Bill Gayner
Yes, Roni, I agree and well said, we are living in a dysfunctional cosmology of the market and consumerism, the most heavily surveilled and propagandized society ever, in a self-reinforcing system that manufactures consent uprooting people from deeply participating in and caring for our world and each other in fulfilling ways. But there is also so much goodness in people, our world, and ordinary life that when we find ourselves already here, deeply embedded and valuing the world, in the wholeness of feeling and making sense of situations and life, we can live our lives one step at a time in deeply meaningful ways. I love the Buddha’s dying words, “Things fall apart, tread the path with care.”
Hi Dennis, Joshua, George and Nelson,
I love Griffins’ paper. I recall being deeply impressed by Catherine Keller’s. I also love James Hillman’s paper. I was a huge fan of his decades ago, loved the way he would shift gears and everything deepened, and then again, in deeper we go! But over time, I couldn’t find a way of using his writings as a path, not enough heart and body for me, it was way too Gemini, Mercury, for me. He owns his shadow in his paper, really impressive. Yes and I have thoroughly enjoyed Thomas Moore.
My sense is archetypes require what Whitehead’s wife recommended, seeing his system from all sides and within. I like how you, Joshua, in responding to us, build on Griffin, in terms of “the cumulative effect of the repetition of particular forms of experience… [and] the central importance of that dimension of experience called variously inspiration, daemonic, nonrational, numinous” (Griffin, 1989, pp 73-740) and include eternal objects, bringing in the whole of God’s nature and how God helps us find our way through what otherwise be combinatorially explosive as John Vervaeke says. Including all of that and creativity too allows for creative evolution and learning by all of us participating in life, including God.
But there’s more here that archetypes and Whitehead don’t address for me, and that is the feel of sages from the past, ancestors, gods and angels participating in our creative becoming and responsively presencing with us. Seems to me we need to draw on Jung and Whitehead to creatively grow the legacy they left, discovering relations and terms that reflect our fresh discoveries in wildfire phenomenology (McDaniel cites Davis in the introduction to Faber’s Depths As Yet Unspoken).
I’m not sure that Whitehead has anything like Dante’s Celestial Rose… but he does say we are perishing into God in each moment, and being immortalized. Are we participating in earth and heaven, dancing in and out of time, like dolphins out of the water and back in again? Perhaps it is our immortalized processes that enable us to presence with ancestors, sages from the past, angels and gods and goddesses? But in so far as I have experienced this, I discover the angels, gods and goddesses in the creative togetherness that is continually birthing us and all my relations, as if they are helping God in cultivating the cosmos, perhaps by embodying through us the very processes they pioneered in their own becoming before they were immortalized, like the Earth or Jesus for example. Also, it seems like God is not the only actual entity that is not an actual occasion. Like ancient sages, ancestors, gods and angels presencing with us now. Are there more actual entities than God participating in becoming with us? Who has worked on these questions in process theology? One last thought: perhaps the difference between gods and God only makes sense when we come out in the open to play with all our relations, participating in becoming much more playfully than the seriousness late capitalism requires. Perhaps the difference between one God, a trinity with angels and saints, and a pantheon of gods is deeply playfully.
Thank you so much, Dennis. I wonder if Jacob’s ancestral vs thinking mind can be compared to Iain McGilchrist’s left and brain hemispheres theory? McGilchrist can show thousands of studies that indicate we perform better when the right brain mode is orienting the left. The left tends to suppress the right, but they function better when they are integrated.
I think of Teasdale, one of the developers of Mindfulness-Based Cognitive Therapy describing how working memory can entrain the integration of feeling and thinking, or just thinking, or not function at all, leaving us at the mercy of whatever impulse strikes us.
Seems to me that just being entrained with thinking we are only drawing on half of what is already whole in concresence, conceptual prehension, whereas rich forms of presencing oriented to the right brain include both physical and conceptual prehension. Because it includes physical prehension, such a mode can access the whole history of the cosmos, including our ancestors and sages optimal salient in our becoming–perhaps overlapping with what Jacobs calls ancestral mind.
Chris, I am so glad you are participating in the course! I wondered if Joshua and Matt had asked you to participate to contribute on the forum!
I loved your classes on indigenous lifeways in our Whitehead and World Religions and Lifeways courses this year and last. Thank you for sharing your PhD thesis All My Relations with me. I am reading slowly through it, well into the indigenous part now, and am being deeply influenced by it.
Thank you so much, Rick, for resonating with my words, responding and coming out to play.
