Bill Gayner
Thank you so much, Rolla, for the encouragement and offer to explore with me. I love the idea and will start to explore what it might look like.
Hi Neil,
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Thank you so much, Rolla.
I attempted to enrol in the certificate program too late and so am only auditing these classes, although deeply engaged with and benefitting from them, so that’s fine. Would I still be eligible to offer a Pop Up 1-2 session course through the Cobb Institute? I would love to offer something on providing a focusing orientation to the process-relational community. You have already got me reflecting on how to do that, fun.
Here’s a one-page intro I wrote a short handout on experiential focusing a while back: https://mindfulfeeling.ca/experiential-focusing/. At the bottom of the page, you can also find a link to a wonderful 15-20 minute video of Ann Weiser Cornell sharing her own focusing practice out loud on the anniversary of her sister’s death, someone with whom she had a challenging relationship.
I expect the best way to be introduced to focusing is experientially rather than to start by reading. However, here’s a list of books for beginners on Gendlin:
Cornell, A. W. (1996). The power of focusing: A practice guide to emotional self-healing. New York, NY: MJF Books.
Gendlin, E. T. (1981). Focusing (2nd ed.). New York: Bantam Books.
Gendlin, E. T. (2013). Let your body interpret your dreams.Chiron Publications.
People can also find lots of resources and workshops on www dot focusing dot org and Ann Weiser Cornell’s website https colon //focusingresources dot com
Hi Neil,
The reference is:
Neil Douglas-Klotz. (2022). Revelations of the Aramaic Jesus: The Hidden Teachings on Life and Death. Charlottesville, VA: Hampton Roads Publishing Company.
I think I may have also cited another of his earlier books in these Cobb courses, not sure whether I did in this Eco Civ course:
Neil Douglas-Klotz. (2011). Desert Wisdom: A Nomad’s Guide to Life’s Big Questions from the Heart of the Native Middle East. Worthington, OH: Arc Books.
He has been publishing translations of the New Testament, the Hebrew Scriptures and other native middle eastern texts for something like 30 years now, and I have been following him almost that long. He has a PhD in the semiotics of ancient Semitic languages. This latest (2022) book really carries his translations on Jesus forward.
We just had a third module by him on the The Aramaic Way of Jesus, in a seven-module online course led by him through the Shift Network, where he is teaching and situating prayers/contemplation based on the Aramaic. This course is very practice/experiential focused. He even pulls out his guitar for the chanting. The Shift Network is planning a second course after that. https://theshiftnetwork.com/. I like how he emphasizes independence in our exploration, fits with my secular dharma influences, although I also love practicing and exploring in community.
I love it, Neil! Witty, deep, and just so!
Yes, what a rich conversation!
Eric, you asked, “Should the human attitude towards the value of human life change from that of an unmitigated good, to that of a qualified good?”
Looking it up, “unmitigated” means “absolute, unqualified”. I take it in a deeply relational cosmos where everything/everyone begins in all of us interaffecting each other, none of us are absolute or unqualified. The deep value of each of us emerges from our deep interrelating and all that affords for each of us.
In any case, our civilization does not treat the lives of humans as unmitigated goods.
When it comes to systemic structural oppression and privilege, privilege is not bad, but it does tend to blind one to empathizing with those oppressed by the system that privileges us. Everyone should be privileged, then that particular form of oppression would disappear. For example, the solution for heterosexism is not devaluing heterosexuals, it is helping them understand how heterosexism renders people who do not conform with these rigid assumptions invisible and stigmatized. Relaxing heterosexism, LGBTQ+ people get to participate more fully in the world in valued ways and to be accorded the privileges of it.
Currently, when a people want to kill or enslave other groups of humans, they dehumanize and call them animals, it plays a key role in ethnic cleansing and genocide. The solution for all of us, humans and animals, is raising us all to the status we would accord humans, rather than lowering humans to the status our civilization accords animals.
But what would be the implications? For example, some argue that entails us all becoming vegans and not culling species that are over-populating eco-systems. On the other hand, native people are omnivores who hunt and eat animals, and also deeply value animals, including them among all their relations. But perhaps we can find different solutions for different populations, for example, re-introducing predators such as wolves to cull deer and reestablish an ecological balance, as well as allowing humans who want to hunt, to hunt, but, when it comes to human overpopulation, using voluntary cultural and pharmaceutical birth methods, and supporting this in multi-dimensional ways including economic.
