Bill Gayner
Hi Matt,
I came across a lovely quotation from the Buddha in the 2012 paper by Batchelor I cited above that illuminates what you are saying, what is implied by awareness of the first noble truth or how to bring it alive as a way of embracing life as a comprehensive, process-oriented, phenomenological understanding of suffering and our existential situation:
In the Discourse to Kaccanagotta we again find the two terms samudaya [arising] and nirodha [cessation], now employed as part of the Buddha’s account of what constitutes “complete view” (sammaditthi):
This world, Kaccana, for the most part depends on a duality—-upon the notion of “it is” (atthita) and the notion of “it is not” (natthita). But for one who sees the arising (samudaya) of the world as it occurs with complete understanding (sammapañña), there is no notion of “it is not” in regard to the world. And for one who sees the ceasing (nirodha) of the world as it occurs with complete understanding, there is no notion of “it is” in regard to the world. … “Everything is,” Kaccana, this is one dead-end. “Everything is not,” Kaccana, this is another dead-end. Without veering towards either of these dead-ends, the Tathagata teaches the dharma by the middle… [S. 12:15]
Batchelor (2012, pages 97-98)
It seems to me that the “arising” of craving or of suffering are examples of what can arise and that Gotama is pointing to the arising and cessation of all processes, whether they are wholesome (free of craving) or unwholesome (conditioned by craving). Lovely inspiration for process-relational ways of navigating life.
Thank you, Charlie, for your thoughtful response!
I was on a retreat my charismatic, brilliant, intuitive guru with terrible boundaries had set up very skillfully for us. He had us in postures that we would have been in in the womb or when being birthed, along with evocative music. But he also provided us with careful coaching on how and what to open and tune into: a foundational level of conditioning in the background and structuring experiencing, rather than what tends to preoccupy the front of the house.
Stanislaw Grof and his brother laid some of the foundations for what some call rebirthing work using LSD. When that became illegal, Grof developed holotropic breathing technique that evoke similar effects to LSD. I continue to be impressed by what can emerge without special breathing techniques or psychedelics.
I don’t take any offence in your bringing up Freud, although Freud was highly suspicious of altered states and religious experiences, viewing them as regressive. He had a famous exchange about this with Romain Rolland. It is a key reason he and Carl Jung, his heir apparent, ended their relationship.
In a 1927 letter to Sigmund Freud, Romain Rolland coined the phrase “oceanic feeling” to refer to “a sensation of ‘eternity'”, a feeling of “being one with the external world as a whole”, inspired by the example of Ramakrishna, among other mystics.[1][2] According to Rolland, this feeling is the source of all the religious energy that permeates in various religious systems, and one may justifiably call oneself religious on the basis of this oceanic feeling alone, even if one renounces every belief and every illusion.[3] Freud discusses the feeling in his Future of an Illusion (1927) and Civilization and Its Discontents (1929). There he deems it a fragmentary vestige of a kind of consciousness possessed by an infant who has not yet differentiated itself from other people and things.[4] (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oceanic_feeling)
I love your quotation from Freud:
The context was a discussion of the ways humans had introduced civilization. “Writing was in its origin the voice of an absent person; and the dwelling house was a substitute for the mother’s womb, the first lodging, for which in all likelihood man still longs, and in which he was safe and felt at ease.”
Reading is certainly the voice of an absent person, interesting that Freud wrote that writing is. I wonder if he meant reading, or if there is a deeper layer here to unfold.
Twenty five to thiry years ago, as a mature student, I wrote an undergrad paper in an anthropology course the prof had me present at a Canadian anthropology conference entitled “A Womb with a View”, in which I made a similar argument, that living in dwellings replicated the same unique experience of being and living inside afforded us by our first 9 months of life in the womb, and so structured that powerful fantasy of having an inner world in which we can act, grapple with thoughts etc.
I like your pun that womb envy would be “a huge stretch”. I can easily imagine that the earliest religious mysteries would have been centred on reproduction in women and that women would have had an important role in these. Struggle for power over is also an old theme. I wonder how it played out so long ago? I imagine some cultures handled it beautifully and fruitfully! Others not so, lol, seeing what transpired…
Batchelor, S. (2012). A secular Buddhism. Journal of Global Buddhism, 13, 87–107. Retrieved from https://www.globalbuddhism.org/article/view/1189.
Lovely, Christie, thank you so much, inviting us inviting us out to play in life, again and again, each time different than before!
