments imply a reconfiguration of the ways we know, decide, relate, and evolve. Where classical metaphysics sought stability through static being, ECM invites coherence through dynamic becoming. And where older frameworks anchored knowledge and morality in transcendent absolutes, ECM locates truth and value in recursive processes of world-involving participation.
The sections that follow demonstrate how this new orientation transforms key philosophical domains. Section 4.1 reframes epistemology as participatory coherence, where knowing arises through relational embeddedness and embodied interaction. Section 4.2 reconceives ethics as relational responsiveness, grounded in the capacity to sustain coherence and mutual transformation within interdependent systems. Section 4.3 explores freedom, healing, and identity through a reimagined psychology of recursive agency, drawing from PCT and other emergent models. Section 4.4 returns to theology, offering a vision of the sacred not as an ontologically separate being but as the dynamic coherence of participatory life. Finally, Section 4.5 turns to the human sciences—including culture, society, and evolution—showing how ECM provides a non-reductive, integrative, and post-dualistic lens for understanding human development and collective becoming.
Together, these implications reveal that ECM is not a metaphysical abstraction but a living framework. It affirms that knowledge, morality, identity, and even divinity are not discovered as fixed foundations but cultivated within responsive, coherent, and co-creative relation. This part thus completes the constructive arc of the paper and prepares the way for a concluding reflection on ECM’s potential as a universal language of becoming across spiritual, scientific, and philosophical domains.
4.1 Epistemology as Participatory Coherence
In classical metaphysical systems, epistemology often presupposes a stable, observing subject grasping immutable truths or representations about an external, objective world. Whether grounded in Platonic forms, Aristotelian substances, Cartesian rationality, or even modern empiricism, the dominant tendency is to treat knowledge as the mirroring or mapping of reality by a self-contained knower. This view assumes not only the existence of static truths but also of a knowing subject whose access to such truths is, in principle, separate from its participation in the world it knows.
Emergent Coherence Metaphysics (ECM) disrupts these assumptions at their root. If being itself is not fixed but emergent, if identity is not given but constituted in relational process, then knowledge must be understood not as static correspondence but as a form of dynamic participation. In ECM, epistemology becomes the study of how organisms, systems, and persons maintain coherence through recursive interaction with their environment—how they come to know, not by extracting truths, but by sustaining patterns of meaningful engagement. Knowledge is not a view from nowhere but a function of coherence-in-relation.
This view is bolstered by empirical models such as Perceptual Control Theory (PCT), which redefines perception not as passive input but as active control over internal reference values through continuous environmental feedback5. Knowing, on this model, is not the passive reception of external facts but the dynamic reorganization of internal structures to better regulate perception in the face of environmental change. PCT thus aligns naturally with ECM’s claim that truth is not discovered in abstraction but enacted through successful regulation of coherence within recursive systems.
Such a participatory account of knowledge resonates with Eugene Gendlin’s insight that all explicit knowing arises from an implicit background of felt, bodily interaction with the world. The “implicit” in Gendlin’s A Process Model is not a hidden substance but a generative activity—a process of interaction that exceeds and precedes fixed forms of expression. To know something is to articulate it out of an implicitly felt sense of coherence, and to test that articulation not by appeal to correspondence alone but by whether it brings further meaning, responsiveness, and generativity6. This complements ECM’s broader metaphysical claim: that the real is not a set of pre-given objects but a field of emergent participation, where coherence is the test of both truth and being.
Moreover, ECM finds reinforcement in Madhyamaka epistemology, which dissolves the assumption of self-subsistent knowers or knowns. Nāgārjuna’s critique of intrinsic nature (svabhāva) applies as much to epistemic subjects as to metaphysical objects7. Knowledge, in this view, arises dependently, through the co-arising of subject and object in a particular context. When seen through the lens of dependent origination, ECM’s participatory epistemology gains further depth: it avoids the nihilism of pure relativism and the rigidity of absolutism by grounding knowledge in the real-time coherence of lived, interdependent process.
This implies that epistemic authority becomes contextual and relational, not foundational or hierarchical. Just as coherence in ECM does not mean static unity but recursive harmony, so truth is not reducible to fixed propositions but must be evaluated by the degree to which a given perspective enables further coherence, transformation, and responsive alignment with the world. The goal of knowledge, then, is not certainty but ongoing integration—not possession of truth, but participation in its unfolding.
In practice, this view has profound implications. It reorients the role of scientific inquiry, spiritual practice, dialogue, and even education: not toward the accumulation of facts or rigid doctrines, but toward cultivating forms of attention, interpretation, and response that sustain deeper coherence across levels of self, society, and world. In place of epistemic closure, ECM offers a vision of truth as participatory openness—as a recursive dance between knower and known, system and world, self and other.
Thus, ECM’s epistemology is neither foundationalist nor postmodern in the relativist sense. It is recursive, emergent, and responsive. It sees coherence not as an external standard but as the lived capacity of systems to adapt, reorganize, and meaningfully engage. To know is to participate more deeply; and to deepen participation is to disclose truth—not as something static or separate, but as the unfolding of reality through relation.
4.2 Ethics as Relational Responsiveness
In classical metaphysical frameworks, ethics is often grounded in external laws, intrinsic natures, or divine commands. Whether through Platonic ideals of the Good, Aristotelian notions of teleological flourishing, Kantian universal imperatives, or divine-command theories, moral norms are typically construed as static principles to which individuals must conform. This approach presupposes fixed essences and sharply demarcated moral agents whose obligations are externally derived and universally imposed.