Dennis, I am wondering what you (and, it seems, Whitehead) mean by “directly experience.” Given that everything is interrelated do we directly experience everything or is everything mediated by everything thing else? Another example, according to contemporary emotion theory, emotions organize our whole neurophysiology before we consciously experience them. They didn’t evolve to be experienced consciously, they evolved to move us into a rapid responses. For example, if I am about to be hit by a truck, the terror moves me to jump out of the way before I barely have a thought about it, and the terror does not hit until I am on the sidewalk and my knees buckle. Another example, I remember standing up at a dinner party in my 20s and shouting, “I’m not angry!” before I realized to my horror and shame what everyone else in the room already knew: I was angry.
High levels of experiencing, presencing, feeling the felt sense, we tend to take in earlier on how the past is influencing the present and then if we symbolize this in ways that are richly alive to the felt sense, this can create ripe conditions for felt shift transformations of frozen suffering as well as how we experience self and other. It is interesting how high levels of experiencing reflect the genetic dipolar prehension, first taking in physical prehension and then symbolically prehending and enacting the creative possibilities afforded us. We don’t have to say that we “directly experience” dipolar prehension to notice its patterns rippling through us in time organizing our experiencing.
So even if it is not direct, can we not say when we consciously feel how the past is influencing in the present in experiencing, are we not in some way feeling physical prehension? When we find our feelings bringing the beauty of the trees waving in the wind, are we not experiencing symbolic prehension of what causal efficacy was already implying through us?
To your point about the dangers of “being,” Frans, in coining the term “interbeing,” Thich Nhat Hanh wanted to take people “beyond the dualistic notions of being and nonbeing, and [help] us not to be afraid of nonbeing” (Hanh, 2017, p. 27). I love how in trying to explain the heart of emptiness, he first thought to use the word “togetherness” but someone thought it was “too strange,” so he went with “interbeing”:
“Interbeing” is a word that is not in the dictionary yet, but if we combine the prefix “inter-” with the verb “to be,” we have a new verb: inter-be.
The word interbeing was born while I was leading a retreat at Tassajara Zen Center in the mountains of California in the 1980s. I was teaching about emptiness and I did not have a sheet of paper with me to illustrate the point, so I used an empty wooden chair. I invited everyone to look carefully into the chair to see the presence of the forest, the sunshine, the rain, and the clouds. I explained that the chair was not subject to birth and death, nor could it be described in terms of being or nonbeing. I asked them whether there was a word in French or English that could describe how the chair existed along with all the other non-chair elements. I asked if the word “togetherness” would do. Somebody said that it sounded strange, so I suggested the word “interbeing.”
The insight of interbeing can help us understand the Heart of the Prajñāpāramitā Sutra more easily and the teachings on emptiness more clearly. Interbeing takes us beyond the dualistic notions of being and nonbeing, and helps us not to be afraid of nonbeing.
Hanh, Thich Nhat. 2017. The Other Shore: A New Translation of the Heart Sutra with Commentaries (p. 27). (Function). Kindle Edition.
In David Ray Griffin’s introduction to Archetypal Process: Self and Divine in Whitehead, Jung, and Hillman, a book he edited of papers from a gathering of Whitehead and Jungian/archetypal psychology scholars including especially James Hillman, Griffin notes of the papers in the book:
Most authors see parallels between Jungian archetypes and some feature of Whitehead’s thought, with Hopper suggesting eternal objects, otherwise called pure possibilities, whereas Cobb and Keller look to the actual world, speaking, as I have, of the cumulative effect of the repitition of particular forms of experience. Slusser, Keller and Heisig also suggest a parallel between Jungian archetypes and the divinely derived “initial aim” in Whiteheadian thought. This suggestion is part of another similarity, especially stressed by Slusser, Sellery, and Heisig, this being the central importance of that dimension of experience called variously inspiration, daemonic, nonrational, numinous.
(Griffin, 1989, pp 73-740)Mind you, Sheri Kling would have a lot to say about this too.
You are very welcome, Kathleen. It is a very moving experience leading into rich discussions.
I have provided the references for all the selections.
Hi Montgommery,
I love the poem, thank you! It reminds me of this Rilke excerpt from Letters to a Young Poet:
Here, where I am surrounded by an enormous landscape, which the winds move across as they come from the seas, here I feel that there is no one anywhere who can answer for you those questions and feelings which, in their depths, have a life of their own; for even the most articulate people are unable to help, since what words point to is so very delicate, is almost unsayable. But even so, I think that you will not have to remain without a solution if you trust in Things that are like the ones my eyes are now resting upon. If you trust in Nature, in the small Things that hardly anyone sees and that can so suddenly become huge, immeasurable; if you have this love for what is humble and try very simply, as someone who serves, to win the confidence of what seems poor: then everything will become easier for you, more coherent and somehow more reconciling, not in your conscious mind perhaps, which stays behind, astonished, but in your innermost awareness, awakeness, and knowledge… I would like to beg you, dear Sir, as well as I can, to have patience with everything unresolved in your heart and to try to love the questions themselves as if they were locked rooms or books written in a very foreign language. Don’t search for the answers, which could not be given to you now, because you would not be able to live them. And the point is, to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps then… you will gradually, without even noticing it, live your way into the answer.
