Bill Gayner
Hi Chris,
I am guessing that in wanting to keep being-as-process and knowledge separate, you are not intending to fly in the face of Whitehead’s attempt to provide a metaphysics that embraces and encourages the processes of deepening our understanding through science, experiencing and religion.
Consider Ian McGilchrist writing about presencing:
“The whole of Merleau-Ponty’s philosophy of embodied understanding depends, in one way or another, on a fundamental distinction: that between two modes of encountering the world, which he calls ‘je pense’ and ‘je peux’.2 The first deals with a mental representation in which we are quite separate from the world, and the question is, then, how our thoughts can be said to relate to that world; the second is an intuitive embodied awareness of the world in which we are already fully situated, a field of potential for interaction, something that comes prior to any conscious re-presentation. I believe he was articulating the intuited difference – as have many philosophers, including Bergson, Peirce, James, Heidegger, Scheler, Sartre and Wittgenstein – between the world as understood by the left and right hemisphere, respectively.” (McGilchrist, 2021, pages 566-568)
Are you saying that the second, “intuitive, emboded awareness of the world in which we are already fully situated” does not enable us to come to know and understand life? That it does not provide a foundation for scientific and religious knowledge and understanding? It seems to me what is key is that our thoughts are alive to the felt sense of our becoming. It seems to me what you mean by abstraction is thinking divorced from this aliveness to the felt processes of our becoming.
Hi Chris,
I am guessing that in wanting to keep being as process and knowledge separate, you are not intending to fly in the face of Whitehead’s attempt to provide a metaphysics that embraces and encourages the processes of deepening our understanding through science, experiencing and religion.
Consider Ian McGilchrist writing about presencing:
“The whole of Merleau-Ponty’s philosophy of embodied understanding depends, in one way or another, on a fundamental distinction: that between two modes of encountering the world, which he calls ‘je pense’ and ‘je peux’.2 The first deals with a mental representation in which we are quite separate from the world, and the question is, then, how our thoughts can be said to relate to that world; the second is an intuitive embodied awareness of the world in which we are already fully situated, a field of potential for interaction, something that comes prior to any conscious re-presentation. I believe he was articulating the intuited difference – as have many philosophers, including Bergson, Peirce, James, Heidegger, Scheler, Sartre and Wittgenstein – between the world as understood by the left and right hemisphere, respectively.” (McGilchrist, 2021, pages 566-568)
Are you saying that the second, “intuitive, emboded awareness of the world in which we are already fully situated, a field of potential for interaction” does not enable us to come to know and understand life? That it does not provide a foundation for scientific and religious knowledge and understanding? It seems to me what is key is that our thoughts are alive to the felt sense of our becoming. It seems to me what you mean by abstraction is thinking divorced from this aliveness to the felt processes of our becoming.
Sorry for posting this twice, I don’t know how to delete the redundant post below.
The theme of moving from sampling world cuisines to learning how to prepare and serve food reminds me of Meister Eckhart’s exegesis of the two Marys, Martha and Mary.
Mary the younger sister sits at Jesus’ feet taking in all he is sharing, while Martha serves everyone. At one point, Martha asks Jesus to ask her younger sister to help her.
Jesus responds by naming Martha three times, “Martha, Martha, Martha” and then goes on to reassure her that Mary has chosen the better half. Eckhart comments that anyone Jesus names three times, her name is already written in heaven. According to Eckhart, Jesus recognizes Martha is living spirituality in an embodied, holistic, wise way, and reassures her that while her sister’s understanding is still only partial, choosing the light will eventually lead her to living life in the more holistic way Martha already embodies. Mary is enamoured of the light but does not know yet how to embody this in life, thinks that wisdom and serving others are two different, separate things. Jesus reassures Martha that even though Mary is caught in a dualistic understanding, she has at least chosen the better of the two halves, and this will eventually lead her to living her life in a more integrated way, the way Martha embodies.
