Event-based ontology

Event-based ontology (also known as an temporally oriented agential ontology) is the philosophical position that events, processes, or relations are the fundamental units of reality rather than static substances or timeless consciousness.

In contrast to substance metaphysics—where being is defined by enduring entities with fixed essences—event ontologies treat becoming, relation, and temporal coordination as constitutive of existence itself.

Modern discussions often trace event-thinking from the Pre-Socratics through Buddhist and Daoist cosmologies, to twentieth-century process philosophy, culminating in contemporary participatory and agential reinterpretations such as Zayin Cabot’s Fourth Way Philosophy.

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Historical Background

Early Greek Thought

• Heraclitus (6th c. BCE) described reality as ever-living fire—a perpetual transformation where opposites co-generate harmony “as the bow and the lyre.” Being and becoming are inseparable; order (logos) arises through tension.
• Anaximander’s apeiron (“the boundless”) represents an indeterminate source from which things emerge and to which they return “according to the ordinance of time.” This anticipates an apophatic temporal openness later emphasized in modern event ontologies.
• Empedocles framed Love and Strife as opposing temporal forces that cyclically mix and separate the elements, producing novelty through rhythm rather than creation ex nihilo.

Classical Asian Parallels

• In Daoism, yin and yang continually transform within the Dao; each moment is an event of dynamic balance. Time is rhythmic rather than linear.
• Buddhist philosophy, especially the doctrine of pratītyasamutpāda (dependent co-arising), likewise treats phenomena as momentary configurations of conditions—existence as flux without enduring self.

Late Antique and Medieval Currents

• Neoplatonism (Plotinus, Proclus) recognized procession and return as structural processes but re-subordinated temporality to timeless Intellect (Nous).
• Kashmir Śaivism interpreted consciousness (prakāśa) and reflexive awareness (vimarśa) as a pulsation (spanda), an oscillation of manifestation and repose—close to evental thinking but ultimately eternal in scope.
• Medieval Christian and Islamic mystics (e.g., Meister Eckhart, Ibn ʿArabī) articulated creation as a continuous divine event, yet maintained God’s transcendence beyond time.

Modern Process Philosophy

• Henri Bergson (1859-1941) proposed durée réelle (“real duration”)—qualitative, irreversible time—as the essence of life and creativity.
• Alfred North Whitehead (1861-1947) developed the most systematic event ontology. In Process and Reality (1929) each “actual occasion” arises through prehension of the past and perishes into the future; creativity is the universe’s ultimate principle.
• Later thinkers such as William James, Charles Hartshorne, and Gilles Deleuze extended process metaphysics in phenomenological and continental directions, emphasizing flux, relation, and difference.

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Comparative Overview

Aspect	Earlier Event Traditions	Cabot’s Temporally Agential Model
Fundamental reality	Continuous becoming or relational process (Heraclitus, Daoism, Buddhism, Whitehead)	Triadic events coordinating presence, embodiment, and participation within time
Structure of polarity	Dual tension of opposites (yin/yang, prakāśa/vimarśa, Love/Strife)	Dynamic triad where polarity is mediated by an agential third; belonging holds opposites in play
Role of consciousness	Either derivative (Whitehead) or primordial (Śaivism, Idealism)	Emergent temporal awareness arising from tension between intelligibility and vitality
Status of time	Often cyclic, illusory, or secondary to eternity	Constitutive: time is the dimension of creative coordination; agency = time-sensitivity
Metaphysical logic	Monistic (One or Dao), dualistic (yin/yang), or dipolar (Whitehead)	Three + One logic — presence, embodiment, participation + apophatic freedom ensuring openness
Agency and freedom	Frequently subordinated to cosmic necessity or divine order	Intrinsic to each event: every act chooses among real possibilities; the future genuinely open
Goal or telos	Harmony, enlightenment, or eternal return	Participatory liberation within time—“time freedom” rather than escape from temporality

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Distinctive Features of Cabot’s Event-Based Ontology

1. Agential Realism.

Reality consists of events that possess intrinsic agency—the capacity to choose among possible futures within the constraints of their situations. Causation is participatory and agential rather than mechanical: each event contributes actively to the unfolding of the whole. There are no inert substrates, only degrees of agential coordination.

