Teaching as a process of story telling allows faculty to reach out to students’ emotions, breathing life into the ideas that are being taught and learned. Story telling among indigenous peoples emphasizes the importance of balanced relationships with the land, with all living creatures, and with the cosmos. It serves different functions in other societies that can also enhance teaching and learning. Alfred North Whitehead’s account of emotions is relevant to the learning process and to teachable moments better understood as learning opportunities that enhance the value of students’ lives. I provide an example of such a learning opportunity in which one of my students experienced an energetic connection with her colleagues as a living community. Teachable moments and story telling can strengthen students’ range of comprehension, their imaginative and aesthetic appreciation, as well as their growing capacity to learn. Emotion also has a primordial role in Whitehead’s account of life in his process philosophy. Its vectoral character enables all entities to realize their distinctive value as a process of valuation in life. An appreciation of this process requires consciousness and the refinement of human understanding through art as the achievement of finite perfection. Whitehead believes an education which would allow students to appreciate art and beauty could be implemented quite easily to transform the lives of future citizens. Process pedagogy itself could include the creative power of story telling to promote the value of life.

Congruent mystical insights of two diametrically opposed philosophers, one ancient and one modern, support the circular configuration (“mandala” in Sanskrit) of all moments as the master inference of how the universe unfolds or seemingly progresses. Such configuration accounts for phenomena that linear time cannot; avoids its paradoxes; allows for a more coherent co-existence with whatever may be experienced and/or conceptualized as God; and accommodates an environment conducive both to sublime peace and ecstasy.