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It sounds to me like all three of you have explored systems theory more deeply than I have, although I am familiar with using therapies founded on system theories. What I find lacking in systems theories is the gap between how certain processes are thought to participate in reality in illuminating and discerning ways, providing a sense of direction, and others unfold as if they were completely unfeeling and unresponsive. It would be too much to even call the latter “dead” or “blind,” because “dead” implies it once was alive, and “blind” that its normal state involves seeing. For me, it rings true that the whole cosmos unfolds in illuminating ways, all my relations participating in a conversation constituting us all.

Reminds me of how Douglas-Klotz translates the original Aramaic that would have been translated into Greek in the Gospel of John:

In the book of Ben Sira, also known as Sirach, a text written about 200 years before Jesus, Holy Wisdom, even though a feminine archetype, is called “word.” “Word” (the Aramaic melta) is not simply one word spoken, but more like an ongoing, living conversation among many voices present in a community process It was, so to speak, the community speaking as one. Ben Sira relates that Holy Wisdom would come again, gather people together without distinction of rich or poor, of male or female, then feed and heal them. We see Yeshua doing all these things.

On the outer level then, people would have heard the prologue to John’s Gospel as pointing to Yeshua as one who consciously embodied Holy Wisdom. On an inner level, viewed through Aramaic, the prologue shows how Sacred Sense enters deeply into every person. In this light we’ll look at the first few verses.

“In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.” (John 1:1, KJV)…
B’reshith aitahiy huwa melta
wa huwa melta aitahiy
huwa l’wat alaha
wa alaha aitahiy huwa hu melta

The Aramaic b’reshith connects directly to the Hebrew bereshit, the first word o Genesis 1:1, usually translated “in the beginning.” From their shared roots both words point to the origin of all existence as an outpouring of light and fire. As mentioned, melta is an ongoing word, sound, and conversation–in today’s language, a messaging. Because the whole prologue can be read in the present tense, this conversation is always going on, as is the Beginning from which it arose. Past, present, and future exist simultaneously from the ancient Semitic language viewpoint. The last line of the Aramaic means that this Word-Wisdom exists (huwa hu) as, with, and within Reality itself (Alaha).

“The same was in the beginning with God.” (1:2, KJV)
Hana aitahiy huwa b’reshith l’wat alaha

This clarifies that the whole potential for this conversation between Reality and existence was and is existing at the start of everything. It was there in seed form, so to speak, an in some mysterious sense moves toward or for the unfoldment (l’wat) of Reality.

“All things were made by him; and without him was not anything made that was made.” (1:3, KJV)
Kul bi’ydeh huwa wa beluwhdawhy aphla had hwat mdem d’huwa

Everything understood or perceived by us (kul.. huwa) is held in Reality’s hand (bi’ydeh), coming into existence through this ongoing conversation. Without this process (wa belushdawwhy), no individual thing or perception is coming into being (aphla had hwat mdem d’huwa)…

A bit further on, the prologue says:

“That was the true light, which lighteth every man that cometh into the world.” (KJV)
aitahiy huwa geyr nuhra d’shrara dmanhar l’kul nash data l’alma

The “true light” here is nuhra d’shrara, the light of consciousness that reveals the right direction in life for every human being (kul nash) living in the world of time and space (-alma). Our innate ability, not only to see but also to sense clearly what’s around us, is and was there from the First Beginning. It allows us to live life within a world of limitation, all the while calibrating (as indicated by shrara, “true”) with what is beyond time and space.
Pp. 115-117

Feels to me “true light” illuminates our participation in and with and through the whole of the cosmos from the very beginning of each moment.

[Bill Gayner]

A lovely example, Dennis, of how technology can enhance our engagement in life. I had the same sense of wonder when I first wore glasses, jumping from reading glasses to trifocal progressives.

In a wonderful anthropology course years ago the prof had us imagine waking up in a world without technology. No clothes, none of our current capacities for interpreting and noting the passage of time, no tools, no intentional use of fire. I wonder what of speech would remain to us? Would we still perhaps just be hooting and singing to each other?