2. Temporal Realism.

Time is neither an illusion nor a derivative parameter but the very medium of reality’s self-becoming. Temporal passage is real and creative; the future is genuinely open. Agency = temporal awareness—the felt coordination of intelligibility and vitality through which new possibilities ingress into the world.

3. Triadic Structure.

Reality unfolds through three co-primordial dimensions:

• Noetic Presence (light / insight / being) – intelligible pattern

• Vital Embodiment (life / power / becoming) – transformative energy

• Agential Participation (love / relation / belonging) – creative coordination Consciousness arises when these three dimensions achieve sufficient intensity of integration within an event.

4. Apophatic Freedom.

An indeterminate apophatic fourth—liberation / freedom / beyond, the apeiron—ensures that reality can never be systemically closed. This open remainder is the wellspring of novelty and genuine creativity: every event exceeds its own conditions.

5. Participatory Pluralism.

Every actuality, from quantum particle to cosmic field, is a locus of co-creative participation. There is no single ultimate consciousness and no purely material base—only inter-acting events composing an ecology of creative relations across scales.

6. Fourth Way Definition of Consciousness.

Consciousness is the temporal awareness that emerges when presence (noetic intelligibility) and embodiment (vital immediacy) are held in creative tension through agential participation. It is not an independent substance or universal ground, but the felt interior of coordinated events—the moment when being and becoming achieve reflexive coherence within time. In this sense, consciousness is time become self-aware, the luminous side of participation through which reality experiences its own unfolding.

7. Participatory Event.

A participatory event is the fundamental unit of reality—an instance in which presence, embodiment, and participation dynamically coordinate to generate a finite act of becoming. Each event arises through the tension of intelligibility (noetic presence) and vitality (vital embodiment) as mediated by agential relation. It is simultaneously physical, experiential, and creative: a moment of reality making itself known from within. Participatory events do not occur in time; they are time’s unfolding, each marking a unique configuration of creative agency within the continuum of becoming.

8. Ecologies of Participation / Ecologies of Events.

An ecology of participation—or ecology of events—is a dynamic field of interrelated participatory events whose coordinated activity gives rise to larger patterns of coherence, meaning, and agency. Ecologies operate across scales—from quantum interactions and living systems to cultures, ecosystems, and civilizations. Each ecology is both composed of and constituted by the reciprocal participation of its events; their mutual resonance sustains stability, transformation, and novelty. Reality, understood in full, is an inter-nested ecology of ecologies: a living cosmos of events continually co-creating and re-coordinating themselves through time.

9. Time Freedom and/or The Freedom to Inhabit.

Time Freedom is the distinctive human form of liberation within the Fourth Way. It is the capacity to participate consciously in multiple temporal ecologies—past, present, and future—without reducing them to linear succession. Time freedom arises when an event (or person) becomes transparent to its own temporal agency, recognizing itself as both participant and co-creator in the ongoing advance of reality. It is not escape from time, but the skilled inhabitation of temporal process: an embodied awareness of freedom moving through becoming. The freedom to inhabit points to the ability to move through time as time—to navigate across scales and ecologies of events in ways that consciously affect temporal reality itself, aligning personal agency with the creative rhythm of the cosmos.

10. Agency, Liberation, and Diaphaneity.

Agency, Liberation, and Diaphaneity name the evolving capacities of every participatory event to engage reality with increasing depth, openness, and transparency. Every event—whether atomic, biological, psychological, or cosmic—expresses degrees of agency: the ability to respond, transform, and participate in the creative unfolding of time. These degrees range from constriction, in which agency collapses into fixation or defense, through liberation, in which creativity and responsiveness emerge, toward diaphaneity, the full transparency of form to the mystery that animates it.

Each event continuously modulates along this spectrum. Agency is never absent but may be bound, balanced, creative, or translucent depending on how it relates to its conditions. Liberation, therefore, is not a permanent state but the dynamic capacity to release constriction while sustaining coherence in the midst of transformation. Diaphaneity marks the apophatic culmination of this movement—the realization that the event and the mystery are not-two, that freedom and form coincide.