I appreciate how you are allowing yourself to go on creative flights, Thomas, while wanting to return to check with your central sources of inspiration. How this mix of creativity and carefulness is a process that is surely already enriching your project.
And what a wonderful, awesome project! Wow! How could you not grow and transform through it and inspire others to do the same?
I appreciate Matt’s point that “I think the philosophy of organism is perfectly consistent with this sort of view, but Whitehead would probably say a lot of it awaits empirical/experiential confirmation.” And how Mark’s ChatGPT’s oracle agrees with this.
It strikes me that on the one hand your historical/mythological characters, Steiner’s and Teilhard’s creative visions and philosophies, and your own imaginative process all provide data for Whitehead’s theories, notwithstanding it all requires further testing and exploration. But each including your own process has its own authority as well. How each set of theories/mythologies are like the shells and skeletons left by creatures of, not the truth of some predetermined static reality, but of unique processes of delightful co-creativity. Thank God for their differences and for what you make of it. I bet even our your errors are interesting, meaningful and fruitful.
Reminds me of Van Morrison like so many of Brits of his generation trying to replicate the American blues and creating something also authentically their own.
I love this, Chris!
In this course I have at last realized that the path to wonder is not so much the altitude you can reach in your little airplane, but the way the land looks when you touch down. If the flight was a good one, the world is different… I see ANW’s insistence on experience now as not only the place to test “The Free and Wild Creation of Concepts” (Stengers), but also the place to re-wonder the world.
I love the rich, multivalent pun in “re-wonder the world”. Fruitful flights ripen us, transforming our life world in ways that change how we experience we experience ourselves, others and the world, and empower us to live in more deeply valued, satisfying ways that afford more wonder and deeper ways of wondering.
Thank you so much, Thomas! Yes, it was a process of learning from my clients’ and my own suffering, how to transform suffering into deeply valued living, drawing on wisdom, care and inspiration from so many pioneers, the loyal opposition. Slow cooking. Discovering what is trustworthy.
It is amazing how Douglas-Klotz’s midrash from the Aramaic makes such deep, illuminating sense of Jesus’ words. Who knew? For example, in that scene with the Samaritan woman, how instead of “Jesus saith unto her, I that speak unto thee am he.” (John 4:26, KJV), Jesus says, “I-I, the connecting of my small self (naphsha) to its source (ruha) is present in the conversation between us (ana amekhy).” (Douglas-Klotz, 2022, p. 132)
I love how Douglas-Klotz in his recent (2022) book shares his view that Jesus’ breakthrough was that to open into ruha (soul) and participate in Alaha, we do not have to kill the ego, rather, it is the I-I, mediated by the heart (leba) that is the way, the life, and the light of the world. He was not saying “I am the way,” but “I-I is the way”. What a difference! No wonder the powerful didn’t pick up on that.
I look forward to learning more about your plays, Thomas, they sound rich and deep!
Reference
Douglas-Klotz, Neil. (2022) Revelations of the Aramaic Jesus: The Hidden Teachings on Life and Death (p. 132). Red Wheel Weiser. Kindle Edition.A wonderful quotation from Physics of the World Soul, Rolla. I am fascinated by that shift from “Experience… [as] the private property of me or you exclusively” to letting go into “Experience [as]… the world’s way of weaving itself together” (p. 38). What a difference! Seems to me the world invites us to come out to play. It was lovely how easily Brian Swimme was able to do this in class last week.
What do when we are stuck with experience as a private possession, though? There are ways that recommend killing the ego, but I prefer those paths where we learn to turn towards the huddled self within, saying hello to, and discovering how to resonate with him, her or them, so often a frozen or hurt child self-aspect. If we discover compassion arising in us for this frozenness or suffering within us, we are already and perhaps without even noticing it letting go into presencing with all our relations, a major step on the route to developing the secure attachment with the cosmos which enables us to come out to play with all our relations.
Wow, I am delighted to hear that, te’a! I look forward to discussing this with you. I would love to hear more about what you find most helpful in his work.
Thank you, Mark, and for the invitation. Yes, I appreciate the work of figures like Glenn Wallis, Evan Thompson (https://yalebooks.yale.edu/book/9780300264678/why-i-am-not-a-buddhist/), Stephen Batchelor and Winton Higgins in setting us free from giving our power away to religious, academic or political authorities, and other hidden assumptions structuring our lifeworld. I have fallen in love with cultivating opening into the always more free of a priori assumptions. With all the emphasis on emptiness and homelessness in Buddhism, I love how the brahmaviharas invite us home.
