Bill Gayner
Hi Chris and Rolla,
Thank you for your heart-warming, appreciative responses!
Chris, yes, the art and method of presencing, deeper forms of experiencing. Would love to share more about how I got here.
Rolla, yes, well said, coming alive to the felt sense provides so much implicit information about the situations we are participating in and constituted by, as well as sorting out what matters to us, and motivating us to act. Stephen Batchelor’s valuing of the Buddha’s four tasks over the four noble truths is a lovely exemplification of this wholesome action tendency in the Buddhist world, although he is not familiar with and so unable to draw on Gendlin’s and Whitehead’s work. He is also more familiar with mindfulness-based cognitive therapy and mindfulness-based stress reduction, and therefore cognitive behavioural therapy and behavioural therapy perspectives rather than experiential and emotion-focused therapies I am more oriented to, so unable to highlight how the felt sense and emotions carry needs, action tendencies and values and how they function in letting go and transformation. Batchelor calls his approach “secular dharma”. When it comes to the West, rather than forms of psychotherapy, he has drawn more inspiration from Western philosophy such as existentialism and Stoicism, and Christian theologians, especially secular Christians such as Don Cupitt. Batchelor argues that new scholarship reveals the four tasks are part of the older Buddhist scripture and the four truths a later interpolation. He uses the acronym ELSA:
1 – Embrace life [including and especially suffering]
2 – Let reactivity be
3 – See reactivity stop
4 – Actualise a pathMainstream mindfulness teaches us how to let go of what we know in order to open into the felt sense of our interrelated becoming now. Although he wasn’t teaching “meditation,” Gendlin provided language and whole philosophy of the implicit for this, for example, coining the phrase “felt sense” and showing us the importance of finding words, imagery or gestures that are alive to the felt sense to deepen our experiencing of it. Deepening experiencing in this way creates ripe conditions for transformation into deeper coherence and participation in and appreciation for and engagement in what is happening. In doing this, we are also integrating and adapting what John Dunne refers to as nondual and classic forms of Buddhist practice, inspired by contemporary psychology and philosophy.
It is not important to submit to orthodoxy, but it is helpful to deepen our dialogue with the traditions that inspire us.
Gendlin developed the technique of focusing with its six steps to be integrated into diverse forms of psychotherapy and self-help. Pushed and helped by his wife, the psychologist Mary Hendricks-Gendlin, he developed an applied technique Thinking at the Edge that has 14 steps as a phenomenological method for his philosophy of the implicit. It is a way of using focusing to be able to explore and express things you know well but have not yet articulated in order to create new theory. I have integrated both Focusing and Think at the Edge into meditation and how we explore and carry forward meditation experience together.
Rolla, the heart of my exploration includes how to cultivate wholesome communities of contemplative practice. I have had front row seats (lower level leadership roles) in crises concerning teacher boundary violations in two different Buddhist communities that were badly handled and covered up.
Last weekend in a one-day workshop, our Touching the Earth Mindfulness Ontario community explored using John Vervaeke’s Philosophical Fellowship and Dialectic into Dialogos methods, adapted for our use. In the morning, we used the Philosophical Fellowship method to explore what we are cultivating and, in the afternoon, the Dialectic into Dialogos method to explore and express what each of us already implicitly knows but has not yet expressed about resolving interpersonal conflict in community, as part of how we are developing our community’s conflict transformation policy, highlighting and integrating transforming interpersonal conflict as part of the heart of our practice, rather than a shocking interruption of it.
Chris, I would love to meet with you to discuss your project. We have each other’s emails from Richard’s group email about our discussion group. We could also discuss this in the discussion group this evening.
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Hi Dan,
Wow, I love how you highlighted those three sentences. Those words moved me deeply as well.
We missed you in the group meeting yesterday, but I am delighted to hear you will be participating in “The Way of Aramaic Jesus” as well!
