Bill Gayner
Thank you, George. I love Mary Oliver and have often read her poems in mindfulness groups and workshops. I will put this book on my list.
Hi Kaeti,
3. I find the need for re-enaction compelling for what sparks someone into a artistically creative act. There is something that has been experienced — a fleeting moment of beauty — that wants to be felt again. Thus, attempts are made to recreate the stimuli or memory part of the experience for an attempt to relive the feeling.
Do you find in returning to the stimuli or memory to relive and express it richly and freshly changes the feelings, carrying life forward in transformative ways?
Beautiful, rich reflections, George. Sounds like when you read poetry, your embodied, deeply felt soul smiles, unfurls wings and soars. Are you writing this from long experience with poetry, fresh discovery, or both?
Hi George,
Yes, thank you for your response and you are making an important point. These abstractions are not real, not “concrete,” in the way that our moment to moment experiencing now is, my writing this now, and your reading this now.
Mind you, to be clear, when I say that we and all our relations are metaphors, I am not claiming we are abstract literary concepts, I am pointing to how I experience now implicitly how all our relations are reverberating in us, crossing in us, in the freshness of rich experiencing, an exemplification of the real. How, when it comes to experiencing, as Gendlin put it, it is interaction first. That coming alive to the felt sense of the flow of experiencing that constitutes my continual becoming, when I pause and deepen my experiencing, I can feel implicitly within and all around me all our relations, our implicit interdependence and aliveness in each other.
Thank you, Douglas. Yes, your remark on “grok” led me to look it up. I recalled it was from Stranger in a Strange Land, which I read many decades ago, probably in the 1970 or ’80s. AI Overview responded:
In Robert A. Heinlein’s 1961 science fiction novel Stranger in a Strange Land, the word “grok” is a Martian term that, in its most basic sense, means “to drink.” However, it carries a much deeper meaning, signifying a profound and intuitive understanding, even merging with or becoming one with the object of understanding.
This fits with my sense of the word, and feels fits well with my sense of Whitehead and Gendlin.
I initially thought in your response to the word “gist” you are indicating an emphasis on the cognitive (e.g., “meta-thinking” and “mental world map”) rather than the implicit, intuitive felt sense that grok and gist have more me, but on rereading your words, I am not so sure. For example, the definition you shared pointed to the essence or foundation of something. For me the essence or foundation is our felt resonance and creative participation in body/environment/world/cosmos processes. For example, most people do not notice that the meaning of our thoughts is provided by the felt sense. The way implicit, pre-conceptual feeling functions in our concepts provides the gist of what we are thinking or saying. How does this land for you?
Hi Andrew,
Your words ring with truth, deep gratitude and empathic appreciation for how these elderly parishioners from your wife’s previous church presenced with you the whole day, a lovely embodied exemplification of the creativity and beauty we are exploring together. Also, your experiencing of the event and remembering it now is more real than anyone’s theories about what happened could ever be, although they surely helped you make sense of what happened. A lovely example of what Jay McDaniel, citing Andrew Davis and Roland Faber, call wildfire phenomenology, feeling and thinking along with Whitehead, rather than treating his speculative metaphysics as a fixed, unchanging system to be examined in an “objective” way.
Thank you for sharing this beautiful experience with us.
Hi George,
Your post provides a lovely ground for reflecting on Dr. Jay McDaniel’s in-class request for examples that exemplify particular categories of existence. The one that stands out for me in your example is “contrasts” which he describes as:
Contrasts
Contrasts refer to patterns of difference or opposition that are either harmonized or remain in tension within experiences. These contrasts give shape and complexity to reality by bringing together opposing elements. For example, a melody is enriched by contrasts between high and low notes, and a life story is enriched by the interplay of joy and sorrow. Contrasts are essential to the depth and texture of experience, embodying both harmony and tension within each moment.
https://www.openhorizons.org/eight-categories-of-existence.html
For example the first four of your examples:
1. Great Works of Art (Major Beauty)
– **Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony**: The integration of contrasting musical themes (chaos and resolution, joy and sorrow) creates a profound aesthetic experience where tension resolves into harmony.
