Bill Gayner
Beautifully expressed, Christopher, thank you so much! I love how you have expressed what comes from experiencing and living from wholeness:
The most exciting part of this experience for me is the importance in not just learning more about the mechanics of process thought but how to live it out in applied practice in my life, in the life of those I love and in the world in which we all live so that together we are all engaged in creating the best of all possible outcomes for ourselves and for everything and everyone for we are all connected to each other in ways I am only now being able to vaguely grasp
Reminds me of Rilke, “And the point is, to live everything.”
Hi Mark,
Thank you for this rich post! I had to read and reread carefully to understand it. You wrote:
The human experience then becomes creative in one sense because we must evolve under the constraints of our biology, our language etc. The human experience also becomes limited in another sense not having access to prehensions of purely mental eternal entities. We could understand biological death as the transition from a society of hybrid actual entities to a society of mental actual entities. We could understand the spiritual beings we sometimes refer to as gods to be societies of mental actual entities.
I love how you connect human creativity and evolution with constraints, a point that others have made as well, e.g., John Vervaeke’s neo-Platonism. I wonder what you mean by “The human experience also becomes limited in another sense not having access to prehensions of purely mental eternal entities.” Why wouldn’t we experience them as ingressions, inspirations or affordances? According to Whitehead, all actual occasions experience God’s mental prehensions as sacred ingression orienting us to what situations afford us. Mind you, God is not a purely mental actual occasion, our momentary satisfactions and perishings participate in and constitute her physical prehension. She grows through our growth, presumably founders in our founderings. The difference is her becoming leads with mental prehension followed by physical prehensing, the opposite of ours. Do you mean we can experience God in our dipolar prehensing, but we cannot experience pure mental eternal entities, i.e., dead people? Or do you mean a lot of people do not notice this?
I take it gods and goddesses unfold as God unfolds, their conceptual prehension coming alive in us as sacred ingression, followed by their physical prehension as a participation in the sacred marriage, heiros gamos, of heaven and earth that constitutes us and within which we navigate. In that sense, perhaps gods and goddesses are modulations of God. Here’s another speculation: that the communion of saints participates in God’s dipolar prehensing, growing with God in her participation in our embodied, earthly becoming. After all, what else is God?
Perhaps, as well, the communion of saints is open to us all when we pass away, having tried what we could in life. Or if there is a hell, it is co-created by people for whom the heaven God freely offers doesn’t sound good enough or perhaps who exclude themselves from self-hatred, before they discover they are actually in purgatory, picking up with joy a cross with equal arms, tension between constraint/habit and aspiration/luring, because each step takes them closer to God, a metaphor John Tarrant, Zen teacher and Jungian psychoanalyst, explored in his book The Light Inside the Dark, drawing from Dante’s Inferno.
Jessica, you asked:
And another follow up question (this is keeping me up at night): if an actual occasion fails to achieve its subjective aim and concrescence is completed and the superject reflects that failure and then becomes the objective data to be pretended by the next actual occasion, is that actual occasion now going to amplify that failure? It its subjective aim an attempt at correction (i.e. does the original subjective aim remain until it’s achieved by subsequent actual occasions) or must each subjective aim be novel?
We inherit from God’s treasuring us our experiences of living well as well as our failures to do so, as well as our sense of self. God also orients and inspires us to take the next small step in our healing and growth in each fresh new moment of becoming. The more we deepen and enrich our experiencing, the more alive we come to this. The cosmos continually invites us into deeper relationship and creative, beautiful, loving engagement. And yes, our habits of turning away from this can compound our initial error. But our being continues to try to turn towards the creative nourishment in the earth, the rain and the light. So helpful to turn towards the frozen suffering within us in a friendly way, saying hello to it, and discovering how to resonate empathically with it. Compassion then arises within us for the suffering, the miracle of God’s sacred ingression, inspiring and orienting us to take in all that the situation is implying and creating ripe conditions for creative felt shift transformation into deeper coherence and engagement in life.
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Hi Jessica,
I have encountered a passage from John Cobb Jr’s (2015) Whitehead Word Book: A Glossary with Alphabetical Index to Technical Terms in Process and Reality that addresses questions I find myself asking and as well as some of the questions you ask above. I almost started a new post about it, because it addresses conversations I have participated in other posts on our forum as well as our discussion group on Sunday, but am adding it here.