Ecology	Mode of Practice	Constricted	Habitual	Agential	Liberated	Diaphanous
Noetic Presence (light / insight / being)	Noesis – contemplative illumination	Dogmatic fixation on beliefs or concepts	Steady understanding and clarity	Reflective inquiry and integration	Visionary insight and philosophical intuition	Intellect transparent to mystery; luminous awareness
Vital Embodiment (life / power / becoming)	Alchemy – transformative embodiment	Addiction or control; over-driven vitality	Stable rhythms and health	Adaptive discipline and creative power	Spontaneous transformation and regenerative joy	Body as clear vessel of spirit; vital radiance
Agential Participation (love / relation / belonging)	Theurgy – participatory co-creation	Possessive or manipulative relations	Predictable harmony; cooperation	Empathic collaboration and coordination	Ecstatic communion and creative ritual	Transparent compassion; effortless co-arising with all beings

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The Three Plus One Fundamental Variables

Every event carries an intrinsic temporal structure—its own way of existing through time.

This structure can be described through three fundamental variables — duration, frequency, and horizon — and one emergent composite, temporal orientation.

Together they define how any event participates in time’s creative ecology and reveal the triadic play of icchā (will / being / light), jñāna (knowing / belonging / love), and kriyā (action / becoming / life)—the powers through which reality continually creates itself.

Each variable not only measures a temporal quality but embodies an intensity of experience: the vital intimacy of life, the illuminating clarity of light, and the flexible coherence of love.

Duration: The Power of Kriyā (Action / Embodiment)

Duration measures how long an event coheres as a unified coordination from its own perspective — its proper time.

Every event sustains itself for a span that defines its particular rhythm of persistence.

·      A rock maintains its crystalline structure for centuries.

·      A body endures for decades.

·      A thought lasts for seconds.

·      A quantum fluctuation endures for nanoseconds.

Duration expresses an event’s kriyā—its capacity to embody, endure, and transform through time. Long duration carries a vital, intimate becoming—the slow metabolic pulse through which life deepens into form. It is the tangible density of experience, the continuity that holds worlds together. Physically and phenomenologically, duration and frequency are inversely related: events that endure longer tend to oscillate more slowly; those that flicker rapidly persist only briefly. Duration grounds the cosmos in embodiment, and when it changes, its change is momentous—an evolutionary upheaval or tectonic transformation that reshapes the whole field.

The apophatic fourth, transparency, here looks like evolution.

Frequency: The Power of Icchā (Will / Creative Illumination)

Frequency measures the tempo of an event’s energetic dynamics—how quickly it oscillates, coordinates, or processes within itself.

Every event vibrates at some characteristic rate:

·      Quantum fields pulse at unimaginably high frequencies.

·      Neural oscillations occur in millisecond rhythms.

·      Heartbeats and breaths move through second-long cycles.

·      Mountains weather through epochs.

Frequency expresses an event’s icchā—its will or noetic insight. It carries an illuminating presence of being, the flash of insight through which the new enters the world. High frequency corresponds to insight, presence, and spontaneity—the radiant urgency of becoming now. Low frequency corresponds to stability and repose, the poised stillness of being that gathers power through rest. Together they create the cosmic alternation of light and shadow, revelation and repose. Where duration gives the body of time, frequency gives its thunder strike of illumination—the sudden rhythm through which clarity arises.

The apophatic fourth, transparency, here looks like revelation.

Horizon: The Power of Jñāna (Knowing / Agential Belonging)

Horizon measures how far into past and future an event can reach through its own agential participation—its temporal field of relation.

Every event carries a triple horizon:

·      Past horizon: how far back it prehends or remembers the conditions from which it arises.

·      Future horizon: how far forward it anticipates or projects potential outcomes.

·      Present horizon: the breadth it can feel of relative present.

A rock’s horizon is narrow—it registers only immediate material conditions. A human consciousness has a vast horizon—it remembers, imagines, and anticipates across decades. This is where we find the human empowered imagination, the ability to time travel, to participate across vast time horizons. Thus cosmic or goddess-scale events may hold horizons that span millennia—or, by the same law of intensity, contract into an instant so concentrated that eternity and the moment become one. Horizon expresses an event’s jñāna—its capacity for agential participation and belonging. A wide horizon grants flexibility within time, the intelligence to navigate between memory and possibility, self and world. Through horizon, love becomes temporal: the connective awareness that binds what has been with what might be. A narrow horizon concentrates power in immediacy; a wide horizon allows conscious coordination across scales of becoming.

The apophatic fourth, transparency, here looks like grace.