Bill
In our course discussion group yesterday evening, we explored the conversation in this thread. This morning, I found the following passage in John Cobb Jr.’s (2015) Whitehead Word Book that helped me better understand what Whitehead meant by the terms we are using in our discussion. I am finding it so helpful, I am reading and rereading it, and have been contemplating it. I thought I would share it with you, in case you might find it helpful as well.
THE PRIMORDIAL AND CONSEQUENT NATURES OF GOD
Whitehead calls God’s ordering of eternal objects for the sake of realizing value in the world, God’s “primordial nature.” He thinks of this ordering as a single nontemporal act, preceding and conditioning every actual occasion. The meaning of “primordial” here is much the same as the more usual term “eternal.” Hence one may say that God is eternal. God has no beginning and no end.
However, Whitehead speculates that God’s primordial nature does not exhaust what God is. According to the ontological principle, in order that God be the reason for anything in the world, God must be an actual entity. The primordial nature of God can be thought of as the conceptual pole of God. But for actual occasions, the conceptual pole by itself is not actual. What is actual is the dipolar occasion, physical as well as conceptual. Unless God is actual, God cannot be the reason for the order of potentials that, in turn, provides order and novelty to the world. But for God to be actual would seem to require that God have physical feelings as well as conceptual ones. Those physical feelings would be and, Whitehead speculates, are, God’s prehensions of actual occasions. These prehensions constitute God’s physical pole and complete God. This aspect of God is affected by everything that happens in the world. It is in this sense “consequent” upon the world. Whitehead calls the physical pole of God, the “consequent nature.”
Although Whitehead proposes that all actual entities, including God, have basic similarities such as dipolarity, he speculates that God differs markedly from actual occasions. These originate in conformation to the actual world and God. Thus their first phase is their physical pole. This is taken up in the supplementary phase and integrated with conceptual feelings. Thus the occasion comes to satisfaction only through its conceptual pole. God, on the other hand, originates in the conceptual feelings that constitute the mental pole or primordial nature. This is forever unchanged. God’s physical feelings are woven upon it, thus constituting the “consequent nature.” This consequent nature cannot be separated from the primordial nature. Indeed, what God is at any moment, is consequent upon events in the world, that is, the consequent nature of God, always includes the primordial nature. In actual occasions it is the addition of conceptual feelings to physical feelings and the contrasts that addition makes possible that give rise to consciousness. In God, it is the addition of physical feelings to the conceptual ones that introduces consciousness.
Another difference is that actual occasions exist as subjects only momentarily and then pass into objective immortality. In living persons, the subjective feelings of one occasion are reenacted in its successors with a certain immediacy, but this quickly fades. God is everlasting. The consequent nature retains all that enters it in full immediacy. Thus the value that is attained and quickly lost in the world is everlasting in God. It is the immediacy of feeling in the actual occasions that is objectively immortal in God.
Cobb Jr, John B. 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.
Hi Tom,
Thank you so much for reminding us of Anna Case Winter’s critique of Christian exclusivism and anthropocentrism and her discussion of creation as “a community of subjects” rather than a collection of objects.
How wonderful you are currently a scholar in residence at a Quaker retreat and study center. I reread your self-intro to remind myself what kind of life you are living to have what sounds like such good karma. Looks like you stretch yourself to respond to God’s lure.
You wrote, “My interest initially and still is in integrating a scientific and religious world view.” Given the themes you describe in your post today, are you drawing on your fellow physician Iain McGilchrist’s work?
Hi Dan,
So glad you are intrigued Neil Douglas-Klotz’s work. I have been following him for many years now, and discover his influence continually and gently deepening in my life, in just the way you are hoping it might influence you.
I will be taking an online course with him that starts soon and which can be followed live or asynchronously. Starts Wed May 29, 2024:
Hi Chris,
I’m wary of emphatic forbidding, I find when I emphatically forbid, or emphatically refuse to forbid, I lose my ability to be playful and intimate. Gotama recommended a middle path between essentialism and nihilism. When it comes to reified monism or dualism, rather than rejecting one or the other, the Zen folk comment “not two”.