Interesting how Meister Eckhart reverses what I was taught as a child in Roman Catholic Sunday school. In that version, Jesus is gently chiding Martha who is a good soul, but does not understand that if you have the opportunity to sit at Jesus’ feet and listen to his words, you would choose that over serving the people who have come to listen to him.
Hi Leslie,
3) Reflecting on your question, it feels appropriate to say that I engage in Cobb Institute courses as religious practice. Not that I have had that particular thought before.
Exploring world religions simply as an observer strikes me as like exploring world cuisines by reading about them but never eating their food. The observer stance seems to me that left-brained, abstracted style McGilchrist has described so well. Exploring world religions and philosophy comes alive for me in a relational, felt, right-brained way where life is religious exploration with all our relations. In that sense, they do feel like deeply interrelated and endlessly diversified ecologies to me.
Choosing a particular set of religious practices feels to me like a process of discovery of what carries the felt sense, our embodied felt transformative living processes of experiencing, forward. So important to choose alive to the divine lure.
To carry my world cuisine metaphor forward, perhaps choosing a religion is like going beyond eating at a restaurant or a friend’s home, and learning how to participate in cooking and serving the food as well.
This returns me to an ancient metaphor I love, the cauldron, how learning to live life is like learning to tend a cauldron, cooking food for others, ourself, and for the gods. For me, the structures of our mature life, especially love and work, are the cauldron. Important to learn how to maintain the fire so it does not go out or flame too high so that the pot boils over.
Warm regards,
Bill
Hi Chris,
I find a search for common threads only takes someone into more abstraction if one’s search is only through abstraction. The left brain tends towards abstraction and does not know how to feel the whole of it again. It does not know how to search for, i.e., feel and discover, common threads. However, if one returns and grounds this search in the felt sense, in right-brained ways, then the search opens into what is always more than any of our abstractions and inevitably participating in deep inter-connection. I find when my search crosses with another’s in this way, my own processes are deepened, enriched and enlivened.
Any searches whatever the field conducted only through abstraction intrinsically uproot us from our living, embodied, felt processes of becoming.
Hi Leslie,
2) I think I see the point you are making, but Dr. Long writes, “Nirguna Brahman corresponds to Whitehead’s understanding of creativity as nonactual and formless” (p. 268). In contrast, Sarguna Brahman seems to refer
to the joint entity that they [the world and God] together constitute the word theocosm–the God-world complex. This Western, Greek term would correspond to the Vedantic concept of Saguna Brahman.
I wonder if Ishvara fulfills roles closer to Whitehead’s God (pages 268-269).
Hi Leslie,
(1) Your question reminds me of a Sufi story about when God created humans and told the angels to bow down to them. The brightest angel, the angel closest to God, Lucifer, was so in love with God that he never took his eyes off of him and therefore refused to turn away from God to bow down to humans. God banished Lucifer from his presence, which was hell for Lucifer, but Lucifer kept himself alive on his memory of God.
Lucifer is one extreme, spiritual pride, a being so committed to God that he did not know how to value human, everyday life, and therefore has no appreciation for how God ingresses in the human realm affording creative transformative opportunities which God treasures and returned to us as all our relations. Can we say that how God (Brahman) participates in the world in this way is Brahman too? In this Sufi story, Lucifer is so god-inflated that he does not know how to come out and participate in the whole that is Brahman.
Then there are those who are so engrossed in the material and abstract that they have forgotten how to presence with the whole. They are fused with left-brained, abstracted, arrogant, go-and-get-’em grasping, lost in the fallacy of misplaced concreteness, mistaking their own endless re-presentations for true reality that is none other than Brahman. Interesting how the fallacy of misplaced concreteness functions in greed and power and control over others. Both the Luciferian and left-brained options are forms of frozen imprisonment divorced from the sacred that I know too well from my own experience.
