Bill Gayner
If you orient to the early Pali cannon, but take the gods out, as the secular Buddhist do, you risk losing the very potentials for meaningful transformative becoming Whitehead recognizes we need God for. My sense is that theistic and polytheistic and the various theisms may function as more than simply arbitrary desperate or privileged projections on reality (of course, they can also function that way too), but may also be deeply meaningful attempts to point to transformative experiential processes oriented and inspired by values emerging from presencing with the always more of the whole in which we are participating. I know this from my own experiencing.
It is possible to know how to enact such transformative processes without imagining oneself as entering into deeper experiential relationship with God or with a god, but is it possible to create a coherent metaphysics that truly welcomes experiencing as transformational becoming in a way that is also coherent with science without God or gods? Of course, there are many who are trying, for example, nontheistic Buddhist cognitive scientists and philosophers such as John Vervaeke, but he is learning much from his dialogues with various kinds of theists such as Orthodox Christians and Matt Segall, and Vervaeke bases so much on neo-Platonism. There is much in Buddhism that functions as a kind of God, even if with the mythology supposedly all stripped out. For example, Buddha nature, interbeing etc. I find myself inspired by and appreciating Whitehead’s philosophy of organism and the central role God plays in it, and I am looking forward to hearing about the role of the primary principle of creativity.
Gordon, how interesting, thank you so much for this! I look forward to hearing from Dr. Davis.
I find the metaphor of wet-nurse (tithēnē) or “foster mother” very evocative, fitting with the metaphors I was riffing with and reminding me now of how Hera’s symbols include the cuckoo bird who lays its eggs in other birds’ nests to raise them, Hera, the queen of the gods who oversees the hero’s transformational journey involving or perhaps culminating in her heiros gamos, the sacred marriage of opposites, which Jung viewed as key in individuation, journeys which Hercules (Heracles, Hera’s glory, her spouse-son in a pre-Greek cult) underwent, journey marrying underworld, mortal and divinity, and which I feel Dionysos’ myths suggest as well. It was Hera who tormented Hercules and Dionysos, setting the challenges that set them free.
Hi Joel,
I want to say yes, and yet am having to feel into this to discover how to say more than that. Seems to me Whitehead is invoking here “the higher Aphrodite” — the reason both “cosmetic” and “cosmos” share the same root, that epiphany in which the whole comes into focus in our experiencing as we come alive oriented to deep values like wonder, awe, compassion and appreciation. In Bottecelli’s La Primavera, Hermes is pointing upwards, indicating, I have heard, the higher Aphrodite.
Miriam Webster dictionary dephines epiphany as:
1: capitalized : January 6 observed as a church festival in commemoration of the coming of the Magi as the first manifestation of Christ to the Gentiles or in the Eastern Church in commemoration of the baptism of Christ
2: an appearance or manifestation especially of a divine being
3: (1) a usually sudden manifestation or perception of the essential nature or meaning of something
(2) an intuitive grasp of reality through something (such as an event) usually simple and striking
(3) a. an illuminating discovery, realization, or disclosure
b. a revealing scene or momentReminds me of how if we presence with suffering, taking in the whole of what our felt sense of the situation is implying, compassion tends to arise. Feels to me like compassion is an epiphany, a gift from opening more deeply to the whole by allowing ourselves to resonate with suffering, a value that orients us to how to take the whole in even more deeply yet and to respond emerging from transformation with our whole being, the way the beauty of a flower perhaps lures bees not out of greed, but a deeper relationship valuing about how to live serving and celebrating the whole. Deep beauty. That Navaho prayer:
With beauty below me may I walk. With beauty above me may I walk. With beauty all around me may I walk. In old age wandering on a trail of beauty, lively, may I walk.
Presencing free of confusing emotions, free from craving, the world discloses its deeper beauty to us and we discover ourselves moved by feelings that orient us to deep values such as wonder, awe, gratitude, loyalty, faith, courage and love. Appreciating and discovering ourselves participating in higher beauty includes feeling values that bring us fully to life motivated to live in deeply engaged and fulfilling ways. In this sense, it seems to me, beauty is deeply moving coherence that orients and moves us to respond in deeply fulfilling ways.