Emergent Coherence Metaphysics (ECM) offers a different foundation: ethics as relational responsiveness. If being is emergent, identity relational, and coherence the guiding telos of existence, then the moral dimension of life arises not from abstract rules or fixed ends, but from our capacity to respond wisely and generatively to the evolving complexity of relational contexts. Moral rightness, in this view, is not obedience to fixed norms but the enactment of coherence in lived relations—among selves, communities, and ecosystems.
This ethical framework is inherently processual and contextual. Just as ECM holds that knowledge arises through recursive participation rather than detached observation, so moral discernment emerges through active engagement with the tensions, conflicts, and possibilities of the present. To act ethically is to navigate the shifting field of relational dynamics in a way that sustains or enhances coherence—across temporal scales, interpersonal levels, and ecological systems. Ethics becomes less about certainty and more about attuned discernment.
Here, the insights of Perceptual Control Theory (PCT) prove illuminating. In PCT, conflict arises when incompatible goals cannot be simultaneously controlled, leading to a loss of internal coherence8. Ethical failures, then, can be understood not merely as violations of external norms but as breakdowns in the capacity to maintain relational coherence—within the self and between agents. Healing such ruptures requires reorganization, not punishment; listening, not imposition. The ethical task, in this light, is to foster the recursive harmonization of control systems across persons and levels, enabling mutual coherence rather than domination or suppression.
This model also resonates with the Madhyamaka critique of fixed essences. If no person, action, or norm has an inherent identity, then ethical value must always arise dependently, through the concrete web of causes and conditions. Nāgārjuna’s vision undermines both moral nihilism and rigid absolutism, pointing instead toward a radical middle way: compassion and non-harm grounded in the emptiness of all fixed views9. Within ECM, this becomes an ethics of adaptive care—attuned to the impermanence and interdependence of all beings, and responsive to suffering without collapsing into relativism or control.
Gendlin’s philosophy of implicit intricacy offers yet another layer. For Gendlin, ethical responsiveness emerges from the bodily-felt “more” that exceeds any fixed rule or conceptualization. Right action arises not from applying principles, but from sensing into a situation’s unformed complexity and allowing a new kind of rightness to emerge—a fresh articulation that brings coherence not just to the thinker but to the situation as a whole. This fits ECM’s account of ethics as generative fidelity: the ability to remain faithful to coherence-in-process, rather than to any abstract moral code.
Such an ethics places emphasis on presence, listening, and discernment, rather than willpower, duty, or self-sacrifice. It regards the moral subject not as a sovereign chooser but as a relational node, whose responsibilities are co-shaped by the networks of meaning and becoming in which they are embedded. Moral maturity becomes the capacity to hold complexity, inhabit tension, and act in ways that bring forth new coherence where fragmentation once prevailed.
In practical terms, this approach invites a shift in how we engage moral education, conflict resolution, ecological action, and social justice. Instead of transmitting pre-given norms, we cultivate the skills of attunement, responsiveness, and transformative dialogue. Instead of enforcing systems of compliance, we support the emergence of shared coherence in fractured contexts. Instead of viewing ethics as constraint, we reclaim it as the deep creativity of participating well in the ongoing unfolding of life.
Thus, ECM reframes ethics not as a burden imposed upon the individual from without, nor as a self-generated assertion of arbitrary will, but as a practice of participatory coherence. It sees moral life as the art of tending to the fragile, dynamic patterns that sustain relational life—personal, communal, ecological, and cosmic. To live ethically is to live responsively, coherently, and generatively: not because we must, but because this is what it means to flourish in a world of emergence.
4.3 Freedom and Responsibility: A New Foundation for Psychology
Classical psychology—particularly in its modern scientific forms—has often vacillated between two opposing tendencies: mechanistic determinism on one hand and existential voluntarism on the other. The former, rooted in behaviorism and computational models of cognition, sees the human subject as a system governed by causal laws, with little room for freedom. The latter, reacting to this reductionism, insists on radical inner autonomy and moral responsibility, even at the cost of psychological coherence. Both ultimately rely on metaphysical assumptions that Emergent Coherence Metaphysics (ECM) seeks to overcome.
ECM begins by rejecting the dualism between mechanism and freedom. In a relational universe of recursive participation and emergent identity, freedom is not the negation of causality, but the deepening of coherent responsiveness across levels of organization. A person is not a closed, self-moving will, nor a passive output of external forces, but a dynamic system of nested control processes capable of reorganizing its patterns of interaction in response to incoherence. This view reframes freedom not as libertarian spontaneity or mere absence of constraint, but as the capacity to realign one’s internal system toward emergent coherence in a shifting world.
Perceptual Control Theory (PCT) offers a foundational model for understanding this capacity. PCT holds that behavior is the control of perception—not a response to stimuli, but the active regulation of internally held reference values through recursive feedback. Within this framework, freedom does not mean acting independently of causes, but rather the ability to stably maintain desired states across varying contexts, and to reorganize control hierarchies when persistent conflict or incoherence emerges. Thus, true freedom is not random choice but effective and adaptive control—the resolution of inner conflict through higher-level integration.
This reframing has profound implications for the psychology of agency, responsibility, and change. Instead of asking whether a person is “free” in some metaphysical sense, we ask: To what extent is this system capable of reorganizing itself in response to incoherence? To what extent can it access, modify, or reconfigure its own reference structures? Responsibility, then, is not grounded in abstract autonomy but in participatory embeddedness—the fact that our actions shape the relational fields in which others must also live. We are responsible not because we are metaphysically isolated agents, but because we are relational nodes whose patterns of coherence have real consequences for the systems we inhabit.