What distinguishes our tool use from other species is that ours involves planning that takes more than an hour. This is found in the fossil record at the same time our frontal lobes expanded.

Another interesting feature of new technology is how numinous it was for the people who developed it. For example, how deeply integrated technologies like baking bread, making wine, and mining and smelting were with our religious understanding, and to God’s participation in luring us into developing technologies, expanding our ability to participate in cocreating greater intensities in rich participating in experiencing with God. Consider epic poems, Stone Henge, the memory devices for remembering the Buddha’s oral teachings, writing, Gothic Cathedrals, stained glass windows, and the printing press.

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[Bill Gayner]

Hi Karina,

Thank you so much for your delightful response, inspiring me to read CS Lewis’ Perelandra and Dante’s Paradiso, although I suppose I should start with the Inferno. I only know Dante through others’ inspiring descriptions.

I was filled with wonder by the Youtube video your son sent you, wow! It made me happy someone could actually describe that so precisely, not that I could understand more than the initial steps, but it was beautiful to watch and listen to. I felt like Kate Bush in her Cloudbusting video with Donald Sutherland. I first saw it many years ago as a young man sitting in the TV room with the other workers on a Dewline Station on a mesa near the Beaufort Sea in the Arctic. I didn’t know the back story: the song was inspired by Peter Reich’s loving relationship with his father Wilhelm Reich and their work on his orgone theory, described in Peter’s book, A Book of Dreams. Not that I have looked too deeply into Reich’s theories, except for some early formative experiences with bio-energetics and influences through Neil Douglas-Klotz who was influenced by Reich. The video for me speaks of spiritual longings in late capitalism and empire and the people who have inspired us.

Watching the video back then on that station, I was afraid I would burst into tears in front of the other guys. I had tears in my eyes today watching it. Dreams do come true. Wonder, gratitude, joy and sadness, “I’m cloudbusting, Daddy.” https://youtu.be/pllRW9wETzw?si=oBLE1sCzB_OC7nwU

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[Bill Gayner]

Hi Alexandra,

Great questions. Vital ones, at the heart (or mind) of our age. The key here is not to fall into the fallacy of misplaced concreteness, responding as if concepts are more real than our experiencing. The question becomes something like Heidegger’s: how do you find yourself? Heidegger meant this not so much as propositional or procedural knowing, but through participatory knowing that is experiential. How do you discover yourself experiencing, presencing with all this now? Since we are exploring Whitehead, can you feel the creative togetherness?

It seems many Buddhist modernists experience an empty interdependence, without a God, gods or bodhisattvas responding. And yet I expect they might notice when they are struggling to be with frozen suffering within them the sudden grace of compassion illuminating experiencing. But perhaps this is no longer experienced as Chenrezig, Tara or being at home with Brahma the god of love and creativity.Emptiness has different meanings pointing to different experiences in different Buddhist traditions. John Cobb Jr. described Buddhism’s ultimate as emptiness, and Whitehead’s as creativity. And he wrote these can be combined. This is not just an abstract point, it is something that can also be explored in experiencing. I discover emptiness and creativity combining as a sense of creative togetherness birthing me with all my relations. Thich Nhat Hanh, trying to describe the heart of the Heart Sutra, why not to be afraid of emptiness, the tenderness of emptiness, came up with the word “togetherness,” but someone thought it was too strange, so he used “interbeing” instead.

As Charles Taylor describes, in the prevalent lifeworld, we are buffered selves separate from each other. Do you experience life that way? Sometimes I do. I often start in meditation that way. Or are you more porous and participating in the world, coming out to play with all your relations? These are not concepts these are ways of trying to intimately describe how it feels where feelings are not just reactions but potentially illuminations, an implicit sense of how things are that help us make sense of situations, sort out what matters to us, and motivate to act. Do you feel a God or gods or saints presencing in you? or is it all happening in a separate in sense of self, only me and my parts in here and everything else is “out there” as if we were not the environment and the sacred not presencing responsively through and with us? Or perhaps as a kind of intimate participatory togetherness, interbeing, but without God or gods presencing with us?