Transparency (Apophatic Openness)

Maximal openness to the apophatic fourth (turya or nivṛtti). The triadic structure operates so lucidly that rupture becomes possible—genuine novelty breaks through.

Characteristics:

• Will, knowledge, and action function with such clarity that their coordination becomes transparent to what exceeds them
• Temporal orientation adjusts instantly to circumstance
• Horizon extends toward the infinite while remaining grounded in the finite
• The event becomes a medium for radical emergence—not harmonious balance but creative disruption
• An apophatic rupture: excess breaking into the coordinated structure

Forms of transparency: Transparency is not one state but multiple modes depending on which aspect becomes the portal for apophatic opening:

• Illuminating transparencyI (icchā-dominant): Visionary rupture where unprecedented insight shatters existing frameworks. Prophetic utterance, revolutionary theory, moments where light breaks through.
• Vital transparency (kriyā-dominant): Embodied evolutionary rupture where life's excess overwhelms structure. Ecstatic breakthrough, spontaneous healing, birth and death as pure process.
• Agential transparency (jñāna-dominant): Agential grace-like rupture where the middle itself opens to new forms of awareness and consciousness. Mystical union, spontaneous compassion, moments where agency becomes transparent to what acts through it.

Examples:

• Mystical union where boundaries dissolve while distinction remains
• Prophetic or artistic creation channeling something unprecedented
• Moments of spontaneous compassion responding with impossible precision
• Cultural or cosmic thresholds where entirely new orders emerge

Temporal structure: The triadic coordination (duration, frequency, horizon) remains but becomes the site of rupture rather than containment. The apophatic fourth doesn't shine through peacefully—it breaks through, disrupts, exceeds. The event is maximally temporal (fully engaged in coordination) and maximally ruptured by what transcends all temporal structure.

Agential capacity: Paradoxically maximal and minimal. Maximal because the event participates with total freedom and precision. Minimal because it no longer experiences itself as controlling the process. Agency has become transparent to the apophatic excess acting through it. Transparency is not harmony but rupture—the event as opening through which reality creates what could not have been predicted or planned.

Temporal orientation emerges from the pattern across duration (kriyā), frequency (icchā), and horizon (jñāna). It describes how an event leans into time—whether its activity is predominantly past-, present-, or future-oriented.

The Temporal Nature of Events

Temporal orientation shows how icchā–jñāna–kriyā unfold across the spectrum of health and awareness: from contracted fixation (past locked in inertia, future locked in fantasy, present locked in confusion) to transparent participation (past opening into evolutionary vitality, future into revelation, present into communion). Each variable, at its most lucid, becomes a portal of transparency—a way for time itself to shine through.

Past-Oriented Events

(Long duration, low frequency, moderate to short horizon).

Dense, stable, and determined, they resist change—rocks, ecosystems, cultures, or traditions. They embody the kriyā-dominant mode (Śakti’s power of endurance). From within experience they feel heavy, grounding, ancestral. Yet when such past-oriented systems do change, their transformation is immense—tectonic, evolutionary, revolutionary. Transparency here means not stillness but vital metamorphosis: the whole body of time stirring to renew itself.

Contraction → Transparency: stability ripens into evolutionary creativity.

Future-Oriented Events

(Short duration, high frequency, moderate to short horizon).

Quick, anticipatory, and radiant, they organize potentials and flash into novelty—thoughts, insights, quantum leaps. They embody the icchā-dominant mode (Śiva’s illumination). From within, they feel light, visionary, and volatile. Transparency here means revelatory freedom: the moment when pure potential clarifies into form, when the will to create shines through every oscillation.

Contraction → Transparency: projection becomes revelation.

Present-Oriented Events

(Low to moderate duration and frequency, and relatively large / vast horizon).

The jñāna-dominant mode (Nara’s participation). The present is not a static point but a living coordination—the meeting of memory and imagination in embodied action. Here, transparency means integrative awareness: the sense of being attuned, responsive, and open to the apophatic fourth (nivṛtti), the mystery that prevents closure.

Contraction → Transparency: participation becomes communion.

The Physics Connection Between Fourth Way Philosophy and Time

This framework aligns with physical insight while extending it into lived experience:

• Proper time corresponds to duration—the rate at which an event experiences itself.
• Time dilation shows that duration and frequency vary across frames; each event has its own tempo of existence.