Hi Evan,
Thank you so much for introducing this vital theme in our reflections, it is so important. I expect you may be right about naming this as a shodow of process-relational thought, but I have seen and read some of this tradition’s treatment of this theme, for example, Catherine Keller’s work. It would be very disappointing to learn that there are not many others.
Mind you, all the major religions were coopted by state power.
I also can speak as someone deeply influenced by Buddhism who over-idealized Buddhism, as we do tend to do in exploring anything new, having experienced two rounds of teacher wrong-doing in two different Buddhist communities and then made a study of the shadow in religion and spirituality.
I would just like to name a process that interests me greatly how the grounded earthy spacious friendliness that emerges in so many practices such as mindfulness, loving kindness practice and prayer, while a holistic-intuitive process, still carries within it frozen processes (as all our holistic processes do) that may want to emphasize letting go of difficulties and not remember or know how to turn towards suffering that does not want to let go, and say hello to it, discovering ways to resonate with it, explicating this to deepen our experiencing of all the situation is implying, discovering compassion for suffering emerging as a divine lure emerging out of everything interaffecting everything, orienting us and creating a felt shift transformation that carries us into more coherent, responsive, engaged ways of participating in the world. I am finding Whitehead is helping me to deepen my understanding of these kinds of processes. The kind of process that you are contributing to our discussion.
Wonderful, Chris. I am looking forward to seeing your new graphs as well.
Following up on your challenge, Eric, Eugene Gendlin’s phenomenological method, Thinking at the Edge (Gendlin, 2000-2004; Krycha, 2006), what is emphasized rather than starting with already formed ideas is coming alive to the felt sense of some process you know well but have not yet articulated and then finding ways of expressing this where you allow your words to have new meanings. (After all, words always have new situation-specific meanings that are usually not noticed by people in our civilization.) He encourages practitioners to allow themselves to transform the meanings of the words they use in order to reflect richly what they are trying to explicate. The steps in his methodology indicate ways of creating new theory from this that can be deeply situated within whichever literatures you are familiar and then tested.
Gendlin, like Heidegger and Dilthey before him (Scharff, 2019), emphasized coming alive to what Gendlin named “the felt sense” of our experiencing free of a priori assumptions. And then discovering what words and ways of speaking might be alive to the always more of our felt sense. So here, the felt sense of our interdependent becoming is allowed to precede and go further than whatever already formed ideas we might have. Gendlin’s career was devoted to studying this process and showing how it was present throughout the history of philosophy.
References
Gendlin, ET (2000-2004). Introduction to “Thinking at the Edge”. The Folio, Vol. 19, No. 1Krycka, KC. (2006) Thinking at the edge: Where theory and practice meet to create fresh understandings, Indo-Pacific Journal of Phenomenology, 6: sup1, 1-10, DOI: 10.1080/20797222.2006.11433935.
Scharff, Robert C. (2019). Heidegger becoming phenomenological (New Heidegger Research) Rowman & Littlefield Publishers. Kindle Edition.
I’m reminded of Neil Douglas-Klotz’s latest (2022) translation of Jesus’ prayer from the Aramaic, the language he and his followers spoke, the first four lines in particular. The words orient us to how coming alive through the felt sense of our body, heart and soul to creativity birthing the cosmos and our own becoming, how from this aliveness emerges a sense of empowered possibility and direction. Shem is the signature felt presence of a being, here it is the signature presence of creativity’s birthing, parenting of the cosmos.
Abwun d’bashmaya (“Our Father which art in heaven” Matthew 6:9, KJV)
O birthing, parenting of the cosmos,
you are creating all that moves and changes,
to and from, within and along with
a boundless wave of light and sound [and I want to add “feeling”](p. 30-33)
Nethqadash shmakh (“Hallowed be your name.” Matthew 6:9)…
The prayer asks that shmakh, “your shem,” the light or sound of reality that connects all communities—human and those of the natural world—provide the centering, focusing light of our lives.