I love how Cobb emphasized complementary transformative pluralism, reality too complex to be comprehensively described by one tradition, we need them all, and who is anyone to deny how someone else experiences life? Instead we can learn from each other’s experiencing in ways that transform us. To do this, we need to discover and trust the authority of our own experiencing and presencing, open to the new and transformation.

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[Bill Gayner]

Hi Monte,

I love that, “eternal dreamer,” yes!

Our revels now are ended. These our actors,
As I foretold you, were all spirits and
Are melted into air, into thin air:
And, like the baseless fabric of this vision,
The cloud-capp’d towers, the gorgeous palaces,
The solemn temples, the great globe itself,
Yea, all which it inherit, shall dissolve
And, like this insubstantial pageant faded,
Leave not a rack behind. We are such stuff
As dreams are made on, and our little life
Is rounded with a sleep.

William Shakespeare, spoken by Prospero, The Tempest, Act 4 Scene 1

I wonder if in perishing in each moment we wake from this dream in the Great Mysterious with all our relations, before diving back into the dream of life again like a dolphin into air. Perhaps in perishing in God’s consequent arms we are brought back to ourselves uniquely participating as/in/with/through the many togethering in that Celestial Rose before being drawn out again as a unique enfleshed expression of all my relations come out to play and care for each other again.

I also love how Yeshua names God in his intimate invitation of a prayer that I said in English before going to bed as a child and now contemplate in Aramaic. “Our Father who art in heaven” is Abwun d’bashmaya. Feeling from Chris’ explanation perhaps the whole line is God’s “name”–God’s signature-presencing-with-the-whole-of-the-cosmos-co-creating-with-us:

Yeshua begins his well-known prayer like this:

Creating, parenting, birthing Breath coming into form now.
Spreading, shining, radiating through all waves of sound and light,
heard or unheard by human ears,
seen or unseen by human eyes,
named or unnamed by human lips.

Roots and Branches
What the KJV translates as “father” is abwun, a derivative of father but expanding into all parenting (ABw), beyond contemporary fixed ideas of gender, through sound and breath (U) into a middle space between self and soul, naphsha and ruha. This middle space (“oo”) can be felt in the human heart (which is where the sound “abwoon” resonates), reminding us of how the mystery of life comes into each form (N) each moment, including what we call ourselves. This living, creating process is always going on throughout the universes, seen and unseen. The way this all appears in our time and space is via vibration and light unfolding without any seeming limit, shemaya. Just so we don’t become too satisfied with our own explanations, the two sounds prefacing shemaya are d and b, both prepositions, which show us that abwun’s creative process can be sensed emanating from, as well as along with and within, this universe of sound and light. The sound and light that we perceive create what we call time (unfolding in duration) and space (unfolding in extent).

(Douglas-Klotz, 2025, The Aramaic Jesus Book of Days: Forty Days of Contemplation and Revelation, p. 21).

The next two lines (creatively from my heart) are something like coming alive to feeling creative togetherness birthing us, we feel God intimating a sense of transformative direction for us, every moment that new morning.

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Just seeing the quotation from your thesis, Chris, thank you. Okay, I get now how it originates conceptually from God’s primordial nature, an ever-giving source of inspiration, sense of direction and life for us. I will carry this forward into my contemplations and explorations, inspiration from the source of all inspiration, that continually catches us at the other end and welcomes us home again.

Wow, so beautiful, Chris, thank you so much! Your response joins me in my questions and carries them forward into wholeness and transformation. My felt sense loves your response, I have a sense of wonder and affirmation. It answers something present in the felt sense that was missing somehow in my understanding of Whitehead’s philosophy, a fruitful contrast, finding satisfaction now in a happy, full, grateful feeling and the thought, “so we are in God and God is in us.” Becoming presupposes the whole of God’s consequent and primordial nature, from the Aramaic Yeshua spoke, ruha (breath/wind/soul) in Alaha (reality, yes/no marriage of all opposites, God).

