Replies

Dear Dennis. Thank you for your generous comment and warmth with which you have held both this space as well as classroom space.
Thank you for the book reference too.

Hello Nelson. I read your comment and wonder. I am new Whitehead and am not sure I understand Lure very well. Instead, I am wondering about religious nihilism and its impact. When process is frozen in our perceptual vision, how can Lure reach us?

And then again, I hope for someone like Jesus in a very different form to walk in a small community, making small changes (Islands of Coherence and all that) that is a butterfly effect in the centuries to come.

It was great meeting you and listening to you too, Nelson.

I will miss all of you. (I am not in the certificate program).

warmly
Bhavana

Your post feels like an invitation to sit with the idea of gender. This quote: “When the model of understanding God is humanity in general, and maleness in particular, then it is too easy to project all features of humanity, including gender and sexuality, onto God even when those features are clearly inappropriate to the singularity of deity.”

I read this reflecting on how I had realised this projection tendency while exploring insects and words. I realised when we study animal or insect world, we project all our messes, including what is emphasized or not onto the insects. There is a black widow and praying mantis and so on.

As I explored that world, I realised fe/maleness was just one of the attributes in the making and sustenance of life. The spikiness I feel toward the “category” as a social human is more an evaluation of how I am cultured in my world towards gender. It is not a “fact,” it is what I prehended into the interaction. And the insect world called me to see other ways.

The text called me to look at God to poorly quote Andrew Davis’s forthcoming book “Whitehead’s Universe” as Possibility of Possibilities, Dipolarity of Dipolarities. Entangled and embedded in the relationship of world-making and yet holding the possibility of other world-making.

That Jesus just is…an invitation to engage in a different enchantment.

Thanks for these inputs, Dennis. A question: When you say Corbin believed “entire world is a theophany of the Divine”, how is this different from the notion of “hierophany” that you introduced in this post?

Another reflection: Imagination is fabulous and also possibly poisonous. Md Iqbal’s work on Reconstruction of Religious Thought was published the same year he gave the Allahabad address proposing a Two-State theory that eventually led to the Partition of India. That address (an imagination of a possibility and logical reasoning) and his metaphysical reflection feed each other.

And I have wondered how we can imagine with care. And I wonder about prehension and its strength. Recently I was talking to friend about dipolarity in religion– I was lamenting that my faith is way too much towards the physical pole, very past oriented and how I long for imagination and looseness. He warned me that the evolution has to be slow and organic, not directional and manipulative. That traditions naturally slowly evolve in response to changing events.

I am sitting with his inputs…

Dear Bill. Thank you for your thoughtful exploration of the idea of “Oneness.” Yes, we say Oneness is a quantity only when something is an object, not an experience.

Thanks also for the rich references. This is such a resource! Thank you also for making time to respond to my discomfort 🙂

warmly
Bhavana

Alexander, I resonate much with what you offer here. That our faith is such a personal experience. We don’t exactly do “religion” — we experience something that we may describe to others as “faith” or some such. But to ourselves it is an experience. And affected by others, irrespective of who. Your story of your catholic friend is right on– it is not at the level of theory but literally life-in-process that evolves. Beyond categories of meaning. Beyond performance of identity. Thank you for sharing these thoughts– I feel stirred and boosted.

Hello Douglas,

“Hindu Nationalism” is a category-level error just as “Hinduism” is. And to turn it into a possessive of a person who is also framed into an abstraction creates further errors. “Modi’s Hindu Nationalism” is a Thing, not the processual Universe.

Whatever is the emergent ideological state referred wrongly as above, it holds within it a yearning to return to roots, a decolonial endeavour, and a mimesis of what exists in other religious traditions, modern politics and global dynamics. It is a mash-up. Both tender and deadly. To dismiss it outright is to ignore Process.

I am very curious about this notion of Perishing Play…I have to look it up. Thanks for making time to connect me forwards

Oh this evokes so much in me. Since I saw your response on my phone, I have been sitting with my drawing pencil, sensing my way through the readings.

Tell me, @Robert, have you also tried an abstract form to roll into the readings?

This is so beautiful:
“Yet God is never exhausted by sufferings in the ways we are. This is what the process theologian Bernard Loomer called God’s S-I-Z-E as indicating God indefatigable ability to endure the horrors of war into the divine nature without defeat. God’s suffering is also in the context of God’s endurance on behalf of Good. God is the hope of the world, but relational collaboration is always required.”

Same here. I struggle with the term God too. I struggled so much with session 4 readings.

And I also think-hope there is something in what Whitehead is indicating that may hold the faith in the magic and possibilities of this moment as Godhead — so here, so present, in this our Universe.

Thanks for your response, Andrew

Dennis and Montgomery, the sheer randomness and queerness of these forms (whether of an animal body, animal sound, or words), reaches to me as God indeed. My breath has changed, I feel closer to the Whitehead readings of this week.

I am struggling with the chapters–just attempting to grapple with the questions you raise.

If I may and forgive me as I write this — to me the terms “war” and “suffering” are abstractions, a map of the vast changing territory of many many events happening within and needing subjective experience.

So I think for each subject enacting on possibilities that is not holding truth-goodness-beauty is a loss of encounter with God. That each person experiences actions that are not “satyam shivam sundaram” (truth, essence, beauty as in my world) is also an opportunity to encounter God, emerge novelty from the subjective experience encountering with infinite possibilities to respond to the experience of non-goodness in new ways.

That at a larger level, it is un-God-ifcation of our worlds that keep us in same cycles…perhaps.

Aah I see. The “Universe” is not a lazy label…the essence itself is not static. Water gathering and flowing within. Thank you, Dr Davis.

Beautiful, Bill.

I just have to share the formation of my name. Bhavana is made of Bhava and Na where Na is a futuring of the Bhava (forming). Best translation is Becoming where there is a casting into existence.

This is not a usual name in my community but popular in another community. My mom as a lonely and lost teenager, heard from her window, a Tailor from that community call out his daughter with this name. And to her, it meant Imagination. It gave her hope and later she gifted it to me.

And for us, name isn’t a noun–like a label, an eternal object. But a call, a pull in a certain direction. Like Deepak of Deepak Chopra is a symbol of light — he was being called to be a Light.

As I read the readings of this course, the quotes and thoughts you both have shared, and the story of my “call”, I realise my-this-moment was always in the possibilities of the first experience that met my mom.

Dear Andrew.
Thank you for introducing the notion of “intimacy” in systematic togetherness–once again pointing to the interiority of experience for subjective forms. And the everything-one is everywhere. This brings in a moistness in the idea of our universe.

I will carry this with me.

I checked the books and authors you recommended. I was able to access David Temple’s book. I didn’t find the Lazlo chapter in the Anthology of Spiritual Memoirs book you had linked– was it supposed to be some other link? Nor could I find a way to access BN Mallik’s work on Related Multiplicity. I would be grateful for any help in this regard.

And thank you for this course. I didn’t expect to be so drawn by Whitehead’s work nor the readings. I am happily surprised.