(p. 33-34)
Teyte malkutakh (“Thy kingdom come.” Matthew 6:10)
These roots, MLK (also found in the Hebrew melech and the Arabic malik) show a fiery vision focused through a personal center, the heart. This vision of where to go or what to do is combined with the energy needed to accomplish it. One can see how this was a necessary leadership trait for guiding a group with no fixed home.
(p. 34-35)
Nehwe sabyanach aykana d’bashmaya aph b’arah (“Thy will be done in earth as it is in heaven.” Matthew 6:10)
This line is the heart of the whole prayer. The activity of leba, heart, expresses itself though what Aramaic calls saba, present here in the form of the second word sabyanach.7 Usually translated as “will,” a better translation is “heart’s desire.” It brings the vision received in fire and light as malkuta deeply into our hearts and prompts us to initiate action. We no longer need to think about a change we are making in life; it is already part of us. As we act, we begin to witness the change happening all around us, even if it is not yet fully completed. This line of the prayer affirms that sabyanach, “your saba,” working through the individual and collective hearts of humanity, can bring shmaya, our communal, shared life, together with arah, our individual life and purpose.
(p. 36)
I hear in “the heart’s desire” how the Friend lures us from within ourselves into becoming freshly and creatively on the path opening before us. Looking forward to reading about it this week and hearing Dr. Davis’ reflections on this.
Reference
Douglas-Klotz, Neil. 2022. Revelations of the Aramaic Jesus: The Hidden Teachings on Life and Death. Hampton Roads Publishing.Wow, very inspiring and mind-expanding, Daniel, thank you so much!
I’m looking forward to watching Chimp Empire and reading The Soul of an Octupus, thanks for the references, Evan and Thom! Amazing to reflect how this octupi whom so many imagine as an alien from another planet may best reflect the true nature of our souls. I wonder if our distance from octupi and fungi may measure how alienated we are from our soul. I’m reminded of Robert Sardello’s (1991) words:
“This circulating force or power I shall call soul, and to make clear that what I am calling soul has little to do with individual life alone, by soul I shall always imply the soul of the world as a way of referring to the inseparable conjunction of individual and world; and further, this is always a conjunction in depth.”
Dr. Davis, I’m savouring a dialectic between appreciating the truth, on the one hand, in the words:
“”…we have the ability to say no to instinct upon moral grounds.” In a sense we feel a call beyond our animality, but so often we descend lower than them in our treatment of the earth.” But, on the other, how often animals respond better to the values animating and inspiring all creatures. I wonder about how much of the problem is not instincts but rather conflicts and unfinished business within us, our uprootedness from soul, leaving us fused with whatever unintegrated, fragmented, so often suppressing self-aspect gets into the driver’s seat. So often what’s needed, it seems to me, rather than saying no to instinct, is compassion and appreciation for the uprooted/uprooting self-aspect, our compassion and appreciation emerging from deeper participation in the good earth of our becoming.
Reference
Sardello, Robert. 1991, 2004. Facing the World with Soul: The Reimagination of Modern Life. Great Barrinton, MA: Lindisfarne Press.If I recall Wittgenstein pointed out how the meanings of words are always situation-specific, providing many such examples. Eugene Gendlin carried this forward, showing how the situated meanings of each word are infinite, and how words come alive with fresh meanings if we allow a felt sense of each situation we participate in to emerge.
Seems to me our society-wide convention that words have fixed meanings is part of what Gendlin called “the public language barrier” that separates us from our own becoming in the world and from discovering how words alive to our felt sense can help carry our becoming forward in creative, fulfilling ways.
My sense is the point you are making, Jeremy, is that as we learn more of Whitehead’s words and their complex interrelationships, our felt sense for their interrelationship is enriched and the words take on new dimensions of meanings. This really comes alive as we experience how the words enable us to more sensitively explicate our felt sense of experiencing and reflecting on our own life and world.