Feeling into it now, my sense of the problem with subject-predicate understanding is not whether there are subjects or predicates, but assuming subjects that stand behind predicates, separate from them and owning them. Seems we discover subjects through their predicates. There is not a Chris standing behind separate from his intelligence and warmth, there is a Chris-ing happening we discover through our resonance with his intelligence and warmth. But still, I discover a Chris as myself appreciating him and deeply interrelated with him, and yet somehow distinct.
Similarly, I experience what seems well-named as God through discovering myself as physical prehensing of all my relations providing the ground for opening into God’s sacred ingression into my conceptual prehension of my possibilities for becoming in the next small step. There’s only feelings, no God or me standing behind this, but only what we encounter in and through my concresencing. Does God become real through my concresencing? Sounds coherent to me. We need to take care not to reify some God standing behind how her primordial nature functions in our experiences to avoid falling into the fallacy of misplaced concreteness, mistaking what is outside of our experiencing and can therefore only be abstract as more real than felt experiencing.
Echoing Whitehead in this, Gendlin emphasizes how experiencing and consciousness emerge out of “interaction first”. Through God, we are all already interacting with all our relations including God, as our experiencing becomes known in our hearts. In this, we are deeply intersecting, inter-acting sets, inter-being, inter-relating and yet beautifully distinct in a way that affords intimacy. That’s what it feels like for me expressed in the rich vocabulary our courses together afford us.
Am I describing something here, Chris, that includes the point you are trying to make, but also allows for a world and a God who are intimately interrelated and therefore distinct, i.e., not a single monistic set?
Warm, interrelated regards,
Bill
Hi Dan, Chris and Rick,
Your conversation took me back for a dip into Anna Case-Winter’s paper “Rethinking Divine Presence and World Activity” and then led to a deep dive into Neil Douglas-Klotz’s perspective on what was new and to some degree unique in what Yeshua embodied and shared with us that deepened my understanding of my own path.
Sounds like we are all in agreement with Dan’s statement on low vs high Christology here:
Anna’s writings focus a lot on the idea of Incarnation and attempts to bring the traditional theology into harmony with a process vision. To me, the project is only partially successful. To say that Christ provides a transparency which helps us perceive the divine is helpful when joined with the idea that Christ embodies the lure of God’s initial aim. To me, that is a “low Christology” to the point where Christ is fully human but only divine in the sense that we are all interdependent with and in mutual immanence with God. The problem which appears insurmountable to me is the attempt to accommodate the credal statement that Jesus was both fully God and fully human.
Chris, while you like Dan’s low Christology, you propose “but maybe low is also high if God is seen pantheistically and not panentheistically”. I took a look into Hosinki, grappling with the concepts you are suggesting. I wonder what sacred ingression is luring you to step out of the Whiteheadian universe in this way? I for one am not sure I want to take on God’s unique responsibilities even if I’m sharing them with everyone else, lol! Whitehead added God to his model to provide “the ultimate “reason” for all the conditions that make temporal actual entities possible” (Hosinki, 1993, page 164), and then realized there were also other unique contributions in God’s relationship with the world involving his primordial nature:
Whitehead states that God’s conceptual prehensions grasp “the entire multiplicity of eternal objects.” This means that God’s conceptual prehensions grasp all possibilities. God’s mental pole is unlimited and infinite. In contrast, all temporal actual entities grasp only a limited selection of eternal objects or possibilities. No temporal occasion could grasp the fullness of infinite potentiality. The mental pole of any temporal occasion is limited and finite.
(Hosinski, 1993, p. 165)
Sounds like you are even risking losing the possibility of change itself:
Apart from the intervention of God, there could be nothing new in the world, and no order in the world. The course of creation would be a dead level of ineffectiveness, with all balance and intensity progressively excluded by the cross currents of incompatibility. (PR 247, cited by Hosinki, p. 169)
But I am intrigued that perhaps God lured you to risk so much, perhaps a glimpse of reality beyond any need for change or ontological support, just sitting with suchness itself with all your relations already present. However, I wonder if you realize in a universe where we are all already sanctified you risk losing the possibility of playing devil’s advocate?