Hi Matt,
You have given me rich food for thought on Whitehead’s views on religion and its evolution, thank you.
As you suggest, he does not mean a form of rationality that is devoid of feeling. But he does mean emotion purified by reason. Whitehead (RM, p. 31-33):
“Rational religion is religion whose beliefs and rituals [which have their origin in and seek to promote numinous emotions] have been reorganized with the aim of making it the central element in a coherent ordering of life—an ordering which shall be coherent both in respect to the elucidation of thought, and in respect to the direction of conduct towards a unified purpose commanding ethical approval. … Rational religion appeals to the direct intuition of special occasions, and to the elucidatory power of its concepts for all occasions. It arises from that which is special, but it extends to what is general. The doctrines of rational religion aim at being that metaphysics which can be derived from the super-normal experience of mankind in its moments of finest insight.
Gendlin was deeply influenced by Whitehead and so no wonder that this reminds me of Gendlin’s phenomenological method Thinking at the Edge. One starts by exploring something you know well but have not yet expressed, coming alive to the felt sense of it. Particular examples from your experience are particularly rich sources of implicit information about this. You then explicate your felt sense taking care to find words that are alive to the always more that the felt sense is implying and allowing the felt sense’s infinitely rich specificity to transform the meaning of the words you use to explicate it. Without trying to describe every step, from this, you come alive to the felt sense of explicit examples to describe the different ways what you are exploring manifests, and how one of these might look from the perspective of the other. You then describe several elements/themes/principles and then describe their logical relationship with each other. A way of creating new theory from your implicit experiencing.
It is fascinating exploring the power of these logical relations and what they imply, when informed by the richness of the always more of presencing. There’s a mystery here that is uncanny. Something I don’t understand, but have experienced. It reminds me of how Peter Kingsley describes Parmenides being given the gift of logic in the underworld by its queen, Persephone, who is also the spring. It reminds me of the Jorge Luis Borges quotation you highlight at the beginning of chapter 3 in Physics and the World Soul, “Everything happens for the first time, but in a way that is eternal.”
I wonder if it is because this kind of living logic involves a kind of happy death to reification that still prizes our individuality, as we let go into all our relations, discovering we are always given freshly in each moment, not Hades, but the Eleusinian Fields. As you quoted, Matt, “It is the difference between the enemy you conciliate and the companion whom you imitate.” This companion smiles with us and through us, luring us on. Can I say there is something in logic informed by all our relations that welcomes us home.
Hi Mark,
You asked me:
Whitehead was well aware of the role of culture in the establishment of modern science, do you know if he investigated the major contributions of other cultures to philosophy. My impression is that Buddhist thought would have been of great value to Whitehead’s project.
If I recall, while he viewed the world religions as a rich resource, Whitehead drew primarily from his extensive Christian background, the Romantic poets and Western philosophy in developing his metaphysics and it has been the work of the current generation of philosophers and theologians to explore integrating his thought with other world religions.
In the Cobb Institute course “Process Thought and World Religions” many in this class attended together, we read and met fascinating people engaged in this work:
Session 1: Indigenous Life Ways: with Chris Daniels, PhD
Session 2: Judaism: with Sandra Lubarsky, PhD
Session 3: Hinduism: with Jeffery Long, PhD
Session 4: Islam: with Jared Morningstar, PhD
Session 5: Buddhism: with Jay McDaniel, PhD and Reirin Gumbel
Session 6: Christianity: with Anna Case-Winters, PhDJay McDaniel combines process relational thought with Zen Buddhism. He had a great discussion in class 5 with the head of a Zen monastery Reirin Gumbel. You might find this link interesting: I put “Buddhism” into the search function on Jay McDaniel’s website and came up with this page with links to diverse posts, papers and videos: https://www.openhorizons.org/apps/search?q=buddhism
Thank you Mark and Matt for the interesting discussion.
There are so many layers of meaning in all this. For example, so many different forms of Christianity, Buddhism, Islam, Hinduism and Judaism, some more rational than others. In general, I’m on board for what Whitehead means when he says “rational” because I take it to be informed by embodied felt presencing in a cosmos that continually births us with all our relations and whatever is most salient and that inspires us into stepping into beautiful transformative participation in what is always more than us. Of course, that’s not what everyone means by rational.