I love the phrase you quote, Dr. Davis, “words for Whitehead “are played with, stretched, turned over, and expanded, almost like little universes of meaning themselves.”” Whitehead’s words function “almost like little universes of meaning” because to understand them we need to come alive to a felt sense about what Whitehead’s philosophy points to in such a richly differentiated way, our mutual togetherness and participation in the universe, and affording new perspectives on this.
Kathleen, seems to me the question you are asking about whether contemporary process-relational philosophers and theologians have had to find new words to express how their tradition is evolving would be a litmus test for whether process-relational philosophy is a living tradition that embodies the transformational values Whitehead described as intrinsic in our becoming. I’m reminded of how the secular dharma teacher Stephen Batchelor often cites MacIntyre (1984):
“In After Virtue, the Scottish philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre recognizes that “a living tradition . . . is an historically extended, socially embodied argument, and an argument . . . about the goods which constitute that tradition.”25 Central to such a concept of tradition, he maintains, “is that the past is never something merely to be discarded, but rather that the present is intelligible only as a commentary upon and response to the past, in which the past, if necessary and if possible, is corrected and transcended, yet corrected and transcended in a way that leaves the present open to being in turn corrected and transcended by some yet more adequate future point of view.”” (Batchelor, 2015, p. 20)
References
Batchelor, Stephen. 2015. After Buddhism: Rethinking the Dharma for a Secular Age. Yale University Press. Kindle Edition.MacIntyre, Alasdair. 1984. After virtue: A study in moral theory. Second ed. Notre Dame, Indiana: University of Notre Dame Press.
Thank you for sharing something about your life with me, sounds like you are living it in a deep, engaged way.
Wow, Daniel, what a helpful, furthering post for me, thank you! I love how you ended on a question, pointing me in the direction of what was emerging in me reading your words.
I don’t know Plato’s usage, but sounds like Whitehead is talking about receptacles that receive, hold, transform and generously release, furthering, the receptacle that holds us the way a mother holds a child, the magical mutual emotional coregulating dance of love and concern and delight, that then releases the child from her secure base (optimally) into developmental tasks like pretending to be a super hero, feeling how that changes one’s experience of self and world. I love how all the great technologies (like surfing, not that I surf) provide numinous sacred metaphors and here I am reminded of the cauldron. The cauldron, formed by the ancient alchemy of going into mother earth and bringing out and combining these gifts to create metal and hammer it into a pot, a receptacle, a cauldron that can contain the food to be cooked for our sustenance (more gifts received from the earth) or as offerings to the gods. Takes a while to make or bring such a cauldron into focus in our lives in a way we can work with it. It’s vital when cooking to know how to work with all five elements, for example, how to start a fire and tend it so that it doesn’t burn too bright so that the cauldron boils over (Icarus, so much of my young adulthood, how it hurts when you hit the ground), nor go out and contents inside go bad (been there too, but even the darkening of depression serves alchemical purposes; as Leonard Cohen wrote and sang, “You wanted it darker.”).
Interesting how some traditions wait to see if someone has formed that cauldron in their life, knows how the cauldron is formed by working with the constraints and possibilities of our life in a way that we know how to be cooked, transformed, and cultivating the discipline of freedom, how this can emerge about the age of 40. I’m speaking as someone who is 64 years old. It’s about understanding how the disciplines of work and love forge us so we know how to work with the gifts of this life to produce food for ourselves, our family, our friends and community and for the gods. How the earth of our life, everything interaffecting everything, is moved by the creative principle and also lured by the sacred friend so that we can give ourself joyfully and gratefully releasing into the next moment, participating in and changing both earth and heaven, discovering a path for ourselves from our ancestors, the wise, and the sacred that can be of use to others.
Gotama said we need to learn to work with our life like a farmer cultivating a field or a fletcher shaping an arrow.