If I understood Dr. Long, he described a need, rather than getting lost in Maya as illusion, to discover Maya’s creative power by recognizing everything as Brahman, including everyday life (Maya). Rather than viewing the world through a left-brained, abstracted, fragmented lens focused on collecting the most objects, it is vital for us to shift into right-brained relational presencing with the whole, alive to the emerging, deeply experienced specifics of life situated and valued in the light of the whole that we are. Nurturing this in ourselves as the deep teleology of our true becoming, valuing Maya as the way back to Brahman.
It seems to me Whitehead helps us understand how the sacred/God participates in our life in this way by sharing with us our interrelatedness with all our relations as well as by inspiring us through sacred ingression how we may return to wholeness in our everyday lives.
Hi Scott,
Sounds like you have cultivated something very wonderful!
Have you found the values you orient to in changing your dreams has changed with experience? It seems to me that my most important dreams conveyed to me more than I already knew and that sometimes the parts I would want to rewrite had important information for me. I know my tendency is to over-compensate, to push down unwelcome feelings and push on and I have had to work hard to be open to the always more of my feelings. What has your experience been?
Warm regards,
Bill
Chris, your sensitive response to my words and to what I was trying to feel into and explicate deepens my resonance and wonder for what we are participating in. Such joy to be out in the open together!
What a lovely, evocative post, Chris, thank you.
You have inspired me to try to explicate what emerges in me reflecting on your passage. What interests me most is how coming alive to the fluid river of our body-environment-becoming involves experientially feeling our past-in-the-present so that we can more richly take in all that all our relations are implying, creating ripe conditions for a creative occurrence to happen into us, carried forward as new becoming.
Taking in more of the always-more that the past is implying in us involves more than our past, but also sacred ingression of our possibilities in the present as we lean into the future.
For example, turning towards suffering within us, saying hello to it, and attempting to more richly resonate with it, we may feel the sacred affordance of compassion arising as grace to help orient us to more sensitively feeling and understanding what has and is happening, so that we open into a new way of understanding the past and carrying this forward as transformation. This new way of becoming/being/experiencing for us is treasured by the sacred and returned to us as our new past within the context of everything else that is happening in the cosmos. Who could tease past, present and future apart in how time and space are afforded to us as organic and fluid possibilities intrinsic to carrying our body environment life processes forward?
Is objective immortality heaven treasuring all our relations’ transformed becoming and returning this to us as our now transformed and refreshed past? Does objective immortality include heaven’s sacred ingression in our new becoming? Are we the expression of heaven and earth marrying and birthing us anew, transforming all of us, including heaven and earth?
Gendlin loved the ancient Greek letter theta as a symbol for this creative experiential going into the past and carrying it forward as creative transformative becoming. He noted how this creates a new past, a past understood from within the context of our new becoming. The International Focusing Institute uses the theta symbol as its logo, as you can see here: https://focusing.org/
Hi Jeremy,
I am more familiar with Buddhist perspectives on karma. It sounds like there may be a lot of overlap with Hinduism, but I am not sure. From my Buddhist training, the greatest freedom when it comes to karma lies in our wholesome intentions to change. That seems a rich point of connection with Whitehead, how the sacred can inspire us to wholesome intention and action.
For example, Buddhist scriptures describe the Buddha after his awakening reflecting that it might be too subtle and difficult to share his realization with others. Brahma Sahampati, the god of love and creativity came to him and inspired him to teach, saying,
Venerable sir, let the Blessed One teach the Dhamma, let the Sublime One teach the Dhamma. There are beings with little dust in their eyes who are wasting through not hearing the Dhamma. There will be those who will understand the Dhamma.
What a wonderful example of the divine lure, here inspiring the Buddha into his lifelong vocation, he taught from the age of 35 when he awakened to when he passed away 80 years old. His last words were a deeply compassionate sharing with the monks closest to him, “Things fall apart, tread the path with care.”
By the way, the Brahma viharas (Brahma’s dwellings) in Buddhism are metta (friendliness/loving kindness, wishing wellbeing for others), karuna (compassion), mudita (sympathetic joy: feeling happy when others feel wholesome joy) and upekkhā (equnimity). The brahmaviharas were shorthand for liberation among the ascetics with whom Gotama practiced. Gotama repurposed the brahmaviharas to suit the dhamma/dharma (the principles and practices of awakening) he developed.