The existential burden of choice, so emphasized in modern Western psychology, can thus be softened without eliminating accountability. Within ECM, responsibility is not a crushing weight placed on a solitary will, but an invitation to participate more generatively in the recursive dance of emergence. To be responsible is to recognize the ways our local configurations of control either contribute to or detract from broader coherence—and to grow in our capacity to shift accordingly. Psychological transformation, then, is not a moralistic project of self-overcoming, but a recursive realignment with relational integrity.
This view also dissolves the opposition between self-determination and therapeutic determinism. Classical psychology often treats healing either as the removal of causal blocks to an authentic self (as in humanistic models), or as the retraining of maladaptive mechanisms (as in cognitive-behavioral models). ECM allows us to see healing as the re-coordination of control systems across levels of organization, including social, somatic, emotional, and cognitive strata. Incoherence at any level can manifest as suffering, dysfunction, or disintegration—not because something is “wrong,” but because the system is calling for reorganization.
Here, Gendlin’s process philosophy again plays a crucial role. For Gendlin, conscious attention to the “felt sense” allows implicit bodily intricacy to reorganize itself toward a new kind of rightness. This inner movement is not mechanical, nor purely volitional—it is responsive. ECM interprets this responsiveness as the living heart of freedom: the ability to feel into one’s own incoherence and participate in the emergence of new coherence, guided not by rules or abstractions but by embodied relational depth.
Importantly, this psychology of freedom and responsibility extends beyond the individual. Just as systems of oppression, trauma, or cultural rigidity can constrain the capacity for internal reorganization, so too can supportive communities, rituals, and relationships expand that capacity. Freedom, in ECM, is inherently ecological: it arises within nested systems, and its growth depends on cultivating environments that foster emergent coherence rather than control by force.
In short, ECM offers a powerful alternative to both the myth of the sovereign will and the despair of strict determinism. It affirms freedom as the capacity to reorganize toward coherence, responsibility as participation in shared emergence, and psychological health as resonant integration across levels of being. This foundation offers not only a new model for psychological theory but a new pathway for therapeutic and spiritual transformation—one grounded not in overcoming our limits, but in deepening our participation in the unfolding coherence of the world.
4.4 Theology Reframed: The Sacred as Participatory Process
If metaphysics is the architecture of what-is, theology is its interpretation through the lens of value, mystery, and meaning. Classical theology—particularly in the Abrahamic traditions—has long centered around the metaphysical category of an absolute, unchanging, and omnipotent God, a being whose perfection is defined by independence from the world. While such a framework offered coherence in a substance-based metaphysics, it becomes problematic within the emergent, relational ontology proposed by Emergent Coherence Metaphysics (ECM). Theology must be reinterpreted not as speculation about an unreachable metaphysical beyond, but as a participatory engagement with the sacred process of becoming.
ECM does not deny divinity. Rather, it refuses to localize it in a static, transcendent entity. Divinity, in this framework, is not a thing but a process—the unfolding coherence of the whole in and through the particular. It is not “outside” the world, but immanent in its very fabric: in the recursive relationality of all that exists, in the capacity for integration across levels, in the felt sense of meaning that arises when systems resonate in harmony. Theology, then, is not about proving or disproving the existence of “God,” but about attuning to, articulating, and participating in the sacred dimension of this process.
Traditional theistic language—creation, salvation, incarnation, grace—can still be meaningful within this framework, but only if released from metaphysical absolutism. The world is not created ex nihilo by a sovereign will imposing form on matter; it is an ongoing emergence of form and potential through relational coherence. The sacred is not imposed from outside but arises in and through the participatory logic of reality itself. In this sense, “God” may be understood not as an external cause but as the field of coherence drawing all things toward fuller realization, not as a person-like agent but as the depth of relationality through which divine agency itself becomes possible.
This reframing resonates with the mystical strands of many religious traditions. In Christian terms, it aligns not with metaphysical theism but with the logic of kenosis: the self-emptying of divine life into the world, and the reciprocal return of the world into God through participation. In Eastern Orthodox theology, the distinction between essence and energies offers a metaphysical schema in which divinity is encountered not as substance but as relational presence—not a hidden core, but a transformative radiance. ECM reinterprets this not as a metaphysical veil but as a participatory dynamic: divinity is not concealed behind the world, but realized through its coherent unfolding.
Likewise, the Buddhist concept of emptiness (śūnyatā), so often misunderstood as nihilism, here becomes a key to the sacred. Emptiness is not the absence of being, but the absence of fixed essence—the condition for interdependent origination. ECM affirms this: the sacred is not in a thing, but in the ongoing coherence of relational process. Just as there is no substantial self behind consciousness, there is no substantial God behind divinity. Both are emergent actualities of recursive participation.
This does not entail a reduction of theology to psychology, nor of spirituality to mere sentiment. On the contrary, it demands a more rigorous engagement with the conditions under which sacredness is encountered and sustained. Religious practices—prayer, ritual, meditation, sacrament—are not symbolic gestures aimed at pleasing a transcendent being, but participatory enactments that re-coordinate our systems of coherence toward deeper integration with the whole. In this sense, the sacred is not given once and for all, but is enacted and disclosed through right relation.