I find an exemplification of Whitehead’s dipolar prehension in how Buddhist scripture describes Gotama supported by the Earth goddess in the early stages of the meditation that led to his awakening in his struggle with the demon king Mara’s temptress daughters and demon army. She witnessed his many lifetimes as a bodhisattva, his worthiness to awaken–which I like to interpret as the empowerment of coming alive to physical prehension. Surely this empowered his experiencing his many rebirths, discovering through this principles such as dependent arising, non-self, impermanence and what Stephen Batchelor refers to as the four tasks (embracing suffering and our existential situation, acknowledging and letting go of the arising, appreciating cessation, and cultivating the path). And how when Mara tempted Gotama immediately after his awakening with how hard it would be to try to share this with anyone and better not to bother, Brahma came and invited and lured Gotama into exploring a lifetime teaching vocation. Seems to me a lovely example of conceptual prehension and sacred ingression.
But I wonder if the European and American scholars of Buddhism in constructing their rationalist Buddha might not have stripped away all this talk about demons, goddesses and gods as later superstitious accretions. Or dismissing it as Stephen Batchelor tends to do, as simply the world view of the day which we have now happily moved on from, rational creatures that we are. On the other hand, Batchelor recently acknowledged that if you are looking for creativite and transformative processes in Buddhist texts, you will find it in the metaphors that these supernatural beings afford.
Then there is the issue of racism. It is good to read your informed view, Matt, that Whitehead was not racist. And that you also acknowledge “He undeniably makes Victorian colonial and Eurocentric assumptions that are evident in his other writings”. However, I am not sure I can imagine forms of colonialism free of racism.
Moreover, as a gay man, I know despite having come out in the early 1980s and worked in the heart of the gay community in Toronto in the HIV sector for decades, and engaged in decades of therapy and self/lifeworld work, I still carry internalized heterosexist assumptions. I feel sincere sympathy for heterosexuals who may have not had the mixed blessing of being born gay and having been slapped in the face with this form of systemic oppression for so many years, and so are faced with a much more difficult task in terms of appreciating their privilege and therefore the unexamined heterosexism from which they still suffer. Of course, even straight people suffer from internalized heterosexism, the drive to comply to rigid gender and sexual norms. So protesting that a privileged member of British and American society was not racist could only be true so far. It’s like questions in tests intended to detect deception which ask people if they always tell the truth. Or liberal politicians and police sincerely and indignantly insisting they are not racist. One hopes they will learn how to soften their defences and enter into deeper participation in this being human. But, like any value, this is not something any of us can cross off our to-do list.
Thank you, Matt! And for carrying forward the theme of feeling our way into scientific and philosophical inquiry in your great questions and dialogue with Brian Swimme! I loved how he responded and the whole process that ensued. Very inspiring first class!
What a beautiful, deeply felt conversation, luring me in! What a lovely opportunity to contemplate freshly prayer, communion and community, thank you! Well met!
Prayer as the willingness to turn inward and outward and allow fresh resonance to emerge infusing our body, feelings, thoughts and images with new meanings, transforming us and our lifeworld. Especially when we turn toward that which has been the hardest to approach both within and without us and to discover how to catch its resonance in our sails. This willingness to come alive to the present more richly discovers all our relations there with us, inspiring us with compassion when we are willing to feel suffering in our hearts, luring us forward in life-affirming, more complex, integrative, and transformative ways. Our inner and outer communities smiling and singing in our hearts and back to us from the world as we discover we are never alone. Discovering how Bowlby’s secure attachment afforded by parents to babies and spouses and friends to each other, is rooted in a deeper belonging, fresh becoming birthed from, by and with and returned to the cosmos who is holding and releasing us into life and receiving and treasuring us on the other side of each becoming. All of this implicit and smiling in our every moment and looking forward to welcoming us with open arms.
And I have felt
A presence that disturbs me with the joy
Of elevated thoughts; a sense sublime
Of something far more deeply interfused,
Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns,
And the round ocean and the living air,
And the blue sky, and in the mind of man;
A motion and a spirit, that impels
All thinking things, all objects of thought,
And rolls through all things. (William Wordsworth, 93–102)Reference
William Wordsworth, “Lines Written a Few Miles above Tintern Abbey, on Revisiting the Banks of the Wye during a Tour, July 13, 1798,” in Lyrical Ballads and Other Poems, 1797–1800, ed. James Butler and Karen Green (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1991), 118–119.cited by:
Taylor, Charles. (2024). Cosmic Connections: Poetry in the Age of Disenchantment (pp. 17-18). Harvard University Press.