Deep is the perfection of insight: it is not actualized by anything, for no one actualizes it ... nor is there anything to be actualized ... anywhere. The actualization of the perfection of insight is actualization of space, of all dharmas, of non-attachment, of the limitless, of non-existence, of non-acquiring. [65]

The nature of things is not something which requires actualization: space is empty without needing to develop that emptiness. In exactly the same way the perfection of insight is not in need of development. The implication is evident that the essential original nature of thought (citta), brightly clear, as well as the nature of things in general, is unattached knowing, the perfection of insight which constitutes buddhahood:

The nature of all dharmas is complete purity ... All dharmas have attained nirvaa.na, [and hence] are identical with suchness ... All dharmas are noble arhats, completely purified by nature ... All dharmas are enlightenment because they cause one to be aware of the buddha-knowing (buddhaj~naana). [66]

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V
Let us now consider from this particular perspective Whitehead's own non-dualistic approach to the topic of knowing or perception. Perception for Whitehead is basically another name for reality itself. An actual occasion is a process of concrescence, growing together, of many objects into a novel subject, by means of those prehensions of objects which together constitute the new actual occasion. The actual occasion is its prehensions, and the objects of prehension are the subject in its process of actualization. From this standpoint all that actually exists is the subject: "Apart from the experience of subjects there is nothing, nothing, nothing, bare nothingness." [67] Objects are only constituted by (or as) the prehensions, feelings, perceptions of the subject as it enacts itself. [68] In other words, "that moment of experience, in its character of being that one occasion, is nothing else than the percipient [subject] itself." [69]

　　 Now the "experiences of subjects" are simply prehensions, perceptions; and the analysis of prehension [70] shows that it consists of the subject, the object(s), and the manner in which the object is felt or perceived by the subject. Yet this is only analysis, and reality is the synthetic concrescence, as a unity, of an actual occasion. The perceptual experience, an act of knowing, is thus a single, undifferentiated whole; there is, in fact, no object as such, external to the subject, nor a subject separable from its object(s), nor a process of perceiving which a subject "has" with regard to an object. The threefold analysis does reflect, on the other hand, the manner in which the world is apparently experienced by most people most of the time -- a manner which the very language of the preceding words of this sentence renders in typical form: People (that is, subjects) experience a world. My point is that there is an implicit parallel here for the Mahaayaana doctrine of two truths: Whitehead's metaphysic indicates an "ultimately" nondual reality which is "normally," that is, analytically or conceptually, experienced as a manifold "world" in which the many subjects severally experience each other as objects.

　　 I think that we can find a possible reason in Whitehead's own discussion of perception for the kind of dichotomy just suggested. Whitehead describes three modes of perception: causal efficacy, presentational immediacy, and the mixed mode of symbolic reference.

　　 Perception in the mode of causal efficacy is simply the prehension which constitutes the concrescing subject itself as well as the objectified "data" in relation to which the subject is the emergent, novel occasion. It is the subject's experience or awareness of the objective background of which it is the subjective result. In this sense, what the subject is, is what it perceives (prehends).

　　 Conscious perception, a feature of prehension which seems to appear only in more complex organisms, allows for the mode of presentational immediacy, which is sensory perception in the sense that the term "perception" is ordinarily used: sounds, smells, colors, tastes, and bodily feelings (touch, kinesthesia,

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pain, etc.). [71] Three aspects of presentational immediacy should be noticed here.

　　 First, it is a phase of perception in the mode of causal efficacy, not a generically separate mode of perception. The objective side of prehension becomes sense objects, sense-data, for the subject to the extent that this mode of perception is possible for it, but what is experienced as sense-perception is already experienced (prehended) in a more immediate way as causal efficacy, that is, prehension which constitutes subject and object as one occasion.

　　 Second, therefore, presentational immediacy shares the ontological non-duality of causal efficacy -- the world which appears does so by virtue of sense-data "which can with equal truth be described as our sensations or as the qualities of the actual things which we perceive. These qualities are thus relational between the perceiving subject and the perceived things." [72] It is in this mode that the "world" appears as such, that is, as "a community of actual things," contemporaneous with the subject, which are spatially extended. This sensorially perceived extension arises from "that general scheme of relationships providing the capacity that many objects can be welded into the real unity of one experience." [73] In other words, the prehensions constituting an actual occasion are "'vectors;' for they feel what is there and transform it into what is here." [74] Perception of spatial extension, including the appearance of a world as being "external" to consciousness, is the realization in sensory terms of the intrinsic subject-object character of all prehension. But this perceived extensiveness presents a world of separable content, for "in so far as concerns their disclosure by presentational immediacy, actual entities in the contemporary universe are causally independent of each other." [75]