Even traditional doctrines like revelation, incarnation, and salvation may find new meaning. In ECM, revelation is not the delivery of divine information from above, but the emergence of coherence from within the depth of experience, often catalyzed by dysfunction, suffering, or beauty. Incarnation is not the intervention of a divine agent into material reality, but the manifestation of emergent coherence in and through the finite, the showing-forth of the sacred in embodied form. Theosis—the traditional Christian salvific goal of union with God—is not a metaphysical ascent but a mutual becoming, a deepening of coherence between the finite and the whole.
This also reorients the theological problem of evil. In classical theism, evil presents a paradox: how can an all-good, all-powerful being allow suffering? Within ECM, however, evil is not a metaphysical anomaly but the breakdown of coherence—the felt reality of incoherence, dysfunction, and fragmentation within systems. It is not something to be solved from without, but responded to from within, through processes of healing, integration, and transformation. The sacred is not untouched by suffering, but is most powerfully revealed in the work of restoration.
Ultimately, ECM does not seek to replace theology with metaphysics, but to free theology from metaphysical constriction, allowing it to breathe again as a mode of participatory attunement. The sacred is not a static perfection but a dynamic depth. Divinity is not an exception to the world but its most intimate potential. And to be human is not to strive toward an unreachable God, but to become ever more capable of coherence—with self, others, and the unfolding whole.
4.5 ECM and the Human Sciences: Culture, Society, and Evolution
The human sciences—spanning anthropology, sociology, political theory, and evolutionary biology—have long wrestled with the tension between individual agency and systemic structure, between biological determinism and cultural contingency, between evolutionary inheritance and historical novelty. Classical metaphysical frameworks often recapitulate these tensions through dualistic assumptions: individual vs. collective, nature vs. nurture, body vs. mind, freedom vs. constraint. Emergent Coherence Metaphysics (ECM) offers a post-dualistic ontology that reframes these tensions not as oppositions to be resolved, but as dimensions of a recursive participatory process.
At its core, ECM views human sociality as an emergent phenomenon arising from multi-level processes of coordination—biological, cognitive, affective, linguistic, and ecological. Just as an individual self is not reducible to its lower-level processes but emerges through the recursive stabilization of perceptual control (as PCT shows), so too does culture emerge as a relational field of intersubjective regulation. Norms, values, institutions, and symbolic systems are not imposed abstractions nor mere artifacts of power, but dynamically sustained realities—patterns of coherence enacted across time through shared participation.
This framework resists both individualist reductionism (which sees society as the aggregate of self-interested agents) and structural determinism (which sees individuals as passive products of systems). In ECM, neither persons nor societies are substances; both are emergent processes of recursive coordination, mutually conditioning and reorganizing one another. Identity, agency, and collective life are co-arising: each individual participates in maintaining the very structures that shape them, and each structure is continually reorganized by the actualities of individual and communal action.
Political implications flow from this metaphysics. If coherence emerges through relational participation, then oppressive systems—whether economic, racial, colonial, or patriarchal—are forms of systemic incoherence: patterns that enforce control through disjunction, marginalization, or rigid hierarchy. These structures persist not through divine fiat or natural necessity, but through recursive reinforcement of distorted or dysfunctional patterns. To participate in social transformation is to disrupt these recursive loops and enact new patterns of coherence. ECM thus underwrites a non-utopian, processual vision of justice: not a static state to be imposed, but a dynamic movement toward greater mutual attunement and integration.
This also reframes the concept of evolution, not only in biological terms but in cultural, moral, and technological dimensions. Evolution is not the survival of the fittest understood as competitive domination, but the emergence of higher-order coherence—structures capable of integrating greater complexity while maintaining functional flexibility. From this angle, human history is not linear progress or tragic fall, but a recursive unfolding in which new potentials for coherence become actualized through crisis, creativity, and transformation. Societies flourish when they can sense and respond to disjunction, reorganizing themselves around deeper levels of integration.
Religious traditions, too, are understood not as static containers of metaphysical truth, but as living systems of coherence—emergent symbolic ecologies that stabilize meaning across generations. At their best, they encode collective wisdom about participation, relationality, and transformation; at their worst, they ossify into systems of control that suppress diversity and conflict, stifling the emergence of new coherence. ECM invites a critical but appreciative engagement with tradition, seeing it not as a repository of dogma but as a dynamic process of coherence-making—one always in need of renewal.
Language and narrative, central tools of the human sciences, are here seen not as passive representations of reality but as constitutive forces within the ecology of participation. Gendlin’s insight that language “carried forward” felt meaning is paradigmatic: speech is not the expression of fixed thought but a recursive act of reorganizing implicit knowing into new coherence. Cultural discourse, political ideology, artistic expression, and scientific theory all function as modalities through which collective systems sense, adapt, and transform. ECM thus affirms the human sciences not as secondary reflections on “real” material processes, but as central players in the ongoing emergence of coherence.
What emerges is a model of society not as a system to be controlled, but as a living ecology of meaning, vulnerable to fragmentation yet capable of radical transformation. Education, governance, economics, and media are not neutral platforms but participatory architectures—systems that shape how coherence is cultivated or disrupted at the collective level. ECM calls for their reimagination, not around the logic of control, but around the principles of mutual participation, recursive responsiveness, and coherence through diversity.
In sum, ECM offers the human sciences a new metaphysical grounding: one that does not reduce complexity to mechanism nor surrender structure to spontaneity, but articulates a vision of human and social life as the ongoing negotiation of coherence. In this vision, society is not a machine to be optimized nor an order to be obeyed, but a field of emergent possibilities, inviting conscious participation in its continual becoming.