– **Michelangelo’s *David***: The sculpture balances strength and grace, tension and calm—showing how contrasts enhance unity.
– **Shakespeare’s Tragedies (e.g., *Hamlet*)**: The interplay of conflicting emotions (love, betrayal, madness) generates deep beauty through dramatic intensity.**Why?** These works exemplify *major beauty*—they don’t avoid discord but transform it into a richer whole.
2. Nature (Harmony in Contrast)
– **A Sunset**: The interplay of warm and cool colors, light and darkness, creates a dynamic unity.And how these contrasts heighten how subjective forms>, eternal objectsand propositions function in conceptual prehension in realizing the optimal transformation and satisfaction implied in our physical prehension<, lured by God’s initial aim for us. This drama is heightened in how multiplicities “represent the richness of possibilities that are yet to be integrated”. Of course, talk of prehensions bring us to actual entities. I wonder if the greatest contrast among actual entities is that between those actual entities that are occasions and God, who is not one, but who lures all of us into optimal transformations. God is an exemplification of creativity in how he/she/they function in this way, and complex hybrid actual occasions are another kind of exemplification, each (God and actual entities) needing each other deeply and their contrast to exemplify their own mode of becoming.
This raises the question if perhaps all forms of beauty require all eight forms of existence. For example, the universe is a multiplicity. So anything happening in it includes multiplicity. Anything actual requires the multiplicity of actual occasions and God acting together with creativity. And is beauty what draws multiplicity to form nexūs, through creative togetherness intimating new possibilities?
So I was drawn to the theme of contrasts in your examples, and discovered all eight forms of existence implicit within them all. I wonder if I am missing something and/or we could imagine an exception, an example of beauty that does not include all eight categories of existence?
I love the poem, George, thank you so much for sharing it! It describes well what happened to me at a young age, and the heart of my healing/life cultivation/soul recovery, bringing that boy back to life within me to come out to play with all our relations, that boy “who beholds the light, and whence it flows.” Softening the buffered self (Charles Taylor) to return to a more porous sense of self.
Reminds me of Jesus’ b’reshith (Aramaic; bereshith, Hebrew) life way, returning to the renewing and transformative genesis birthing and renewing us in each moment, which accords with Whitehead well. As Camus said, “In the midst of winter, I found there was, within me, an invincible summer.” I had problems just now with Camus’ word “invincible,” it seemed too big a claim for me, but then I remembered what is invincible is not me, but the light we all participate in.
I love how your piece flows together, Andrew, so beautifully: the references, your life, the haiku, the reflections in the lake, your reflections, and the photograph.
Stillness as “a temporary harmony within continuous movement.”
“By saying mountains, trees, and sky “flow into” the lake, the haiku portrays them as inseparable from the lake’s being.”
Your words suffused with the beauty they are expressing.
Thank you.
Reflecting on two Youtube conversations: Chris Hedges’ with Rob Larson (author of Mastering the Universe: The Obscene Wealth of the Ruling Class, What They Do with Their Money, and Why You Should Hate Them Even More) and Thomas Karat’s interview on SaltCubeAnalytics: “War Crimes in Gaza: How Israeli schools Militarise Children – Interview with Nurit Peled-Elhanan.”
Feeling compassion for these contrasting examples of the challenges of extreme conditioning so many children grow up in so that their sense of separation from our interdependent world and others — so pervasive today — is exacerbated in ways that strengthen and enrich elites in ways that also feed the multiple crises destroying our planet’s capacities to support us all.
Hedges and Larson discuss how the children of the uber rich are raised emotionally deprived and with power over their adult caregivers that disconnect them from living empathy and compassion for others. Karat and Peled-Elhanan discuss how Israeli school books characterize non-Jewish Israelis as potential genocidal threats, Arabs in particular as Amulek (the archetypal enemy of the nation of Israel, deserving death), and erasing Palestinians from any kind of presence at all, while simultaneously continually retraumizing Israeli children with extreme images of the holocaust. Then there is the trauma of growing up in an open air prison such as Gaza and suffering periodic “mowings of the lawn” (speaking of a horrific metaphor that erases Palestinians and treats them as Arabs as Amulek).