Rick, I find I have a lot in common with the low Christology you describe, which I provided in more detail on my post in this last section of our course, “Friends Practicing Together”. You wrote:
So I have a “low Christology”, believing that Jesus was a man who achieved Enlightenment, or Christ Consciousness. Made in God’s image, this is our potential as well. Jesus is the Way. He isn’t the only person to ever do this, but in my culture and DNA, he is the best pattern for me, along with a dash of the other great spiritual paths that I have studied and know something about. Zen Buddhism, Sufism, Indigenous Ways and Vedanta add to my appreciation for the Divine.
Yes, I would say something very similar, although it is so new for me I am only discovering how to say it. While there are other great teachers, saints, prophets, and aspects of the divine, there is something unique in Yeshua’s “shem“, the signature qualities of his presencing/way that speaks to me deeply. It makes me wonder what was his relatively unique breakthrough?
Douglas-Klotz describes how the people of Yeshua’s time and place suffered generations of inter-generational trauma including dissociative disorders as well as an historical transition that was dividing people’s naphsha, the small self of their daily engagements, from the ruha, their presencing in the world. He speculates that the spiritual disciplines of that time emphasized removing the naphsha, the small I, in order to open to ruha, soul, perhaps in ways similar to what we would call channeling, in ways that were rough on the small self. It also reminds me of the heavy emphasis in so much traditional and even current teaching all over the world on removing or killing the “ego”, as if it were in the way. What Douglas-Klotz discovers in the Aramaic is Jesus’ breakthrough was this new possibility of how the leba, the heart’s feeling and knowing, can be opened to relate in loving ways to both our small self and to the soul and God.
We could then be aware of our Source, aware of this moment in time, and aware of inter-being with the natural world that preceded us. In other words, we’re talking about the awareness of our own awareness, with naphsha and ruha fully present, mediated by what Aramaic calls leba, the heart.
This is what Genesis 1:26-27 outlines as the original human potential. It was not to “dominate and subdue the earth” (an egregious mistranslation from the Hebrew), but to “learn how to manage our own earthiness” and help all the beings created before us to fulfill their purpose along with our own.1
Yeshua embodied this next leap in human consciousness, although I don’t doubt it took place in several places and times, since at some level each individual naphsha is connected with the consciousness and group-naphsha of all humanity. What we have followed is one such pivotal moment that happened in a backwater of the Roman Empire in about the first century CE, in a geographical area where three tectonic plates push together from the continents we today call Africa, Europe, and Asia. A geologically active area on the outside revealed on the inside a place of great shifts in the activities of naphsha and ruha.
The reports of prophets and holy people in Southwest Asia before Yeshua don’t relate that they loved their students. They offered wisdom, insight, threats, and even predictions, but not love. Yeshua offers the vision and example of a greater love, one that allows the heart to take a much larger role in human life. We can find this heart not only in our personal relationships, but also in our ability to perceive life around us more deeply and to make decisions with saba, our heart-will. Yeshua showed us how to shift our awareness between self and soul, thereby mingling the One Life with our own life.
(Douglas-Klotz, 2022, pp. 206-208).
It is worth noting that Jesus was teaching at a time before Judaism had developed, and that Christianity and Judaism developed at roughly the same time and both increasingly influenced by neo-Platonism. The Aramaic Jesus tunes into a time before neo-Platonic philosophy shaped how we understand Christianity.
References
Douglas-Klotz, Neil. (2022). Revelations of the Aramaic Jesus: The Hidden Teachings on Life and Death . Hampton Roads Publishing. Kindle Edition.
Hosinski, C. S. C., Thomas E. (1993). Stubborn Fact and Creative Advance: An Introduction to the Metaphysics of Alfred North Whitehead. Rowman & Littlefield Publishers. Kindle Edition.
Assigning preconceived value to something removes its suchness.