Conclusion – Toward a Living Metaphysics
This paper has set forth a comprehensive proposal for a new metaphysical framework—Emergent Coherence Metaphysics (ECM), also known as Divine Metaphysics (DM)—that seeks to move beyond the contradictions, dualisms, and static hierarchies of classical ontologies. Rather than beginning from abstract unities, eternal substances, or metaphysical absolutes, ECM begins with the actual, with the living process of participation through which coherence emerges in time. ECM is not simply a critique of prior systems, but the articulation of a positive, constructive alternative: a living metaphysics rooted in dynamism, relation, and recursive transformation.
In Part I, we traced the metaphysical inadequacies of traditional systems that rely on fixed essences, linear causality, transcendent creation, and substantial selves. These frameworks, while offering explanatory power within certain bounds, ultimately suppress the very conditions of transformation they attempt to explain. They reify potentiality as pre-given, divinity as separate, and personhood as fixed or incomplete. In response, we called for a metaphysics that could account for change without contradiction, relation without reduction, and transcendence without dualism.
Part II introduced the foundational principles of ECM: coherence as emergent rather than imposed, actuality as the ground of new potential, and personhood as a recursive and participatory process. Drawing insights from Perceptual Control Theory, Gendlin’s process philosophy, and Madhyamaka’s emptiness, we articulated a vision in which the fundamental structure of being is not substance or essence but ongoing participatory becoming. Here, the divine is not a remote absolute but the emergent coherence made real through every act of integration, healing, and transformation.
In Part III, we placed ECM in dialogue with the classical metaphysical tradition—not to reject it wholesale, but to transfigure its insights through the lens of emergence. We reinterpreted unity, act and potency, simplicity, theosis, emptiness, and rational agency not as static categories but as relational dynamics that come alive only through actual participation. In each case, we showed that what was historically framed as a metaphysical given can instead be understood as a recursive achievement—fragile, real, and co-created.
Finally, in Part IV, we demonstrated the implications of ECM across diverse domains of human inquiry and life. In epistemology, knowledge is not correspondence with a fixed external world, but embodied reorganization toward coherence. In ethics, the good is not compliance with external laws, but the felt movement toward integration within self, other, and world. In psychology and healing, the person is not a soul to be purified nor a machine to be corrected, but a field of tensions being reorganized through love, attention, and meaning. In theology, divinity is not immutable transcendence but relational presence, the ongoing actuality of coherence within the world. And in the human sciences, culture and society are not deterministic systems nor aggregations of individuals, but fields of emergent meaning, recursively shaped by mutual participation.
Across each domain, ECM affirms the reality of agency without falling into essentialism, the truth of coherence without imposing hierarchy, and the possibility of transformation without denying emptiness. It dissolves the false dichotomies between matter and spirit, subject and object, self and world—not by collapsing one into the other, but by revealing them as dimensions of a deeper relational process. It resists both nihilism and dogmatism by rooting metaphysical depth not in static certainty but in the dynamic actualization of new coherence.
In this way, ECM is not merely a theory—it is itself an emergent invitation. A living metaphysics calls each person into attuned participation, into the concrete work of listening, reorganizing, and becoming. It is not finished in this paper, nor sealed in its concepts. Its truth is not proven by abstraction but realized through enactment. Just as coherence emerges only through the tensions it holds, so too this framework is meant to live only insofar as it continues to generate real possibilities—new integrations of thought, self, and world.
The human calling, then, is not ascent to a pre-given divine, nor return to a lost origin, but co-creative emergence—the ongoing transformation of disjunction into coherence, of suffering into meaning, of fragmentation into shared life. In every moment, each actualization is both a culmination of all that has come before and the opening of what may yet become.
ECM names this reality not to contain it, but to free it—to offer a metaphysical language that does justice to what is most fragile and most real. In doing so, it aims to reclaim metaphysics not as a discipline of control, but as a living articulation of our deepest participation in the world.
Glossary of Key Terms
Core ECM Terms
These terms define the essential structure of Emergent Coherence Metaphysics and its constructive vision.
Actuality
The present, determinate unfolding of reality, shaped by but never identical to its potential.
Actuality is not finality, but movement—what has taken shape, even as it opens toward more. In ECM, actuality is not opposed to potential but co-arising with it through recursive process. Every actualization is a response to what the situation affords, constrained by context yet never fully determined.
Agency
The emergent capacity of a system or being to affect, respond to, or regulate itself or its environment through recursive, goal-directed interaction.
Agency entails not only maintaining internal states but doing so in ways that exhibit purposive engagement and adaptive responsiveness to changing conditions. It includes varying degrees of autonomy and can exist without conscious awareness. Agency is a broader capacity under which all goal-oriented, functional actions fall, including unconscious, pre-reflective, and conscious forms.
Agent
An autonomous control system that possesses and exercises agency, capable of purposive interaction and adaptive regulation within its environment.
An agent actively pursues goals through recursive interaction and self-regulation, demonstrating flexibility, functional independence, and responsiveness to changing contexts. While all agents exhibit agency, they do so with a level of autonomy and adaptability that distinguishes them from simpler control systems.
Being
The dynamic actuality of relational becoming, in which all entities exist only through reciprocal participation with others.
Being is not a static substance or underlying essence, but the unfolding coherence of processes in interaction, generating and sustaining both selfhood and world. In ECM, being is always emergent, contingent, and co-constituted, with actuality and potentiality interdependently arising in each moment.