It seems to me the key would be opening our hearts to all of our relations and exploring the implications of decisions in highly detailed, empathic and integrating holistic ways. So perhaps raising the status of animals does not bring them the same range of privileges accorded humans, but it does mean relating to them with more compassion, appreciation and empathy and in an ecological, holistic way.
Thank you for the encouragement, Neil.
I appreciate the sequence you describe, of discovering the wisdom in listening to our body and feelings, learning from our animal friends and nature, and learning to share our feelings, an interesting one. Yes, I agree that provides a rich ground for discovering that the meaning of all our thoughts are provided by implicit feelings and exploring how to enhance our engagement with this.
I love what Douglas-Klotz says, that Aramaic, the language Jesus spoke, did not have a word for “mind”, what we point to as “mind” is what they took to be the surface of what we are, while Jesus was pointing to a way that was heart-centred, where our heart can open to both our more limited sense of self in the world and to more soulful participation, presencing, in the cosmos.
“Our animal partners have a way of teaching us.” I imagine that what you learned through your animal partner sheds light about the new kind of learning beginning to develop an ecological civilization entails. Perhaps a new, more responsive way of being in and relating with the world? I would love to hear more about your journey.
In contrast to what you describe, I’m reminded of David Abrams commenting in The Spell of the Sensuous how pre-literate people would have been shocked to hear that Socrates sitting under a tree with a student outside of Athens said to his student:
“…I’m a lover of learning, and trees and open country won’t teach me anything, whereas men in the town do.” These words are pronounced by Socrates, the wise and legendary father of Western philosophy, early in the course of the Phaedrus—surely one of the most eloquent and lyrical of the Platonic dialogues.16 Written by Socrates’ most illustrious student, Plato, these words inscribe a new and curious assumption at the very beginning of the European philosophical tradition. (Abram, 2017, p. 102)
Seems the philosophical/lifeworld problems we are facing did not start with Descartes.
Reference
Abram, David. 1997, 2017The Spell of the Sensuous: Perception and Language in a More-Than-Human World (p. 102). Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.Hi Neil and Rolla,
Rolla, Neil didn’t mention trauma. Correct me if I am wrong, Neil, but I think you simply let us know you are legally blind and this can get sometimes get in the way of knowing what you are supposed to do. That makes sense to me given we live in an ableist world where empathy is generally in short supply.
Let me know, Neil, if I can be of any help in orienting you to anything that is going on here or providing any support. This is my third course in a row with the Cobb Institute and it has been a great experience. Richard Livingston of the Cobb Institute would be the official person to turn to, he is very helpful.
Warm regards,
Bill
Impressive, compelling text, Ryan. Implicit in how racism and slavery is foundational for the West, is the prevalence of settler colonial genocide. I heard the Palestinian American scholar Joseph Massad in a recent Youtube interview making a similar argument where he placed genocide as central to Western Liberal imperial and settler colonial projects. The really successful settler colonial states were most successful in genocide, e.g., US, Canada and Australia. The key is total demographic dominance. The Zionists knew this and planned it from before the founding of the state of Israel. There have been many such settler colonial genocides as what is happening in Gaza, the West Bank and Jerusalem now. They are foundational for the civilization we are living in. “We have met the enemy and he is us.”
An ecological civilization would organize itself to care for everyone, rather than for projecting total dominance to enrich elites. I dare say, if the West was the kind of civilization that made real reparations, we would not have so many homeless and our structural determinants of health would be better across the board at home.
In an all day workshop on transforming interpersonal conflict for our little contemplative community (https://ttemo.ca/), I brought in new forms of play to help us open to what we already know about this, but have not yet articulated.
In the morning, after meditating and journaling, I introduced everyone to John Vervaeke’s philosophical fellowship process, adapted for our uses by including periods of contemplation at different points within it. Instead of using excerpts from philosophical texts, I used poetry and excerpts on books on meditation and focusing. My intention was for us to explore and celebrate what we are cultivating through our touching the earth practice.
Sixteen people (about half of our community) attended. I decided to send out 33 poems and prose excerpts and invited people to select three from them and to find a sentence or phrase in each one that expressed the heart of it for them. In the workshop, I divided people into groups of three or four to a specific poem or passage they had chosen.