What a wonderful sentence, Evan! I love your specificity, not just “a priori assumptions” but “preconceived values”. Highlighting how valuing permeates and illuminates fresh experiencing. Preconceived values are like playing with plastic replicas, re-presentations, rather than participating in what is always more than us.
Thank you, Evan, for pointing to what is so vital!
Assigning preconceived value to something removes its suchness. Even holiness can be a preconceived value. Taking time to observe things as they are and not assigning symbolism to them, even in the form of holiness, opens us up into becoming, absent of the focus on becoming.
As Meister Eckhart said, “Let us pray to God that we may be free of God.”*
Suchness appears as we shift into participating in/from/with…
I love this emphasis in nondual Buddhism to coming alive to experiencing in this way. However, not all forms of Buddhism insist on responding to the arising without preference, and I value this too. For example, what John Dunne (2015) refers to as classic forms of Buddhist practice often found in Theravada Buddhism as well as to a lesser degree in Tibetan Buddhism emphasize differentiating between unwholesome/unskillful and wholesome/skillful states, letting go the former and carrying forward the latter.
Nondual forms of meditation practice also tend to emphasize not explicating or symbolizing experiencing, even after we have come alive to it, for example, Sōtō Zen’s shikantaza, “just sitting”, practice, which Reirin Gumbelin and Jay McDaniel described for us so beautifully. Instead, everything is allowed to arise and pass into emptiness. Sublime!
I have fallen in love with opening into the felt sense and allowing it to arise while letting go of a priori assumptions, and when it seems appropriate using words, imagery and gestures to try to explicate/symbolize/speak from the felt sense in ways that enable taking in more deeply what is being implied, creating ripe conditions for transformations that can then be carried forward in these receptive/responsive/co-creatively ways. I combine both nondual and classic forms of Buddhist practice, integrated with contemporary psychological and philosophical perspectives, in meditation and when exploring experiencing with others.
It seems to me that some forms of Zen afford opportunities for symbolizing/explicating/speaking from the felt sense, such as Rinzai Zen’s koan practice, as well as in dokusan, found in both Rinzai and Sōtō Zen, conversations between teachers and students, which Reirin referred to. I believe both Jay and Reirin are Sōtō practitioners.
Koans are collections of historical conversations between Chan and Zen Buddhist practitioners that led to kensho:
Kenshō (Romanji; Japanese and classical Chinese: 見性, Pinyin: jianxing, Sanskrit: dṛṣṭi-svabhāva) is an East Asian Buddhist term from the Chan / Zen tradition which means “seeing” or “perceiving” (見) the “nature” or “essence” (性).[1][2][note 1] It is usually translated as “seeing one’s (true) nature”. The “nature” here refers to buddha-nature, ultimate reality, the Dharmadhatu. (Wikipedia: Kensho)
One of my favourite koans is the story of a Chan monk leaving a monastery. Chan Buddhism is the form of Chinese Buddhism that became Zen in Japan. This is case 20, from a collection of koans compiled by Master Wanshi Shokaku in The Book of Equanimity.
Dizang asked Fayan, “Where are you going?”
Fayan said, “Around on pilgrimage.”
Dizang said, “What is the purpose of pilgrimage?”
Fayan said, “I don’t know.”
Dizang said, “Not knowing is most intimate.”
(Zoketsu Norman Fischer | 05/21/2006)
Robert Sharf’s Heidegger Becoming Phenomenological, describes how Heidegger creatively carried forward Dilthey’s work emphasizing the importance of not approaching experiencing with a priori assumptions, something Heidegger pointed out Husserl was doing (for example, Husserl assumes Cartesian subject-object dualism).
He [Heidegger] thinks that the first order of business for philosophers in the late modern era who aspire to be phenomenological is to learn how to speak from life, interpreted “in its own terms,” instead of to life, conceived as “one” already understands that matters to be, thanks to our inheritance of a modern (broadly speaking, Cartesian) tradition that already silently tells us what philosophy is and does. (Scharff, 2019, p. 148).