Choice
The emergent exercise of selecting among alternative courses of action or states based on values, goals, or meanings.
Choice presupposes a level of conscious agency, where the agent evaluates options and deliberately endorses one or more paths. It differs from automatic or habitual responses by involving reflection and intentionality in decision-making.
Coherence
The emergent, relational integration of differences into mutually sustaining patterns of meaning, process, and value.
Coherence is not imposed order or fixed unity but the dynamic, responsive resonance of parts within a whole. It arises when distinct elements participate in patterns that deepen their mutual intelligibility and vitality. Coherence is not the elimination of difference, but the flourishing of difference-in-relation. It is always contingent, always unfolding, yet deeply real.
Coherence Awareness
The cultivated capacity to sense, feel, and respond to the degree of alignment or dissonance within and between levels of experience, perception, and participation.
Coherence awareness is both a diagnostic and creative faculty. It can be deepened through contemplative, dialogical, or embodied practices, serving as a key praxis of ECM for guiding reorganization and healing.
Conscious Agency
The emergent capacity for self-aware, volitional participation in the reorganization of one’s own coherence and interaction with the world.
Conscious agency involves the ability to reflect, deliberate, and choose among possible actions in light of values, tensions, and meanings. It is not the absence of causality but the recursive, participatory process of co-authoring one’s becoming.
Consciousness
The emergent capacity for experiential awareness that enables the sensing, differentiating, and integrating of relational patterns across levels of perception, valuation, and participation. Consciousness is not a substance or static faculty, but a dynamic, recursive process through which coherence becomes felt, known, and potentially reorganized. It allows an organism or system to recognize tensions, enact meaning, and orient toward transformative participation. Within ECM, consciousness is the enabling condition for coherence awareness, conscious agency, and conscious reorganization.
Conscious Reorganization
The deliberate, volitional participation in the restructuring of one’s internal control system to resolve incoherence and realize greater relational coherence.
Unlike automatic reorganization, which occurs unconsciously in response to persistent error, conscious reorganization involves reflective awareness, intentional letting go of fixed patterns, and receptivity to new forms of integration. It is central to transformation, healing, and theosis in the ECM framework.
Control
The ongoing process of regulating perception and action to maintain or achieve a desired state or goal within a system.
Control is a fundamental functional mechanism by which systems adjust behavior through feedback loops to reduce discrepancies between actual experience and internal references. Control can be automatic, unconscious, or conscious but does not by itself imply purposive adaptation beyond maintaining reference states.
Control System
A dynamic, organized network of control processes that work together to regulate perception and action toward maintaining or achieving desired states or goals.
Control systems operate at various levels of complexity and can be mechanical, biological, or cognitive. They maintain stability and functionality by correcting errors through recursive interaction with the environment or internal states. Control systems may be simple and fixed in their function or complex and adaptable but do not necessarily exhibit autonomy or flexible purposiveness.
Cosmos
The interconnected totality of emergent relational processes that constitute the manifest unfolding of reality.
The cosmos is not a static or fixed entity but the dynamic, evolving whole in which all beings, fields, and potentials co-arise and participate. It encompasses ecological, physical, experiential, and metaphysical dimensions as integrated through recursive interaction. Unlike notions of a mechanistic universe or isolated substance, the ECM cosmos is an open, contingent, and participatory unity without a separate transcendent boundary.
Divinity
The actuality of emergent coherence within the relational field of becoming.
Divinity is not an attribute or substance but the relational wholeness that arises when depth, beauty, and alignment converge within dynamic interaction. It is the harmonious, life-affirming unity that emerges locally within relational processes—the immanent manifestation of coherence.
Divine Becoming
The actualization of emergent coherence through the creative and participatory transformation of self, world, and meaning.
Divine becoming is not God’s transformation, but the relational shining forth of divinity—when acts align with the deeper affordances of coherence and open the implicit potential within a situation. It is how the transcendent coherence immanent to all becoming is manifest in time, through synergy and meaningful responsiveness.
Dynamic Stability
The persistence of a coherent pattern through continuous adaptation within changing relational conditions.
Dynamic stability enables transformation without disintegration. It underlies identity by allowing structures to reorganize in response to internal or external shifts while remaining functionally or relationally consistent over time.
Emergence
The arising of novel patterns, meanings, or structures through recursive interaction within and across systems.
Emergence is not mere complexity or accident, but the real becoming of what was not yet actual. It occurs through layered participation, feedback, and openness to context. In ECM, emergence is not simply upward causation from parts, but includes downward and lateral constraints that give shape to novelty. What emerges carries with it traces of what was, but is never reducible to it.
Emptiness
The absence of inherent, independent existence; the interdependent and relational nature of all phenomena.
In ECM, emptiness does not mean nonexistence or negation, but the recognition that being is constituted through dynamic relations rather than fixed substances. This understanding undercuts reified essences and grounds the possibility of emergent coherence.
Evil
A persistent and willful perpetuation of incoherence that resists integration, healing, or relational coherence.
In ECM, evil is not a substance or metaphysical essence but a relational and volitional phenomenon: it is the entrenchment of systemic dissonance—when a conscious agent knowingly chooses to act in ways that increase fragmentation, deny feedback, or suppress the potential for emergent coherence. Evil arises not merely when incoherence is endured, but when it is actively chosen and reinforced, often through forms of control that isolate, dominate, or reject mutual integration.