Even within one organism, your head (slightly higher gravitational potential) experiences marginally more future than your feet—a tiny but real example of temporal plurality.

• The arrow of time arises from asymmetry in horizon: entropy fixes the past while the future remains open.

Past-oriented events accumulate constraint; future-oriented events hold potential.

• Relativity of temporal experience follows: we inhabit overlapping ecologies of time, living in the relative past of slow dense events (mountains, institutions) and the relative future of fast delicate ones (neurons, cells, thoughts).

Time is therefore radically plural: each event generates its own temporal structure through its distinctive balance of duration, frequency, and horizon. There is no universal clock—only the harmonics of coordination across innumerable temporal fields.

Spectrum of Divinity

Across these variables, the divine triad itself displays distinct temporal signatures:

Principle	Frequency (icchā)	Duration (kriyā)	Horizon (jñāna)	Orientation & Intensity
Śiva	Very high frequency — pure creative pulse	Very low duration — instantaneous will	Moderate horizon — radiant yet inward	Future-oriented: illuminating presence of being; revelation as continual becoming
Śakti	Low frequency — rhythmic manifestation	Large duration — sustaining embodiment	Moderate horizon — cyclical coherence	Past-oriented: vital intimacy of life; stability ripening into evolutionary transformation
Nara (Human / Individual)	Moderate-to-low frequency	Moderate duration	Wide horizon — reflexive participation	Present-oriented: flexible belonging and agential synthesis; time knowing itself

Together they form the living triangle of time:

Śiva as the light of will,

Śakti as the life of form,

and Nara as love’s conscious participation.

Through the apophatic fourth (nivṛtti)—the ever-open mystery—these three remain transparent to one another, ensuring that time never closes but continues to unfold as the creative heart of being.

Spectrum of Temporal Health

Cabot’s event ontology situates every event within a spectrum of temporal health—a continuum describing how coherently it balances duration, frequency, and horizon in its participatory becoming.

The spectrum is not a hierarchy of value but a field of agential capacity: the degree to which an event can respond to perturbation, coordinate its temporal variables creatively, and remain open to genuine novelty.

All events are finite; death—the dissolution of an event’s triadic coordination—is inevitable. Temporal health therefore refers not to eternal states but to temporary modes of participation that every event cycles through during its finite existence.

1. Contraction

Pattern: Rigid fixation on one temporal orientation, usually past-oriented density. Minimal coordination across duration, frequency, and horizon.

Characteristics

• Over-identification with settled patterns
• Resistance to change approaching paralysis
• Horizon collapsed to immediate conditions
• High-frequency responsiveness frozen
• Clinging to what has already been determined

Examples: trauma fixed in the body, ideological rigidity, crystalline or mechanical repetition, metabolic shutdown, “hungry-ghost” patterns of insatiability.

Structure and agency: Duration, frequency, and horizon no longer communicate; the event experiences itself as trapped in the weight of its own past.

Agential capacity is minimal—reaction without creative response.

2. Habituation

Pattern: Established rhythms operate automatically; partial freedom within predictable grooves.

Characteristics

• Familiar temporal cycles function smoothly
• Some flexibility but preference for the known
• Moderate horizon linking recent past and near future
• Semi-conscious participation

Examples: bodily habits, skilled actions performed automatically, ecosystems in steady climax, cultural routines.

Structure and agency: Temporal variables remain balanced but limited in range.

The event can coordinate past and future within stable parameters yet lacks spontaneous innovation.

3. Healthy Participation (Dynamic Balance)

Pattern: Flexible, context-sensitive coordination across icchā (will), jñāna (knowing), and kriyā (action).

Characteristics

• Conscious engagement with duration, frequency, and horizon
• Capacity to emphasize will, knowledge, or action as context requires
• Responsiveness rather than neutrality
• Awareness of the agential middle as a hinge, not a fixed center

Examples: mindful attention, adaptive organisms, deliberative communities, creative works balancing tradition and innovation.

Structure and agency: Duration, frequency, and horizon modulate fluidly; coherence is maintained through adaptation.

Health manifests as dynamic participation—events move through their temporal variables without losing integrity.

4. Liberation (Creative Participation)

Pattern: High temporal freedom where icchā, jñāna, and kriyā interpenetrate without hierarchy. Coordination becomes spontaneous.