LIVING PERSON
Humanistic and religious readers of Whitehead often complain that the human being disappears into the matrix of minuscule actual entities. This is a misreading. Whitehead does believe that minuscule actual entities, occasions of quantum action, are very important for cosmology. But he is equally clear that moments of human experience are not analyzable into these events. Indeed they are not divisible into smaller actual entities at all. Human experience is taken as it is, nonreductively. Because a moment of human experience has the status of being an actual occasion, its causal efficacy cannot be ignored, as is typically done in the sciences. Far from losing the human in the matrix of quantum events, Whitehead takes its full actuality as the starting point of much of his philosophical analysis.
Nevertheless, prior to his development of the idea of hybrid feelings, his concept of the person was impoverished. [Whitehead realized that physical impressions inherit not just physical feelings, but our previous conceptual prehensions as well. He called these “hybrid feelings”. – Bill] A person was a personally ordered society of actual occasions. But personal order simply implied that there was a serial sequence of occasions each of which inherited from its predecessor a common character. Electrons and molecules qualified equally with human beings as personally ordered societies. All could be equally well named “enduring objects.”
In other words, Whitehead up to that point understood personal order as a form of social order, and he defined the latter in terms of derivation of a common form from antecedent members of the group. Hybrid prehensions introduced the possibility of a new kind of society. Since he did not redefine “society” to take account of this, we might have to say that a living person is not a society. [Matt has said this in our course. – Bill] I prefer to say that it is a different kind of society, but that would require providing a broader definition. While there certainly are societies with personal order that transmit the same form from occasion to occasion, there are other societies with personal order that are alive. The transmissions from occasion to occasion in these societies introduce novelty.
These societies are unquestionably found in animals with central nervous systems. The brains of these animals give rise to a unified experience that is quite different from the addition of all the neuronal experiences that contribute to it. As humans, we know this experience as most intimately who we are. Whitehead called these momentary experiences “final percipient occasions” or “dominant occasions.” The sequence of these occasions he called a “living person.”
Living persons like other personally ordered societies do inherit elements of common form from their predecessors through their pure physical feelings. But they also inherit from their predecessors’ conceptual prehensions. Among the conceptual feelings there are some that simply repeat elements of the past, but there are others that have introduced novelty. The antecedent occasion may have gained information not present in its predecessors. The new occasion, through its hybrid prehensions may appropriate this new information. It may add further to it. In other words, in living persons there is learning.
[I would add that this new learning is not just from our own experience, but also news about/from all the new learning in the cosmos and especially what is most relevant to us, as well as how everyone felt about it including God’s deep compassion and appreciation for us all. The natives say “all our relations”, Thich Nhat Hanh, “interbeing”. – Bill]
The emergence of novelty of this kind does not leave what has been repeated from the past alone. The integration of the two changes both. Over time there may be little common element of form. There may be little common element of form between a girl of three and the woman she has become at sixty. But this does not mean that she is not the same living person. The occasions that make up the living person sum up the ever growing past rather than simply repeat it. In Adventures of Ideas Whitehead shifts from “living person” to the more traditional language of “soul.” (Cobb Jr, 2015, “Living Person)
Reference
Cobb Jr, John B. (2015). Whitehead Word Book: A Glossary with Alphabetical Index to Technical Terms in Process and Reality (Toward Ecological Civilization Book 8) . Process Century Press. Kindle Edition.- This reply was modified 1 year, 9 months ago by .
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So glad to hear that, Jessica!
Such a key point you are making, Mark. It seems to me hubristic, unwise and even nihilistic to try to create technologies to replace us. What’s the point other than some mega-overcompensating, truly self-defeating, empty achievement? To create new technologies wisely we need to ensure they are tools that extend our abilities we can use in serving and participating harmoniously in the earth and the cosmos for all our relations’ healing and flourishing.
As you acknoweldge, Mark, it seems to me that chatGPT needs to be treated cautiously because we tend to project human capacities onto what lacks dipolar prehension beyond the very simple kinds to be expected in the hardware and software of computing devices. For example, as others have pointed in this thread, chatGPT is not an agent who has experience of the world and is not concerned about truth.
