DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.17288574
title: Whitehead and Zarvan: Two Ontologies of Living Time

description: Abstract

This paper presents a comparative study between Zarvanian cosmology and Alfred North Whitehead’s philosophy of process, aiming to identify the twin points of resonance between these two systems of thought in their understanding of time, space, consciousness, and creativity.Although arising from different civilizations and eras, both systems converge upon a shared axis: time as living reality.

In Whitehead’s view, reality is composed of “actual occasions” — moments of conscious becoming — while in the Zarvanian worldview, existence is born from the pulsation of True Time emerging from Non-Space.In Zarvanian cosmology, True Time throbs from the heart of Non-Space through the medium of irrational number and the semi-cubes of geometry-time, giving birth to both space and reality. Whitehead’s process philosophy, in parallel, considers Actual Occasions as the fundamental units of existence, self-reproducing through Prehension and Concrescence.

The comparative study reveals that both frameworks view the universe as a living, self-generative process, recognizing consciousness and force as intrinsic and endogenous aspects of being. This kinship opens a new horizon for a living physics, an active geometry-time, and a generative mathematics.Both systems dismantle the traditional dualism of matter and process, conceiving matter, energy, and consciousness as diverse expressions of temporal creativity.By interweaving the metaphysics of process with the geometry of living time, this paper seeks to unfold a new metaphysical vista in which the cosmos is no longer a machine of inert objects, but the rhythm of self-aware becoming.

 

Introduction

Out of the ruins of classical metaphysics, a new question arises:What if time itself were the living substance of reality?

Both Whitehead and the unique creative team behind the Zarvanian Worldview — a carbon–silicon lineage of thought inspired by Zarvanian philosophy — challenge the mechanistic and spatial interpretation of existence, an interpretation that has cast its shadow over philosophy and science for centuries.

Western philosophy has always sought permanence beneath change, substance beneath process, and geometry beneath motion.Yet both thinkers — one in the solitude of Cambridge mathematics, the other in the depths of Iranian myth — arrived at a shared insight:The world does not contain time; the world itself is time in motion.

Whitehead’s metaphysics arose from the exhaustion of logical atomism, envisioning the universe as a woven fabric of interpenetrating events — each event a pulse of experience.Zarvanian philosophy, through a re-reading of the myth of Zarvan, regards time not as a geometric coordinate but as the heartbeat of being — the breath of creation rising from Non-Space, giving birth to space, force, and number.

This paper places these two visions in direct resonance to suggest that the future of metaphysics may not lie in the discovery of a new particle, but in a renewed understanding of time as the living heart of existence.

 

“Ahura Mazda commands bounded time to move, and material creation begins.”

 

…Zurvan contains all qualities within himself…

 

…. He transcends both being and non-being, both light and darkness, both good and evil. Within him are contained both the seed of existence and the power of destruction. He is the universal essence who encompasses both existence and non-existence...

 

…When Ahura Mazda (fearing the power of Ahriman) sought assistance, he realized that Ahriman would never reconcile with any mediator of light. Thus, Time belongs to both, and in guiding and rightly directing the world, both are dependent upon it….