In the group, they discussed why they had chosen this one and what line they would use. Then one member read the piece slowly. Then a short period of silent contemplation/meditation. Then each person in turn chanted/said that sentence going around the circle four times. Then another period of silent contemplation. Then each person said 2 or 3 sentences about what was coming up for them, followed by more contemplation. Then a free discussion about the poem and process. We took an hour for this.
In my little group, we explored Hafiz’s “With That Moon Language”. What a delight!
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. 1992. The Gift: Poems by Hafiz, the Great Sufi Master (Compass) (p. 322). Trans by Daniel Ladinsky. Penguin Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.
We each experienced this quite differently and learned deeply from one another. In the talking free form part at the end, we decided we had time for each of us reading the whole poem to each other, and that brought such fresh perspectives as well! I find that poem is like a Zen koan, the sun rising within me and radiating everywhere.
Then we came back into the whole group and discussed the process, learning more about the practice we are cultivating and exploring together.
In the afternoon, we meditated and journaled and drew on John Vervaeke’s Dialectic into Dialogos practice. He uses it so participants can explore together in small groups defining a virtue, which is a lot of fun. We adapted it, crossing it with Eugene Gendlin’s Thinking at the Edge and our own practice, to discover the felt sense and express the very edge of our exploration and what we already know but have not yet said about addressing, transforming and resolving interpersonal conflict. This is part of our process in developing a conflict transformation process and policy for our group.
After meditation and journaling, each person contemplated their feelings and felt sense about interpersonal conflict transformation. Then in groups or three or four, we took turns with one person exploring how to explicate and express what their implicit feeling was for this and another person helping them do this through active, responsive listening. A third person took notes and shared them at the end with the person exploring. A fourth kept the time. They debriefed their process, contemplated what was arising, and then switched roles, so that everyone experienced every role. Then we came back to the larger group and shared what we were discovering. People were invited to send us what they had come up with as well.
People said how much they appreciated the lighter more playful process in the morning and how it empowered them to go into the more difficult issues in the afternoon in a more authentic way. For me, the whole day was the kind of fun, serious play this tigger likes, out in the open with friends exploring and learning from each other.
Hi Neil,
Thank you so much for this question! What a delight to feel into it and respond.
I feel deeply that we are being called out to play, whether it is light hearted or deeply serious play. I feel Gaia holding and releasing us into the day to go to play with all our friends.
Play is born through secure attachment, can we find a way to acknowledge the suffering and darkness in our world and still say yes and come out to play? Each phase of our life has different forms of play, different forms of developmental needs and opportunities. Kids who can look back and see Mom and Dad are there when they need them can risk investing themselves totally in the transformative exploration play entails. As kids, we needed Mom and Dad there in our lives.
Now as adults, we still need friends and family, but it is also about being able to turn to the suffering and frozenness within us ourselves and in the world and say hello to it in a friendly way, trying to discover how to resonate with it. As we discover how to open our hearts to this, we enter into deeper presencing with it and the whole situation, we enter into deeper participation in the world, we come more alive to our interrelatedness with everyone and everything, and that everything is alive, and how everyone is here with us now supporting us, all our relations, whether they know it or not, lol. How wonderful some are more alive to it, to discover oneself out in the open playing and exploring with someone, a new or old friend!
When we turn towards suffering and resonate with it, compassion, empathy and other helpful feelings emerge and orient us into taking in even more deeply what the suffering and the whole situation is implying, creating ripe conditions for a creative transformation that opens into more coherent presencing and engagement in the world, as a friendly, empowered, playful body environment process of creative becoming in the beautiful.
What a wonder to feel compassion arising orienting me to resonate more deeply with suffering! Feels like sacred ingression/inspiration/illumination, Alaha’s inviting and encouraging, and all my relations/friends with me supporting me.
With the world holding and releasing us into life and transformation in this way, we go out to play with all our friends with the world smiling through us and with us and welcoming us. Presencing with helpful feelings, the world opens and discloses herself to us, inviting us into deeper participation and fresh transformations, playfully. Our very becoming is secure loving attachment affording deepening play and exploration.
Where turning towards suffering, suffering is in front of us and orienting feelings are ones like compassion, presencing in the world is more participatory, happening through us and with us and in us and all around us. In the presence of suffering, compassion emerges, in the presence of the wholesome and furthering, appreciation opens (experiencing, valuing, understanding). It is what enables the sciences and religion and all the fields of play life affords us. Imagination plays an important role here as diverse thinkers such as Evan Thompson, John Vervaeke, Stephen Batchelor, and Matt Segall agree.