Cf, Douglas-Klotz, 2022, Revelations of the Aramaic Jesus, p. 16: “While Alaha is usually translated as God, the word derives from Semitic roots meaning both “yes” and “no”: it relates being and nothingness as part of a greater unity.” From what I recall, there is no nothingness in Whitehead’s scheme, but the sense I have now of being held in a goodness, wholeness and trustworthiness that unifies all contrasts in a loving homecoming that continually births us and invites us out to play.

[Bill Gayner]

Thank you so much for this Chris!

It seems to me this relates to the entry Pure and Hybrid Physical Prehensions or Feelings in Cobb’s Whitehead Wordbook. Cobb explains that Whitehead for much of PR assumed physical prehensions involved only physical feelings from previous actual occasions. At a certain point, he realized that complex hybrid actual occasions are able to physically prehend both physical and conceptual feelings from previous actual occasions, enabling novel feelings to be carried from one occasion to the next.

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Joshua, yes, it is wildfire phenomenology, feeling and thinking along with Whitehead, that I have found so compelling in his philosophy. Like a series of Rinzai Zen koans, deepening intimacy and wholeness in experiencing.

Alexandra, we have so much in common! I love CS Lewis and Ursula Le Guin! I am so grateful to them and authors like them, like Tolkien, who created worlds that kept my soul alive growing up. I loved “Everything, Everywhere, All at Once”!

And yes, important to see the shadows of sexism and racism in Lewis and Tolkien as it is to trace this in myself and the world. “These battered wings still kick up dust!” (Peter Gabriel, Only Us)

[Bill Gayner]

Thank you so much, Alexandra! That is so interesting, the etymology of your name and your link with Athena. When I was young I fell in love with Mary Renault’s novels about ancient Greece, and two of them were about Alexander the Great (Fire from Heaven and The Persian Boy. Reading your post, I was reminded how Alexander rode into a city he had just conquered at the head of his army dressed as Athena, honouring her, this friend to heroes.

I had hyper real imagery associated with Dionysos come up in meditation on a Buddhist retreat in 1986. I was standing on the prow of a ship, dolphins in the sea around me and vines shot up the mast behind me. It took me a year to discover the story associated with it, reading about it in the Jungian analyst’s Robert Johnson’s book Ecstasy, about the god Dionysos. Pirates try to kidnap this beautiful aristocratic youth and instead he transforms them into dolphins and vines shoot up the mast of the ship with grapes. The only member of the crew left was the helmsman who had recognized the youth was a god, asking for his forgiveness and for his name (the signature presence of a being). The now dolphin-friended flowering ship sails itself to where Dionysos asked the pirates to take him, Naxos, where Dionysos was born. This story is found in the Homeric Hymn 7 To Dionysos, but there are many different versions from the ancient world.

This led me to studying Dionysos as well as Hera, who had driven him mad. And that changed my life.

I discovered I was caught in spiritual bypassing–I was a pirate ship! I needed to face my horror of the ordinary, and embrace an alchemy of learning a craft people would pay me money for, nailing myself to a spot, and getting severely pruned, lol, in order to discover the sacred through the felt sense, the senses, and ordinary life. I chose social work, and became a psychotherapist. Dionysos oversees the mystery of how to bring the wilderness into the city without disrupting our soul and the social forms. It is very democratic, everyone including slaves participated in his festivals. I tried to upload a photo of the Dionysos cup, one of the best known works of ancient Greek vase painting, a kylix (drinking cup) dating to 540–530 BC of this ship with Dionysos on it, but it is too big a file, but here is a link to its Wikipedia page: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dionysus_Cup

I feel a deep connection with Dionysos, Jesus, and a particular form of Chenrezig (Tibetan for Avalokiteśvara, the bodhisattva of compassion) that was given to me to practice by a longtime Buddhist teacher as a yidam, a being that embodies the specific quality of awakening mind most directly related to one’s challenges and potential on the path. I discover them deeply interrelated in what I have fallen in love with in life, how turning towards frozen suffering and resonating with it, we open into creative togetherness birthing us in each moment and intimating the next step in our path. I find all three in Gotama’s dying words, “Things fall apart, tread the path with care.”

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Hi Dennis,

It looks like you were perhaps not able to attach the image. I don’t see it.