An interesting paper published this year describes the radical limits of this technology, “ChatGPT is bullshit”, written by Michael Townsen Hicks, James Humphries and Joe Slater. They are using the term “bullshit” in a technical sense. They provide concerning examples. Here’s the first paragraph of their paper.
Large language models (LLMs), programs which use reams of available text and probability calculations in order to create seemingly-human-produced writing, have become increasingly sophisticated and convincing over the last several years, to the point where some commentators suggest that we may now be approaching the creation of artificial general intelligence (see e.g. Knight, 2023 and Sarkar, 2023). Alongside worries about the rise of Skynet and the use of LLMs such as ChatGPT to replace work that could and should be done by humans, one line of inquiry concerns what exactly these programs are up to: in particular, there is a question about the nature and meaning of the text produced, and of its connection to truth. In this paper, we argue against the view that when ChatGPT and the like produce false claims they are lying or even hallucinating, and in favour of the position that the activity they are engaged in is bullshitting, in the Frankfurtian sense (Frankfurt, 2002, 2005). Because these programs cannot themselves be concerned with truth, and because they are designed to produce text that looks truth-apt without any actual concern for truth, it seems appropriate to call their outputs bullshit. (Hicks, Humphries & Slater, 2024, p. 24)
Mind you, I do wonder if it takes agents to bullshit, so that only the designers and programmers could be considered bullshitting. Of course, they might simply be mistaken in their expectations for their technology.
Reference
Michael Townsen Hicks, James Humphries and Joe Slater. ChatGPT is bullshit. (2024). Ethics and Information Technology 26:38
https://doi.org/10.1007/s10676-024-09775-5. This is an open access article.Wow, Kathleen, so much wonderment and nourishment in this poem, paean to chlorophyll, each line and within each line, each word, an intimate revelation of what seemingly stood beyond imagination and yet here we are discovering this open secret within our own body-feeling-world becoming.
I love this poem! I was amazed when you read this in the final presentations of our last course and blown away again in reading and rereading and lingering with it this morning.
I am exploring how you end the poem with the question “Luminous?” Opening to my felt sense of this, I discover how deep experiencing is not knowing and wondering and can be carried forward by floating a word into the felt sense to see if she loves and is carried forward by it. “Luminous?” Opens me to your writing the poem and so seems to make sense that this last word would be a question, an opening to discover how to carry this forward in our own experiencing. How philosophy, loving with and in and through Sophia/Hockmah/Hakima/Thunder-Perfect-Mind), begins and ends to be reborn again in wonder and wondering.
Your poem reminds me of one by Hafiz that I experience as a koan, how I find the sun radiates throughout it without being named, rising in my heart as intimately as all that makes each breath and the love in our hearts possible.
(BTW, the translator, Ladinsky, centres each line on the page, but I don’t see how to do that here.)
With That Moon Language
Admit something:
Everyone you see, you say to them,
“Love me.”Of course you do not do this out loud;
Otherwise,
Someone would call the cops.Still though, think about this,
This great pull in us
To connect.Why not become the one
Who lives with a full moon in each eye
That is always saying,
With that sweet moon
Language,What every other eye in this world
Is dying to
Hear.Hafiz. Translated by Ladinsky, D. (1999). The Gift: Poems by Hafiz, the Great Sufi Master (Compass) (p. 322). Penguin Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.
Thank you for your generosity in sharing your poem before it has been published. I am sad that I cannot read it to my fellow retreatants at our Touching the Earth Mindfulness Ontario retreat I am leading next weekend, Thursday to Sunday, but I look forward to doing so when your book has been published. This kind of sadness does not interfere with joy, appreciation and gratitude. Could you remind me when it will be published?
Carrying forward such a sense of wonder, joy, gratitude and opening. How the world opens her arms to us and invites us with so much love and appreciation to come out and play.
Hi John,
Do you yourself foray into speculative metaphysics relating to quantum-mechanical event observations? In what way would you draw on Whitehead? I would love to read your thoughts.
Hi te’a,
Thank you so much for putting in your tricksy oar, let’s use your oar to do some sculling together, the way they do in Brittany, one oar out the back of the boat.