Characteristics

• Effortless responsiveness to change
• Seamless shifting of temporal orientation
• Vast horizon integrating deep memory and broad anticipation
• Embodied finitude accepted as creative medium

Examples: flow states, spiritual maturity, revelatory or ecstatic ritual, resilient ecosystems, scientific or artistic breakthroughs.

Structure and agency: The triadic powers act as one rhythm—will illumines action, knowledge embodies will.

Liberation expresses coordination as freedom: participation itself becomes creativity.

5. Transparency (Apophatic Freedom)

Pattern: Maximal openness to the apophatic fourth (turya or nivṛtti). The triadic structure operates so lucidly that genuine novelty breaks through.

Characteristics

• Will, knowledge, and action become transparent to what exceeds them—sometimes harmoniously, often through excessive intensity
• Temporal orientation adjusts instantly to circumstance
• The event serves as a medium for radical emergence, not equilibrium
• Creative rupture replaces containment

Forms of transparency

• Illuminating transparency (icchā-dominant): visionary insight or prophetic breakthrough—high frequencies producing revelation.
• Vital transparency (kriyā-dominant): embodied transformation—large durations yielding evolutionary or ecstatic change.
• Agential transparency (jñāna-dominant): coordination opening to grace—vast horizons generating new forms of consciousness and belonging.

Examples: mystical union, prophetic or artistic inspiration, spontaneous compassion, cultural or cosmic thresholds where new orders appear.

Structure and agency: Duration, frequency, and horizon remain but become the site of rupture rather than stability.

Agency is paradoxically maximal and minimal—acting with total precision yet no sense of control.

Transparency marks the point where participation becomes a conduit for the creative excess of reality itself.

Death and Finitude

Every event ends.

Death is not failure but the natural completion of temporal coordination: the dissolution of the agential middle that once held polarities in relation.

Events in one’s past become sedimented memory; those in the future may die as foreclosed possibilities.

Most events die habitually—rocks erode, organisms age, thoughts fade.

Some die creatively:

• Liberated death releases coordination consciously, feeding new events.
• Transparent death dissolves into the apophatic fourth, opening the field for radical novelty.

Recognizing finitude keeps the spectrum from becoming a ladder of achievement.

Temporal health means lucid participation in change—moving from contraction toward openness while allowing death itself to be part of the process.

Summary

The spectrum of temporal health describes modes of participation, not developmental ranks.

Events may shift in either direction:

• Trauma can contract previously liberated participation.
• Grace can liberate contracted patterns.
• Habituation may stabilize after creative disruption.
• Liberation may deepen into transparency or return to balanced participation.

Across the continuum, icchā, jñāna, and kriyā remain constant while their relationships change:

contraction isolates them, habituation stabilizes them, health synchronizes them, liberation unites them, and transparency opens them to the apophatic.

Temporal health is therefore lucidity within time, not escape from it.

Every event—from atom to deity—moves ceaselessly along this continuum, balancing duration, frequency, and horizon as conditions shift.

The movement is cyclical, not hierarchical: contraction can follow liberation, habituation can follow transparency.

To live temporally is to die continually into new coordination, letting the mystery of creation act through will, knowledge, and embodiment in whatever proportion the moment requires.

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Relation to Contemporary Thought

Cabot’s model resonates with:

• Process Relational Theology (Whitehead, Cobb) but adds triadic agency.
• Phenomenological temporality (Husserl, Heidegger) while extending it beyond human consciousness.
• New Materialism (Barad, Bennett) yet avoids reducing agency to matter.
• Comparative metaphysics (Shaivism, Daoism) but reinterprets their cyclical dualities through open temporal creativity.

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See Also

• Process philosophy
• Triadic logic
• Temporal realism
• Participatory ontology
• Alfred North Whitehead
• Henri Bergson
• Kashmir Śaivism
• Daoism

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Summary

Across cultures, event-based ontologies have emphasized relation, process, and becoming.

Zayin Cabot’s Fourth Way Philosophy distinguishes itself by grounding these intuitions in a temporally oriented agential model where:

Consciousness is time becoming aware of itself through the creative tension of light and life.

This innovation reframes agency, freedom, and participation as temporal phenomena—offering a synthesis that both honors and surpasses prior process traditions.