Warm regards,

Bill

Thank you so much, Joshua!

Hi Dennis and Chris,

I wonder if this difference is about the different if overlapping domains of science and philosophy, especially metaphysics. Perhaps theory construction is understood differently within them. This reminds me of the exchange Matt and Greg had in the last class, where Matt felt metaphysics were not falsifiable, whereas Greg, a philosopher and ecologist, did not agree. I liked how it seemed to me they were both going to go away and reflect on this.

[Bill Gayner]

Hi Chris,

What you have written here helps me more richly imagine life and a bit more about how attractive such living, particularly creative nexūs are, for example, in attracting other actual occasions to participate in creating specific societies and societies of societies in a fetus in the womb. The intensity of their creativity acts like a lure into greater intensity and makes the fluid ongoing processes that structure and constitute say participating in growing an organ in a fetus not only attractive in conceptual prehension, but also salient in physical prehension.

I love this:

Whitehead designates living beings as living societies because some of their elementary processes (‘actual entities’) are characterized by (1) their mental pole, i.e., their activity of experience, being of special originality, thereby introducing novelty into the living society, and (2) their high relevance to the
development of the entire living society. These particularly creative elementary processes Whitehead calls ‘living occasions’ (PR 102, 104, 109, 184).

I wonder, however, just from my implicit feelings rather than Whitehead scholarship, if you and perhaps Whitehead are overstating the case here:

The living occasions are highly creative actual entities that are characterized by predominantly prioritizing the mental pole, rather than the physical pole, and contribute to an entirely living nexus and subsequently a living society that we would call a living being.

Seems to me prioritizing the mental pole over the physical pole uproots us from physical prehension, the rich soil from which creativity is continually birthed. Prioritizing conceptual prehension over physical prehension reminds me of McGilchrist’s description of how the left hemisphere suppresses the right. It seems to me especially creative activity in the conceptual pole would be richly alive to physical prehension. Consider even the coordination within societies needed for such creativity to be sustained. Then there is also God’s lure functioning in physical prehension as well as all the previous conceptual prehension in previous actual occasions physically prehended by hybrid occasions.

But if it is an overstatement, perhaps the importance of conceptual prehension in creativity highlights how easy it is for evolving forms of life to fall into over-prioritizing conceptual prehension and the kinds of predicaments we are facing in late capitalism and empire.

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[Bill Gayner]

I have been exploring my felt sense of this rich conversation in the wonder of experiencing in meditation, or sitting at my desk lost in the light, or walking down the street, and it precipitated a more holistic, integrated, easy way of experiencing for me, that continues to break open when wonder lures me into remembering to be curious about it.

I’m reminded of Evelyn’s, Whitehead’s wife’s, comment about how understanding him is like viewing a prism from different angles, you need a sense of all the changing angles and lights. I needed everything all of you said to feel into all the different dimensions of this experiencing.

What has broken open for me is that experiencing is dipolar prehension, already whole constituting us and that we can come alive to this through the felt sense, through rich forms of experiencing and presencing. What is timeless is that it is already whole in experiencing, conceptual prehension is already calling forth and symbolizing the meaning already being implied through our body’s implicit experiencing, all of this is already whole in the stream that we are becoming. Experiencing is whole. Coming alive to this, the ordinary is already dancing through us and now wonder takes me by the hand out into the open to play with all my relations. Seeing the trees dancing in the light and the wind symbolizes and calls forth in life forwarding ways delight, wonder and gratitude in participating in this world with them, the visuals call forth the meaning already happening constituting us. I realized why CS Lewis and so many others have imagined trees as nymphs dancing and my heart joined them in this. How imagination carries us into deeper intimacy with all our relations.

I realized I was assuming that if concresence is timeless it was some kind of atom excluding me and as a result falling unconsciously into the fallacy misplaced concreteness. But the timelessness is how it is already whole constituting us. We are being invited to relax and let go into the flow of this.

The wonder lures us into discovering this in experiencing, deepening wonder. The wonder of creativity constituting us, how becoming through creative togetherness is even more miraculous than the trees drinking light, earth and rain, and we, the wind.

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