I appreciate your reflections on how you prefer the flow of the longer sentence, “whatever is an arising dhamma, that is a ceasing dhamma,” rather than the shorter sentence, “whatever arises ceases,” which feels congealing and reifying for you.
I am all ears since that is a continual tendency for me, discovering myself thingified. Nor is it always obvious for me — I find it can take time and care to discover that I am congealed and to find my way home, a process of surprising discovery.
Your concern sent me back to the longer sentence. I feel such wonder at the Pali words samudayadhammarri and nirodhadhamman. I am not a Buddhist scholar, but I do have rich fields of associations for the phrases “arising dhamma” and “ceasing dhamma”. “Dhamma” is the Pali word for what is in Sanskrit “dharma”. It is worth noting that we do not know the language Gotama taught in, but he did encourage his monks to teach in their own local vernaculars rather than in a special holy language.
Turning to my felt sense, I notice it arising and am reminded that the felt sense is not already there, it arises if we attend to what is happening and patiently wait for it to draw us into presencing. I discover freshly my felt sense loves the phrases “arising dharmas” and “ceasing dharmas”, resonates richly with them. The word “dharma” has many meanings, but for me now I want to say from my felt sense that it refers to the phenomena-ing (i.e., rich experiencing/presencing) and principles (principling/valuing/luring/affording) of cultivating awakening/the path/healing, growth and flourishing. I want to say dharma is presencing.
Hmm, but I just used the “is” word in the last sentence. I have to admit–no, I would like to share with you–how I love the word. I love its deceptive brevity and its rich, multivalent flavour, how it has survived its misuse, notwithstanding the dark shadows its usage has cast in our world, as well its wonderful etymological roots and potential:
be (v.)
Old English beon, beom, bion “be, exist, come to be, become, happen,” from Proto-Germanic *biju- “I am, I will be.” This “b-root” is from PIE root *bheue- “to be, exist, grow,” and in addition to the words in English it yielded the German present first and second person singular (bin, bist, from Old High German bim “I am,” bist “thou art”), the Latin perfective tenses of esse (fui “I was,” etc.), Old Church Slavonic byti “be,” Greek phu- “become,” Old Irish bi’u “I am,” Lithuanian būti “to be,” Russian byt’ “to be,” etc. (https://www dot etymonline dot com/)For me, “being” sounds like becoming. “To be” sounds to me like springing up and implies becoming, and therefore ceasing.
Hmm, as I reflect on it, I love these kinds of words how even in their congealing they can function the way gristle and bone add flavour to the broth in the cauldron of life. I love how the shadows make something more real, give it gravitas. How we are not all light, how we do well to remember that we can only lean into the light, how shadows give depth to visual perception. I am reminded of how a food writer, was it Anthony Bourdain, wrote that all great food tastes of death. Old man dharma, integrating the boy who survived all that by hardening as well as the softer more alive boy he was protecting, how both can come in for a snuggle now.
I love how “is” functions in logic, a gift Parmenides received as a revelation in the underworld from Persephone, queen of the underworld and spring, queen of ceasing and rebirth. Like any power, “is” can be used for wholesome or unwholesome ends.
Something about how we open and close, congeal, harden, and open again. How loving the hard and congealing parts makes for a good soup.
BIRDWINGS
Your grief for what you’ve lost
lifts a mirror up to where you’re bravely working.Expecting the worst, you look, and instead,
here’s the joyful face you’ve been wanting to see.Your hand opens and closes and opens and closes.
If it were always a fist or always stretched open,
you would be paralyzed.Your deepest presence is in every small
contracting and expanding,the two as beautifully balanced and coordinated
as birdwings.Barks (2003, pp. 46-47)
Am I right in guessing, te’a, you are not insisting on correct language, but sharing how the language affects you, and which wording resonates more fully for you with what both sentences are trying to point to? And the risks in using the succinct version?
As Roland Faber (2020) points out, Whiteheadian mysticism is apophatic because it values and participates in fresh creativity, we are continually discovering ourselves and lifeworld, this body-environment process, as the new wine, the living, transformative sap. You can never finally insist on the right wording, we need to discover ways of explicating the felt sense freshly that ring true and help us come alive to, and if appropriate carry forward, and then let go these arising and ceasing dharmas.