References
Dunne, John D. (2015). “Buddhist Styles of Mindfulness: A Heuristic Approach.” In Handbook of Mindfulness and Self-Regulation, edited by Brian D. Ostafin, Michael D. Robinson, and Brian P. Meier, 251–70. New York: Springer.*Meister Eckhart, Qui Audit Me, Sermon on Sirach 24:30. (Cited by Richard Rohr in Meister Eckhart, Part II: The Reality of Godliness, retrieved from cac dot org/daily-meditations/meister-eckhart-part-2-the-reality-of-godliness-2017-09-29/)
Zoketsu Norman Fischer. (05/21/2006). Not Knowing is Most Intimate. Retrieved from: everydayzen dot org/teachings/not-knowing-is-most-intimate/
Scharff, Robert C.. Heidegger Becoming Phenomenological: Interpreting Husserl through Dilthey, 1916–1925 (New Heidegger Research). Rowman & Littlefield Publishers. Kindle Edition.
Thank you so much, Rick, for your appreciation and for pulling everything I was saying together both with Davis’ five propositions and how you carry our conversation and Davis’ propositions forward! It is funny I was drawing a blank on “TB and goodness”, the highest values! Also wryly appropriate that Google with all its artificial intelligence was of no help in determining the acronym. At least a metaphor of how AI cannot feel and appreciate values.
Yesterday, experientially focusing with a friend, it came to me how God is like a money launderer, how she treasures our every new becoming, appreciating what we were up to and the possibilities implicit in all of it and returns it to us refreshed as encouraging news from all our relations, pregnant with new possibilities for opening into all that she and life affords us, inviting us to come out to play with her and all our relations. How it is all an organic flowing integrated wholeness. The depth of her tenderness and love. It reminds me how nurturing and encouraging wombs are for new life forming, myriad cells each and all together finding their way into unimaginable new life in all its complexity, beauty, wholeness and promise.
Reminds me of two quotations with which Iain McGilchrist starts his chapter in The Matter with Things on imagination:
For the man of imagination, nature is imagination itself.
William Blake.
Nature has a far, far greater imagination than a human being.
Richard Feynman
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Hi Chris,
Could you help me understand what you mean by finding “raw creativity”. How are we going to find creativity apart from experiencing actual entities?
There are three concepts which stand out as having a final ultimacy in Whitehead’s system. I mean that these three categories sum up with a peculiar completeness all the other categories Whitehead identifies and employs.1 These categories are actual entities, eternal objects, and creativity. (Hosinki, 1993: p. 208)
My sense is that there is no way to find, to experience, creativity apart from its expression as living dynamism in actual entities.
Also, there are so many links in world religions connecting values and intensity! For example, I believe Jesus said, I come to bring you life and that in more abundance! Hokhmah, Holy Wisdom, in Proverbs, says much the same thing. (Jesus was considered an embodiment of Hokhmah among early Christians.) Hosinki goes on to say:
Every actual entity, including God, is its process of becoming. Likewise, the world is not some static conglomeration of “being,” but rather is a constant process of development in each occasion and transition from one occasion to the next, from one moment in the world’s history to the next. Even the relation between God and the world is not static; it is a cosmic process of interaction, a continual dynamic interplay between the eternal vision and everlasting becoming of God and the efforts of temporal actualities. “Creativity” is the category in which Whitehead tries to express the inherent dynamism of all actual things. It is creativity that is displayed in the process of becoming or concrescence. It is creativity that is displayed in the process of transition from one “perished” occasion to a novel concrescence. It is creativity that is displayed in cosmic process, the dynamic interaction between God and the world. Every actual entity is a concrete illustration or instance of creativity, as is the interaction between all actual entities. This is why Whitehead accords “creativity” a position of ultimacy among the categories of his system. (Ibid, pp. 208-209)
You are only going to find creativity through us folks here and God and her closer relations. Fortunately, we all embody it in varying degrees. Similarly, you have to look to actual entities to find caring. Fortunately, there’s nothing else to experience, to feel, here except all our relations.