Rainer Maria Rilke (1875 – 1926)
Letters to a Young Poet, Letter Four, Stephen Mitchell translation
http://www.sfgoth.com/~immanis/rilke/letter4.htmlI am enjoying your beautiful photos, haiku and commentary. This haiku and its commentary:
climbing a hillside
where orange daylilies bloom
letting worries goreminds me of a phrase I coined for a process in meditation and life, “feeling feeling lets go” in a way that already feels like a bit like home. Feeling feeling is when you feel something within you (like chest tensions or worries) or outside of you (like a hillside where orange daylilies bloom) and you feel them feeling you, and a friendliness lures us into deeper warmth and responsiveness, and the societies of societies of chest tensions and worries within me let go.
When frozen suffering does not want to let go, trying to feel feel with it, a sacred lure arises of compassion or other helpful emotions like adaptive anger or helpful grief and illuminates my feelings, helping me take in the frozen suffering even more deeply and setting up ripe conditions for a felt shift transformation into deeper coherence.
That deeper coherence can open into “feeling feeling with all our relations,” with lures like wonder and wondering emerging creating ripe conditions for felt shift transformations of how I experience self and lifeworld, self less foregrounded and all our relations coming out into the open to play together within, through and all around each other.
As feeling feeling with all our relations deepens, sometimes a lure welcomes us home, all the pores of our body and lifeworld opening and receiving us home, so that we come from the garden to the garden.
Both of us were delighted by your response, Andrew. Have a lovely day!
Warm regards,
Bill
Hi Andrew,
My husband, Sjarif, was a Taizé brother in Burgundy in the late 1990s, before deciding to leave the order. He went on to study culinary arts before becoming a lawyer. We live in downtown Toronto. He reflected with me just now what a big part of the communal life the music was — how it was beautiful, participatory, inviting, accessible and contributed to daily prayer and personal reflection.
Warm regards,
Bill
Hi Kathleen,
Thank you so much for your articulate, thoughtful response. And for your wonderful class. I am making my way through the video. My apologies for not attending, would have loved to attended and also to support you, but I am not able to attend most classes because evenings Eastern time are prime time in my work as a psychotherapist.
My apologies for this long response, in responding to you, you have inspired me to write in effect a new post.
You wrote:
To say what is real would be an endless conversation, one we are always engaged in.
Yes, when I feel into what your words evoke in me, it seems to me that participating deeply in the endless conversation that is our becoming, what McGilchrist and Merleau Pony refer to as presencing (i.e., rich ways of experiencing), exemplifies what is real. What is real is not abstract propositional truth, but feeling/experiencing.
I take heart from Whitehead’s affirmation of our experience, though I make no claims as to saying what exactly constitutes “the real” whose layers seem endless.
Yes, it seems to me the real, that is our experiencing, exemplified in the felt sense and rich forms of experiencing, has endless layers. Whitehead and Gendlin agree here. I learned from Gendlin that those who love the felt sense, value what is vague and murky as the threshold into rich experiencing, and the transformative path and sense of direction presencing affords. No pattern/abstraction can capture the whole felt sense, it is always more than any theory we have, but it also implies something very specific that we can explicate and carry forward. A theme which you immediately pick up here:
We experience but a small portion of it and with the amazing instrument of language we deepen the experience, our understanding of it, and ability to share it. It can even to impel us to action. Is that real?
I love that you are not reifying language here, committing the fallacy of misplaced concreteness, but also valuing language and writing and reading poetry as a means for deepening our experiencing in ways that help us deepen our understanding, ability to navigate life and communicate with others, and which motivate us to act, exemplifying dipolar prehension in concresence.
Is the fact that it is always pointing something beyond itself make it not real?
After careful study, I have happily decided by “it” you are referring to experiencing, i.e., are you asking, “Is the fact that experiencing is always pointing something beyond itself make it not real?” If I have that right, then… yes, yes, yes! The real, i.e., experiencing is always more than can be said, points beyond itself, as we participate with all our relations, the whole cosmos, in birthing the new.
Once placed on the page, a poem can seem more distanced from us and an abstract entity. Once taken up into mind and breath of the body it carries and expresses the energy of our being/becoming. Don’t take all this mumbo jumbo too seriously: mere words.