This definition carries significant implications for the question of theodicy. In ECM, divinity is not an omnipotent substance who causes or permits evil, but the ever-present calling toward deeper coherence within all situations—transcending yet immanently guiding the unfolding of actuality. Thus, evil is not caused, allowed, or willed by God; it emerges only when conscious agents resist this calling and assert control in ways that sever relational flow and suppress the unfolding of integration.
Importantly, not all suffering or natural disruption (e.g., earthquakes, predation, decay) qualifies as evil. These phenomena may express local or transitional incoherence within larger recursive processes of emergent coherence. They are not moral failures but expressions of dynamic interdependence—real, often painful, but not intrinsically evil. Only when incoherence becomes knowingly perpetuated in defiance of emergent integration does it become evil in the moral and spiritual sense.
God
The transcendent coherence immanent to all becoming—the implicit potential for deeper coherence within every actuality.
God is not a substance, force, or separate entity, but the ever-present lure of coherence and communion. The world does not contain God, nor does God exist outside the world. Rather, divinity shines forth within and through emergence, as the radiant pull toward deeper harmony and meaning. God is the always-more of the present—the ungraspable horizon of coherence that makes novelty, transformation, and divine becoming possible.
Good
The dynamic realization of coherence through integrative participation that honors difference while sustaining harmony, responsiveness, and emergent meaning.
In ECM, good is not a substance or essence but a relational process: it arises when systems support feedback, respond to error, and foster deeper integration. Good is expressed when conscious agents freely cooperate with the call toward coherence, exercising control in ways that relate, adjust, and co-create rather than isolate or dominate.
Identity
The coherent pattern by which a being is recognizable as itself across change.
Identity arises through dynamic stability and is constituted by distinguishing features, relations, or functions. It does not require awareness or self-determination, and it precedes agency and personhood as a condition for their emergence.
Incoherence
A breakdown or misalignment within or between systems in which relational, perceptual, or experiential dynamics come into conflict, generating unresolved error, tension, or suffering.
In ECM, incoherence arises when control systems fail to integrate internal goals or external feedback into a harmonious whole. It is not mere disorder, but a meaningful signal that reorganization may be needed. Incoherence is not intrinsically evil; it is a necessary condition for growth—but if left unresolved, it can become the ground from which evil emerges.
The Implicit
The unactualized but felt depth of meaning, relevance, or response present in each situation.
Borrowed from Eugene Gendlin’s philosophy10, the implicit is not a hidden content or ineffable ground, but the next steps that are “in” a situation before they are said or done. It is how life carries forward its sense of what would deepen meaning or resolve dissonance. In ECM, the implicit parallels God—not as a thing or location, but as the lived sense of what could come next, more fully.
Participation
The active, responsive involvement of beings in the ongoing formation of coherence through mutual influence and transformation.
Participation is not submission to a higher order nor assertion of independent will, but synergistic becoming-in-relation. Each agent or process contributes to the shape of coherence, while also being shaped by it. Participation is both cognitive and bodily, conscious and unconscious, structured and creative. It is process through which reality unfolds.
Person
A temporally extended, relationally embodied agent whose selfhood emerges through recursive interaction with the world.
Persons are constituted by coherent patterns of intention, awareness, valuation, and participation, unfolding within ecological, historical, and interpersonal contexts. A person is not a fixed essence or metaphysical substrate, but a dynamic coherence of becoming—capable of recognizing, responding to, and reorganizing their participation in light of others and the world.
Persons are not limited to human beings but include any agents whose relational selfhood and participatory coherence reach sufficient complexity to engage in recursive transformation and meaningful interaction within their ecological and social contexts.
Personhood
The higher-order coherence of selfhood as it becomes reflexively mediated through relational participation, valuation, and transformation.
Personhood is not a fixed essence or metaphysical ground, but a lived process through which selfhood becomes capable of recognizing, responding to, and reorganizing its identity in light of others and the world. It emerges within ecological, interpersonal, and historical contexts as the unfolding capacity to inhabit, evaluate, and reconfigure one’s becoming—a form of processual agency grounded in dyanmic relational interaction.
Potentiality
The latent affordance of further becoming within any given situation, inseparable from but not reducible to actuality.
Potential is not an abstract realm of forms or pre-existent possibilities but the embodied openness for coherence not yet realized. It is carried in the tensions, gaps, and affordances of the present. In ECM, potentiality is not infinite in a static sense, but emergent from and responsive to actual complexity.
Pre-Reflective Agency
Embodied, minimally-aware responsiveness and skillful action that occurs without explicit deliberation or choice.
Pre-reflective agency is characteristic of “flow states” or skilled performance where the agent acts with tacit understanding and immediate responsiveness, yet without reflective thought or conscious selection of actions.
Recursive Causality
A form of causation in which outcomes influence their own conditions through feedback and mutual modulation. This contrasts with linear causality and enables emergent patterns, where effects re-enter the field as new conditions for coherence.
Relational Field
The interdependent relational matrix of interaction within which entities, processes, and potentials co-condition one another.
The field is the total set of mutually conditioning interactions in which entities arise and transform. It’s not a static background or container, but the dyanmic relational interactions through which coherence emerges.
Relational Ontology
The view that reality consists not of isolated substances, but of interdependent processes and relations.
In ECM, relational ontology rejects any metaphysics based on inherently existing entities. Instead, all actuality is constituted through dynamic, co-arising relations. Entities are not prior to relation; they are emergent from and sustained by relational patterns.