John Tarrant, a Zen teacher and Jungian analyst, in his wonderful book The Light Inside the Dark, draws on Dante’s Inferno using purgatory as a metaphor. How souls in purgatory pick up their cross, the tension of the horizontal constraints of their life, situation and personality and the vertical beam of sacred invitation, inspiration and possibility. They pick up their cross with each step forward filling them with joy and gratitude, because it takes them closer to God. I want to say because God moves through them from below as the creative principle infusing everything interaffecting everything and also as God, the sacred lure, friend, for example, Jesus, Brahma or Dionysos smiling, taking us by the hand, and inspiring us with what could be, to follow them. I’m reminded of the ancient phrase, do this in my name! How “name” in the ancient languages meant the signature presence of a being. How the signature presence/way of a being is remembered by the living cosmos as part of the rich ways of carrying forward afforded and cocreated freshly by us all.
For me, if we are going to draw on Freud, rather than “ego”, I prefer a phrase I read was closer to his German, “the I”. Only two words that are not proper nouns that are capitalized in English, “I” and “God”. We have to take care not to reify (thingify) and therefor lose them, but allow ourselves to feel the wind filling our sails and carrying us to Naxos, Dionysos’ birth place, the original wine god, or to Bethlehem or the bodhi tree.
What’s the secret sauce? I want to say how we get to discover and participate in friendliness, compassion, appreciation and homecoming. The ascetic tradition of Gotama’s time referred to a list like this as the brahmaviharas (dwelling with Brahma, the god of creativity and love; supreme god). Vihara means dwelling and also came to refer to the places Buddhist monks dwelled. The brahmaviharas was shorthand for liberation practices. Gotama took the brahmaviharas of his day up and repurposed them for his own ends, part of what got cooked in and served from his cauldron. They are often translated as friendliness, compassion, sympathetic joy and equanimity. But accepting his invitation in the cauldron of my own life, I have found that discovering fresh ways and words are part of the legacy he gave to us.
Beautifully put, Jamie, thank you for your reflections on the power of this phrase “mutual immanence”, I deeply resonate with what you are saying here. It feels like there is so much here that Whitehead helps us feel into more deeply about how how creativity infuses this and how it makes sense that values and eternal objects and creative possibilities emerge from this mutual immanence and so much about receiving everything into us and becoming something fresh, creative and unique. Thank you!
Thank you for your reply, Evan. Sounds like you have a deep exploration of the topic you shared happening. Did you say you are a psychologist in your week 2 comment? I looked for your self introduction in the introduction section on our forum but did not see it, it would be interesting to hear more about how all this fits together for you. I am a social worker providing individual, couple and group psychotherapy in private practice.
We live in dark, fascinating times full of opportunities for those of us with privilege, to learn, heal, grow and serve. Isn’t that what privilege affords? It still shocks me how little the powerful settle for when we could be cultivating together the generous paradise we have been born into for the benefit of us all. Who needs a mega yacht or private plane or rocket ship if you could contribute to that? Gotama lived to see the deaths of the kings who had supported him and the genocide of his own people. A monk disillusioned by the Buddha’s lack of power in protecting the Buddha’s own homeland a third time from this invasion disrobed and returned to his (the disrobed monk’s) own homeland telling the ruling congress of his people that the Buddha lacked special powers and was only teaching freedom from craving (i.e., greed, hatred and delusion). Gotama, hearing this, remarked, he praises me without knowing it. How important for us to avail ourselves of wisdom teachings such as everything we who are participating in this course have learned already and what Whitehead offers, so that we too can better keep in mind and recognize how things fall apart, and continue discovering our unique path with deepening care, wonder and appreciation for all.
Hi Kathleen,
It strikes me that most of sleep is unconscious but that some people are able to become conscious during sleep and they report it is something we can cultivate, not that I have tried. But I have become conscious while dreaming a couple of times and there have been many times where I don’t become fully conscious, but there is a kind of engagement that approaches it. That continuum of more or less conscious seems to me to suggest how experience extends beyond consciousness, as does our ability to remember dreams which were not conscious, but which keep giving so much to us, such rich ways to receive even more from the always more, that vast creativity Jesus spoke to as Alaha and Abwoon. I love your words about this, “Certainly dreams reveal the great creativity in us”, what Whitehead spoke of as the most fundamental principle. It says so much about our externalizing civilization that dreams are not taken more seriously.