Feeling into the above paragraph, I find myself wondering, what is a poem? I wonder if carefully reading or remembering a poem we have memorized, our becoming physically prehends–births us as–the whole relevant history of the cosmos, all our relations, implicitly, and especially including the poet’s becoming in writing and living the poem, crossed with all of our own associations with the words and all the poem’s devices, and all that the poem inspired, how readers experienced the poem, the commentary and new poems, birthing in us along with God’s original aim inspiring and luring us, our fresh becoming. Perhaps religious scriptures function this way, for example, the dying Buddha encouraging his followers to look to their own life/experiencing and the dharma as their only singular refuge. Of course, the more steeped you are in a tradition and a given sage or poet, the more true your feel for them informing your becoming would be, but also always open to the possibilities of fresh transformations beyond what they anticipated.
Whitehead’s concept of physical prehension may help us understand the ancient pre-literate Greek understanding of how bards recited the epics by drawing on the Muses in remembering their gods and heroes, and their entire culture, in composing/remembering/reciting the epics, so that countless bards participated in composing the great epics.
Here’s Gregory Nagy explaining the ancient Greek view of this, a real metaphysical heresy in our modern, bifurcated world, although perhaps not for some process people.
The Idea of Kleos as Epic Narrative
In general, the word kleos applies to epic narrative as performed by the master Narrator of Homeric poetry. Etymologically, kleos is a noun derived from the verb kluein, ‘hear’, and it means ‘that which is heard’. In the Iliad, the master Narrator declares that the epic he narrates is something he ‘hears’ from goddesses of poetic memory called the Muses, who know everything because they were present when everything was done and when everything was said. Here is the passage where the master Narrator makes his declaration:
HOUR 2 TEXT C
|484 And now, tell me, O Muses, you who live in your Olympian abodes, |485 since you are goddesses and you were there and you know everything, |486 but we [= the Narrator] only hear the kleos and we know nothing |487—who were the chiefs and princes of the Danaans [= the Achaeans]? Iliad II 484–487When we read this passage for the first time, our first impression may be that the Narrator of epic is making a modest statement about the limitations of his own knowledge. In fact, however, what we are seeing here is just the opposite. The Narrator is making a most proud and boastful statement. He is boasting that his mind is directly connected to what the Muses as goddesses of memory actually saw and heard. The Muses ‘tell’ him what they saw and heard. What he narrates about heroes and even about gods is exactly what the Muses saw. What he quotes from the spoken words of heroes and even of gods is exactly what the Muses heard. The Narrator’s mind is supposed to see and hear what the Muses saw and heard. His mind has the power of total recall. The Narrator here is calling on the Muses as goddesses of memory to tell him a part of the epic narrative about the Trojan War. This part of the tale of Troy is generally known as the Catalogue of Ships, and it tells about which warriors came to Troy and in how many ships and so on. The Muses are expected to tell the tale exactly to the Narrator, and the Narrator will tell the tale exactly to his listeners. Modern readers can easily get distracted and even bored when they read through the Catalogue, but it was of the greatest cultural interest and importance to the listeners of the Iliad in ancient times. So important was the Catalogue that the Narrator needed special powers of memory to get it right. That is why the Narrator here prays to the Muses, as if he had just started his overall narration. In fact, however, he has already prayed to ‘the Muse’ at the start of the Iliad.
Nagy, Gregory. The Ancient Greek Hero in 24 Hours (pp. 43-44). Harvard University Press. Kindle Edition.
Seems to me, this may help us imagine what was occluded in the development of literacy and reminds me about what Chris Daniels in the class on indigenous lifeways (in our Whitehead, World Religions and Lifeways course) shared with us about how natives close external sensing opening into something like physical prehending to remember the history of the cosmos and all our relations in order, for example, to know where the deer are on the other side of the mountain.
If we are continually being born as/through dipolar prehension, what other way would there be for us to read, study or remember a poem except through physical prehension which opens in us implicitly potentially the entire cosmos including the whole history of actual occasions engaging with the poem, including perhaps the poet composing the poem? Although, if this is the case, it would make sense that these capacities are not strongly developed in most of us, or in ways that do not fully trust our direct, bodily connection with the cosmos.
This also reminds me of how Gotama, according to southeast Asian Buddhist traditions, called on the earth and was witnessed and supported by her in the early stages of the meditation which led to his awakening. The earth witnessed his many lifetimes as a bodhisattva and his worthiness to awaken. In the ensuing meditation, he remembered all his previous lifetimes, affording him insights into suffering, happiness, and liberation. I wonder if this might have something to do with why the Pali word sati, translated as “mindfulness,” also means “remembering.”