Reorganization
The spontaneous restructuring of internal control systems in response to persistent incoherence or conflict, aimed at restoring functional harmony.
This term, taken from Perceptual Control Theory (PCT), refers to a trial-and-error process below conscious awareness by which the system modifies itself until higher-order coherence is restored. It is a natural process of learning, growth, and healing.
Selfhood
The emergent, perspectival coherence of agency, affectivity, and recursive awareness of a living system within a relational field.
Selfhood arises as a dynamically maintained center of experience and control, constituted by the organism's recursive engagement with its environment. Selfhood is functionally and phenomenologically real, but ontologically contingent—more a process than a thing.
Theosis
The participatory actualization of emergent coherence.
In ECM, theosis is not ascent toward a fixed divine essence but the deepening of relational resonance with emergent divinity.
Truth
The relational coherence between representation, experience, and context that sustains meaningful correspondence within a system of understanding.
Truth in ECM is not an absolute, fixed property but an emergent and contingent quality that arises when patterns of belief, perception, and interaction reliably align with the relational field. It is a process of ongoing verification and reorganization, grounded in pragmatic engagement and recursive participation rather than metaphysical certainty.
Unconscious Agency
Automatic, non-aware action that influences or regulates behavior and interaction without conscious deliberation.
Unconscious agency underlies reflexive, habitual, or procedural behaviors and is typical of many living control systems. It requires no choice or awareness, functioning through implicit feedback and regulation.
Excluded or Rejected Terms
These terms are avoided due to metaphysical contradictions or incompatibility with ECM.
Creation ex Nihilo
Denied as a metaphysical claim; emergence always dependently arises from prior conditions.
The idea of absolute origination from nothingness contradicts the field-relational understanding of actualization.
Divine Simplicity
Reconceived as pattern-unity emerging from complexity, not preexisting essence or substance.
Unity is not pre-given but enacted through integrative coherence without contradiction.
Essence
Rejected as a static, internal identity; replaced with coherence.
In ECM, what something is arises from how it sustains itself relationally, not from an intrinsic metaphysical core.
Infinite Potential (as timeless absolute)
Critiqued as incoherent abstraction divorced from processual reality.
Potential is always situated, emergent, and finite-in-context; infinite potential without grounding collapses into metaphysical contradiction or meaninglessness.
Pure Being
Avoided due to its static abstraction and incoherent universalization.
The notion of “being” apart from dependent relation or differentiation undermines the very conditions of emergence and coherence.
Self
Rejected as a presumed independently existing subject or identity.
In ECM, the self has no ontological reality. It is a conventional abstraction with no fixed referent, arising from linguistic, narrative, and perceptual habits. It does not persist as a discrete substance across time and cannot be identified apart from the emergent processes that constitute selfhood. As such, the self is not a bearer of identity, agency, or existence in itself.
Substance
Rejected as a metaphysically independent, self-existent bearer of properties.
ECM replaces substance ontology with relational process: what a thing is arises from its relations, not from a self-contained essence.
Unmoved Mover
Rejected as a contradiction: a cause that does not participate.
In ECM, all causation is participatory and recursive. A mover that is unmoved cannot be coherent or dynamic.
Gendlin, Eugene T. A Process Model. The Focusing Institute, 1997.
Powers, William T. Behavior: The Control of Perception. Aldine Transaction, 1973.
Gendlin, Eugene T. A Process Model. The Focusing Institute, 1997, 29–38.
Nāgārjuna’s Mūlamadhyamakakārikā (Fundamental Verses on the Middle Way) articulates the doctrine of dependent origination (pratītyasamutpāda), emphasizing that phenomena do not arise independently or singly from themselves or others, nor without cause. Instead, all phenomena co-arise interdependently through relational causality that resists simple linear or one-way explanations. This insight underpins Madhyamaka’s rejection of intrinsic essence and fixed causation. See Mūlamadhyamakakārikā, Chapter 24, Verses 18–19, translated by Siderits, Katsura, and Garfield (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013).
Powers, William T. Behavior: The Control of Perception. Aldine Transaction, 1973.
Gendlin, Eugene T. A Process Model. The Focusing Institute, 1997, 22–27.
Nāgārjuna, Mūlamadhyamakakārikā, trans. Mark Siderits and Shōryū Katsura (Boston: Wisdom Publications, 2013), 15–20.
S. Higginson, W. Mansell, C. Dickens, & S. J. Tai, “An integrative mechanistic account of psychological distress, therapeutic change and recovery: The Perceptual Control Theory approach,” Clinical Psychology Review 31, no. 2 (2011): 249–259.
Nāgārjuna, Mūlamadhyamakakārikā, XVIII.5–6, trans. Mark Siderits and Shōryū Katsura (Boston: Wisdom Publications, 2013), 176–178. These verses explicitly reject inherent existence in persons and actions, a stance that grounds the Madhyamaka ethic of compassion free from both absolutism and nihilism.
Gendlin, Eugene T. Experiencing and the creation of meaning: A philosophical and psychological approach to the subjective. Northwestern University Press, 1962.
I won’t pretend to be intelligent enough to have grasped all that you have said here, but I think I’ll come back to this essay frequently. Some of what you mention reminds me of the mystical writings of Jacob Boehme. While obviously not working within Nagarjuna’s framework, much of what he says about God includes the participatory language you use here, and he seems to have had a view of the divine that was one of continual Trinitarian unfolding. In other words, he possessed a dynamic view of God rather than the static Greek view of divinity. Keep up the good work! I look forward to reading more of what you have to say.