Metta,
Bill
Rilke’s first sonnet in The Sonnets of Orpheus is a deeply moving invocation to the temple the breath of nourishing insight creates within us, interiority coming alive to how heaven and earth birth and inspire us to participate more fully.
I
A tree ascended there. Oh pure transcendence!
Oh Orpheus sings! Oh tall tree in the ear!
And all all things hushed. Yet even in that silence
a new beginning, beckoning, change appeared.Creatures of stillness crowded from the bright
unbound forest, out of their lairs and nests;
and it was not from any dullness, not
from fear, that they were so quiet in themselves,but from just listening. Bellow, roar, shriek
seemed small inside their hearts. And
where there had been
at most a makeshift hut to receive the music,a shelter nailed up out of their darkest longing,
with an entryway that shuddered in the wind–
you built a temple deep inside their hearing.Rainer Maria Rilke. (1993). I, The Sonnets to Orpheus. Trans by Stephen Mitchell. Boston: Shambhala.
I remember my wonder many years ago at first reading this sonnet in my makeshift hut nailed up out of my darkest longing, this glimpse of Hokhmah’s temple, invitation to come out to play, to come home to new becoming. May we walk in beauty.
Hi Evan,
I was deeply moved when Sandra Lubarsky, instead of the wordlessness of political agnosticism, shared with us in her lecture:
I am grieving what I believe is the betrayal of Jewish values by the nation of Israel. And I also believe that one of the immediate tasks before those of whom are involved in doing Jewish theology is to actually retrieve the shared history of Judaism and to create forms of Judaism that are not dominated by the two historic events of the 20th century by the Holocaust and the State of Israel.
I felt less alone, more included and inspired, hearing that, something I continue to reflect on, and with friends. Your sharing this poem by an Israeli poet is such a beautiful response, every verse!
They said we will cup our hands around each heart.
We will sing the earth’s song, the song of water,
a song so beautiful that vengeance will turn to weeping,
the mourners will embrace, and grief replace
every impulse toward harm.I love how simple and ready this grandmother is:
You who are reading this, I am bringing bandages
and a bag of scented guavas from my trees. I think
I remember the tune. Meet me at the corner.
Let’s go.Thank you,
Bill
I am curious, Eric, about your statement, “The term “Christian freethinker” is probably an oxymoron, and any Christian espousing atheism, probably isn’t a Christian.” Do you mean that there are not Christian “freethinkers”, some who even espouse atheism? Or do you mean even if they claim to be Christian, they really are not? Because there are a range of Christian leaders and theologians, such as Bishop Spong who views the Bible as deeply meaningful in a metaphorical, mythological sense, to more radically atheistic ones such as Don Cupitt who rejects any metaphysical claims and insists what we mean by religion needs to be radically reinvented.
I wonder what would need to change in our world to reorient us in the way you are suggesting given everything that is so easily described, such as what W.J. Astore in his post today on Bracing Views described as “the MICIMATT: the military-industrial-congressional-intelligence-media-academe-think-tank complex”? Seems to me, it is worth serving the direction you are sensing, but I’m afraid things are going to get darker now before they get better. Still, I’m grateful that we get to show up for what matters to us, to play our small part in the whole of it. Yanis Varoufakis, the Greek socialist economist, says we have already moved out of capitalism into a new cloud-based feudalism.
Thank you Leslie and Evan for your warm-hearted, soulful responses to my post, for hearing me so deeply! It brings me such gratitude and joy.
All my relations, Evan! Thank you for these open-hearted words. Resonating with them, I understand another dimension of a dream I had two or three years ago, how the welcoming people in the dream, are all my relations welcoming me/us home into new becoming. I thought I was meeting them for the first time and was bewildered by their warmth, how they were meeting me like a long lost friend, welcoming me home, this prodigal son.