I feel us welcomed home through transformative play, out in the open together with all our friends everywhere in a cosmos that loves, births and releases us into life, and then treasures our every action returning it to us better than before as the breath and shape of our new becoming. All our friends are waiting for us to come out to play.
Very interesting, Ryan. That is so true, reparations require transforming our civilization.
Reflecting on this, I asked myself to imagine a world that values all that is birthing, constituting and enabling us to be here and cares for all our fellow creatures. Then I realized, that is the world/cosmos in which we are already living, it’s just that our civilization is uprooted and distracted from feeling, valuing, orienting to and acting from this.
I imagine that an ecological civilization would reverse the order of everything, instead of moving from abstract thought to experience and action, starting from orienting to deepening our experiencing of the implicit differentiated wholeness we are already participating in and that is always more than any of our theories and methods, and discovering together from this deep orientation next steps, helpful theories and coordination needed. It doesn’t mean that deep thinking and planning are not needed, just that it is vital we start from right brain presencing and imagining rather than from what we already know abstractly, the left brain and total control.
I’m imagining trying to describe this in any of the power centres in our civilization, while this week our leaders sleep walk us into a new Cuban missile crisis with both Russia and in the Middle East, in the midst of this new wave of McCarthyism. But it doesn’t mean we don’t have to wait for them to draw strength and orientation ourselves from all that is birthing, constituting and supporting us.
I echo Ryan in feeling grateful for your thoughtful, careful reflections, Kathleen, your appreciation for how Mary Elizabeth Moore started the class by inviting these reflections and your thoughts and examples of the importance of discovering people’s own lived experience of nature and way of expressing this in helping them connect with why they would fight to defend it.
It reminds me of how Joanna Macy worked with environmental activists decades ago who were burning out. I expect you are well aware of her work. On retreat, in nature, she would invite them to express and envision their worst fears for the planet, and then to go out into the nature around them and open to it.
I remember being inspired by her (1983) book Despair and Personal Power in the Nuclear Age and (1991) World as Lover, World as Soul. Macy is a writer, translator of poetry, teacher, process thinker, Buddhist and activist. I love her and Anita Barrows’ (1996, 2005) translation of Rilke’s Book of Hours. Writing this has taken me to her website to reconnect with her again and I see she continues to explore and share group work for deep ecology (https://www.joannamacy.net/main).
Reflecting in the context of Whitehead thoughts, it strikes me how our lived experiencing in/with/from nature whether in the moment or in memory affords such a beautiful opportunity for sacred ingression to inspire us into deeper experiencing, for opening to how all our relations support our healing, becoming, and engaging, and to discover how deeply felt words can deeply resonate with this in a way that helps to carry this forward.
Interesting read, Dennis, thank you. Here is Matt Segall in agreement with you:
Whitehead was among the first initiates into the new cosmological story, but grasping the novelty of his vision also requires remembering the insights of the ancients, even if in a modern context. This book therefore situates Whitehead’s organic cosmology in the context of the larger historical arc of Western natural philosophy dating back to Plato. It also bring’s Whitehead’s philosophy of organism into conversation with several components of contemporary scientific cosmology—including relativistic, quantum, evolutionary, and complexity theories—in order to both exemplify the inadequacy of the traditional materialistic-mechanistic metaphysical interpretation of them, and to display the relevance of Whitehead’s cosmological scheme to the transdisciplinary project of integrating these theories and their data with the presuppositions of human civilization. This data is nearly crying aloud for a cosmologically ensouled interpretation, one in which, for example, physics and chemistry are no longer considered to be descriptions of the meaningless motion of molecules to which biology is ultimately reducible, but rather themselves become studies of living organization at ecological scales other than the biological.33 Ecology—that is, the study of the evolving relationships constituting organisms in their environments—environments—should thus become the most general of the natural sciences, replacing physics.
Segall, Matthew. Physics of the World-Soul: Alfred North Whitehead’s Adventure in Cosmology (pp. 20-21). SacraSage Press. Kindle Edition.
I am curious what you have learned from your own forays into transdisciplinary projects, Dennis? I see you have expertise in finance, economics, construction management, and building construction, as well as a foundation in mathematics and a whole career in education. What a rich mix!