The other part is that you seem to be imagining our relationship with God as if our relevant experiential time/space dynamism was quantum, but we are a different kind of actual entity, one that evolved to be able to appreciate God’s values more deeply. We are the kind of beings who can enjoy God as a companion. That’s what McGilchrist and Whitehead are talking about. Digging deep, we open into her arms.
This does not happen instantly, it happens in the experiential present moment that is one to 10 seconds long and then gets chunked together by working memory so we can follow melodies, feelings, what we or someone else is thinking or saying, and God’s lures into new becoming.
References
Hosinski, C. S. C., Thomas E. 1993. Stubborn Fact and Creative Advance: An Introduction to the Metaphysics of Alfred North Whitehead. Littlefield Publishers. Kindle Edition.Thank you, Chris, for carrying this forward in such an interesting, questioning way. I am only just recently begun to get interested in this question of origins, because it is only recently become something experiential for me. Yes! to digging deeper and to asking where do values come from.
My apologies for posting such a long response! If it is too long to read, my short question is what does your felt sense and imagination suggest to you about where values come from?
My sense is that values are intrinsic to our becoming, how we are being continually born into the world. Values are not tools external to us, like a compass is, they emerge out of appreciating (i.e., experiencing/valuing/understanding) the larger wholeness that is birthing us and in which we are participating. They emerge out of what the world discloses to us when we participate in and presence with it. Seems to me that to ask where values comes from is to ask where we come from. It follows that thinking and belief can only take us so far here, and then we need to leave them behind for a time, and open into experiencing/feeling and discover what emerges, using words, images and our theories that are now imbued with fresh meaning. My sense is that we can feel into your wonderful question based on our dipolar physical and conceptual prehension, i.e., feeling. Feeling the past in the present it feels right to speak of God treasuring us as we come alive to our relations and how this already inclines us to receive sacred ingression orienting us into our new becoming. Seems to me feelings provide us with implicit information about how we are being birthed in each moment. Of course, there is so much more to feel and explore here, taking it deeper. How does it feel to you? Becoming feels to me deeply imbued with values such as love and beauty, being born from deep love and appreciation. Values orient us in how to participate in what is already happening all around and through us.
There are certainly deep Biblical resonances for this in relation to your question. This question of where values and therefore we come from, that for those with “Syriac ears” — the form of Aramaic Jesus and the people of his times spoke — what is vital is experiencing rather than belief. “It’s something you have to feel to believe,” as Tom Petty sings in his great song, Refugee. Of course, fresh feelings transform what the words and beliefs mean. Douglas-Klotz writes:
In John 3, where Jesus advises Nicodemus to be “born again,” the Peshitta and Old Syriac (Sinaitic) render this phrase with the words yiled men drīs, which can mean to be regenerated from the first beginning or from the head or start of a process.2 The Syriac expression drīs recalls through its roots the Hebrew b’rē’šit, so we could hear this with “Semitic ears” as: “Unless you are reborn from the First Beginning – you will not be able to understand the realm of God.”
Shortly thereafter, Jesus tries to clarify for Nicodemus what he means by this in the passage about being born of water and spirit (John 3:5). Here the Peshitta and Old Syriac render “water” and “spirit” as mayā and ruha, words that would have alerted a Semitic listener to resonances with the related Hebrew words (mayim, ruah) used together in the cosmogenesis described by Genesis 1:2 (“And the spirit of God moved over the face of the waters.”). In a Semitic sense, mayim indicates not simply “waters,” but also primordial flow; ruah not only an ineffable “spirit” but also primordial breath. That is, a person listening to the story with Semitic ears could as easily have heard an experience as a belief being described.”
