Three Paths to One Structure: Quantum Mechanics, Process Philosophy, and the Bahá'í Metaphysics of Relational Reality

Three independent intellectual traditions — modern quantum physics, the process philosophy of Alfred North Whitehead, and the Bahá'í writings of Bahá'u'lláh and ʻAbdu'l-Bahá — converge on the same structural description of reality: that existence is constituted by relationship, and that properties emerge only through relational interaction. That love sustains those relationships is the claim of the Bahá'í writings (mahabbat) and, in his own vocabulary (Eros), of Whitehead; physics describes the structure but names no such principle. This paper makes three related arguments. First, local substance ontology is formally incompatible with quantum mechanics: Bell's theorem, combined with the experimental violation of its inequalities, makes local realism untenable and undermines the substance-ontological assumption that systems carry intrinsic properties prior to measurement, making Whitehead's process ontology arguably the most systematically developed internally consistent metaphysical framework available for quantum reality. Second, the Bahá'í writings constitute an independent prior instantiation of process ontology, articulating its essential claims decades before Whitehead named the framework philosophically and before experiments on Bell's inequalities ruled out local realism. Third, these two findings together support a triadic convergence: three traditions from different settings, using different methods across 170 years, describe the same relational structure. The convergence is formalized through six structural isomorphisms (relational ontology, nonlocal interconnection, observer-dependence, decoherence, holographic order, and motion as life) and the Relational Coherence Framework (RCF), developed in a companion physics paper, which restates standard decoherence theory in terms of a coherence quantifier, without altering its predictions, and derives testable consequences for quantum-gate scheduling. The argument employs an overlapping consensus architecture: each tradition validates its own thesis independently; the convergence is not a merged view but independent evidence, from separate instruments, for the same underlying structure of reality. The convergence is three-way on relational structure and two-way on love; that love is the principle sustaining the structure is the paper's central interpretive claim, not a result of physics.