Gendlin wrote a fascinating (1982) paper, “Two phenomenologists do not disagree”. If disagreements arise because either the two phenomenologists are using the same words to talk about different phenomenology without realizing it, or the words they are using to explicate and carry forward the phenomena function differently for them.
Explicating our felt sense about “whatever is an arising dhamma, that is a ceasing dhamma,” I deeply agree with you that the first sentence does a much better job of explicating and expressing this dharma we are feeling our way into and discussing. I agree as a bare, contextless offering, “whatever arises, ceases” does not function as well, but if we allow “whatever” and “arises” and “ceases” to mean all that we are referring to and experiencing here, I find they do well enough and are kind of fun, playful. I would be astonished if they were functioning in a congealing way for Stephen Batchelor, a writer who has deeply influenced me over decades. It has also been fruitful for me in reflecting on how they do not seem to function that way for you and therefore the risks in using this succinct version.
References
Barks, Coleman; Moyne, John; Ergin, Nevit; Nicholson, Reynold; Gupta, M. G.. (2003). Rumi: The Book of Love: Poems of Ecstasy and Longing (pp. 46-47). HarperCollins. Kindle Edition.Faber, Roland. (2020). Depths as yet unspoken: Whiteheadian excursions in mysticism, multiplicity and divinity. Eugene, OR: Pickwick Publications.
Gendlin, E.T. (1982). Two phenomenologists do not disagree. In R. Bruzina & B. Wilshire (Eds.), Phenomenology. Dialogues and bridges, pp. 321-335. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press. From https://www.focusing.org/gendlin/docs/gol_2044.html
Matt’s statement about actual occasions felt illuminating for me and I look forward to hearing how he responds to the group’s questions above, particularly about holons:
You’ve misunderstood Whitehead’s actual occasions, which are not to be imagined as little quantum events that add up to larger things. The “actual entity” is a scale free metaphysical category meant to describe any process of actualization, whether quantum or atomic or biotic or psychic. This description is certainly not algorithmic but is rather creative. What goes on within concrescence is an aesthetic process of selection, not computational number crunching.
We humans exemplify this process, moreover Whitehead’s philosophy aims at returning experiencing to us as all that we have in our unfolding. Returning to my experiencing and explicating what is arising as I write this, I find in rich experiencing a sense of differentiated integration and wholeness, the presencing of the many processes resonating together in the particular uniqueness of my own life arising in this moment in deep togetherness with all our relations. Presencing with the arising, what is emerging feels pregnant/ripe with potential unfolding that empowers self-efficacy in navigating the lovely choices and the transformations that transpire. There can be contradictions in the way my own experiencing/self arises and these contradictions can be related to/with in ways that are satisfying.
Matt’s statement that “The “actual entity” is a scale free metaphysical category meant to describe any process of actualization, whether quantum or atomic or biotic or psychic” reassured me in using this category to make sense of own experiencing. It freed me of some confusion in not being sure about how all the societies of societies added up in experiential arising. This metaphysical category applies at any level we are conceiving of and most importantly to help explicate our experiencing and to test it through our experiencing.
More loveliness:
Yarri kiñci samudayadhammarri sabbarri tarri nirodhadhamman. These are the final words of The First Discourse, uttered by Kondañña, one of the five ascetics to whom the discourse was delivered, as an expression of his insight into what the Buddha said. It means literally: “whatever is an arising dhamma, that is a ceasing dhamma,” or, more succinctly and colloquially: “whatever arises ceases.” Sariputta, who became the Buddha’s foremost disciple, is also said to have uttered this phrase as an expression of his insight on first hearing a summary of the dharma. [Horner (1951), p. 54]”
Batchelor (2012, p. 97)
Rolla, what a beautiful, rich reflection on applying Gotama’s four tasks to how to garden wisely implying how gardeners are themselves like gardens. Gotama advised us to cultivate our lives the ways farmers cultivate their fields. I love how Rumi said, “We come from the garden to the garden.”
Beautifully said, Kevin! Becoming is not a gigantic, nihilistic ending, but a series of smaller changes that rearrange and refresh everything. And whatever we are, we are more a river than a rock and even rocks, like us, are made of many tiny rivers.