(Douglas-Klotz, 2002, p. 4)
I heard this great interview with Iain McGilchrist on his publisher, Perspectiva’s, Youtube channel that seems relevant. He is talking about how right-brained presencing depends on imagination. After quoting William Blake, “For the man of imagination, nature is imagination itself” and Richard Feynman, “Nature has a far, far greater imagination than a human being,” he went on to say:
In imagination you are not inspecting something over there, but in imagination you are already in whatever it is, so that the subject-object divide is actually transcended. So if you really look into nature, you are already in nature and this is what imagination is about, it is about healing the divide, not in some terribly weird and New Age-y way which means we can stop thinking, but there is something desperately profound in this idea that in the realm of imagination we are actually contacting not a representation, which is what the left hemisphere offers us, not a drawing, a picture, a graph, a theory, but the actual experience of what it is, which we finally see through, but not in the sense of seeing through it to something that’s separate from it, beyond, but seeing through the veil of familiarity to its real core.
That’s one thing I want to say about imagination, it brings us to this place, we’re not just making stuff up. We’re definitely not making stuff up, in fact, that’s the exact opposite of what we’re doing, we’re respectfully, honourably, humbly, with awe, approaching whatever it is and thereby allowing ourselves for once to get close to it and into it…
Imagination is not something that has to be drummed up. It is something that is there all the time, if our certain way of thinking doesn’t get between us and it. So, we use and have to use the left hemisphere’s mode of apprehension in order to be able to function properly, but, as I am always saying, there is nothing wrong with that, there is something good about that as long as we can then remember to go beyond it to have finished that process of unpacking explicitly and then say right, it’s none of that, although that is actually helped us on the way. So, it’s as people say in so many religious traditions that the seeking of God is not that God is hiding somewhere but that God is there if only you don’t stop yourself from seeing. And that could be said about the imagination that it is there. It’s by not doing things and by not espousing certain views and not acting and so on, but allowing, permitting something that it will come into being for us.
(McGilchrist, 2023)
References
Neil Douglas-Klotz. (2002). Beginning Time: A New Look at the Early Jewish/Christian Ritual Time, Cosmos: Journal of the Traditional Cosmology Society Volume 18.Iain McGilchrist in conversation with Phoebe Tickell. 2023. Imagination: A Way to Remake the World. Perspectiva, on Youtube.
Thank you, Rick. I am enjoying savouring what you are carrying forward.
Certainly some people use the word “goal” in a way that is almost synonymous with how I am using values and with all kinds of variations I am sure.
If I am following you, goodness and love (BTW, what is “TB”?) not as a distant, idealized destination, but as a state of being to be cultivated now. Trying to stutter my way into explicating the feeling of this, it feels like coming into richer aliveness in participating in everything interaffecting everything (all my relations), I discover myself participating in a world permeated by value, by beauty and love, smiling back and through me and inviting me forward, older sisters and brothers turning back to me beckoning and welcoming us. For example, turning towards suffering within me or in someone else, saying hello to the suffering and trying to discover how to resonate with it in a responsive way where it feels heard and starts to soften, I discover compassion arising. It’s as if all our sister and brothers noticed what we are up to trying to be with frozen suffering and called out to each other to come and help. It’s not that I know how to feel compassionate towards suffering, but humbly trying to come alive to suffering, the sacred affords us compassion and with it the possibility of our transformation and healing, so generous and unexpected, like a garden sprouting in the spring. It’s not that I know how to speak or to listen, I try to follow and resonate with and then open my mouth to speak, participating in the wonder of commun-ication. It’s not that I am beautiful (lol! it’s so ludicrous to write), but discover myself participating in the beautiful as part of something so much more than me, where beauty permeates all of us, even if so many of us don’t notice it and are caught in self hatred. These are fluid processes of becoming to be cultivated and participated in, ourselves part of a garden we participate in cultivating, and not myself a separate gardener achieving distant objectives with this garden that is my possession.
Thank you, Daniel. Yes, discovering our own becoming through feeling affords us an implicit sense of values and orients us in selecting which values, theories or ideas feel most suited to carrying forward the present situation in beautiful, wholesome ways. Participating with all our relations infuses situations, values and systems of ideas with fresh, ripening meaning. Trying to describe this, my felt sense likes Whitehead’s notions of physical and conceptual prehension and the sacred lure.