I am feeling compassion for all those participating in living Stanford prison experiments pervasive in late capitalism (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stanford_prison_experiment).
I am feeling empathy and compassion for not only these extreme examples, but for all of us who grew up in late capitalism, including myself (in so many ways privileged, although not rich, but also traumatized), uprooted from our feelings, from presencing richly in this cosmos, trapped in our heads, so far from our body and from participating out in the open with all our relations. Trapped in the logic of dominating, being dominated, or hiding and passing.
What a wonder to participate in a class like this, in wondering and imagining the possibility of an ecological civilization, and in participating richly in all that the possibility of such a civilization already implies for us now, how friendly, creative, interdependent and life supporting and nourishing our bodies, the earth, and the cosmos are now. To participate each in our way in birthing such a civilization through what is already birthing us now.
The question that is emerging for me from both of these exercises is how may I cultivate and participate in this true direction with all our relations? Whatever comes, how may I be true to this sense of deep gratitude and wonder that I am here now and given this opportunity to come out in the open in this homeland, the world from which I am truly from, with all our friends and relations and to give back and serve. I have to admit, I love comfort, pleasure and the absence of pain, but I am reminded of Neil Douglas-Kotz’s (2022, p. 100) translation from the Aramaic of Jesus’ last words on the cross, “O Alaha, what a wonder–this is the purpose for which I was spared and released!”
References
Neil Douglas-Klotz. (2022). Revelations of the Aramaic Jesus: The Hidden Teachings on Life and Death. Charlottesville, VA: Hampton Roads Publishing Inc.That’s great, George, thank you!
I do find Bracken’s inter-dependent persons model intriguing — after all, aren’t we all interdependent? So, yes, please, would love to hear more about Bracken’s model. God, Hakima (Hockmah; Hagia Sophia or Holy Wisdom (Holy Spirit) in orthodox Christianity) and Jesus seem interrelated but not a three in one God to me. I am sure I have a lot to learn of course.
It seems closer to my own intuitions, surely we are all interdependent, just that some are more alive to this and engaged in helping everyone than others. And some speak more specifically to us than others. For others, it might be the Buddha, or his companion Ananda, or Avalokiteśvara (Buddhist bodhisattva of compassion).
It reminds me of Matthew Fox, the great former RC theologian, now Episcopalian after falling out with what used to be called the Inquisition, describing how Douglas-Klotz helped him experience Jesus once, but that he is more alive to cosmic Christ consciousness than Jesus (I hope I am not garbling his words, it was something like that). The title of “the Christ” doesn’t seem to fit for me for how Jesus presences in my life, Jesus seems much more warm, down to earth and friendly than that. (Mind you, I am not claiming I’m right and John Cobb and so many awesome people are wrong. Just that “the Christ” doesn’t sing to me for me and seems somewhat different than how Jesus presences). It also feels to me that Jesus more embodies Holy Wisdom (Hakima, Hockmah, Sophia) in relationship with Alaha, which Douglas-Klotz writes was how Jesus’ early followers viewed him. And that we are all co-constituting each other.
I’m with the natives, Sufis and Roman Catholics that great saints, prophets, and sages can presence in our life today. Jesus feels like a saint or sage or angel in that way to me. In doing so they are interrelated with us and with God and with Wisdom, but (for me) that doesn’t make them God in a uniquely superhuman way, but rather participating and collaborating wonderfully, more deeply with and in and through God and creativity/emptiness. Wow, it’s difficult to express these subtleties!
I view this as transjective, how each of us engages with reality in a creative meaningful unique way, to cross the ocean, but perhaps to different shores (a metaphor I heard Matt Segall use), or climbing different mountains as Dr. McDaniel put it last Tuesday evening.
There is a lot for me to feel into and discover and differentiate in all this.
What a lovely, lyrical, profound reflection, Roni, thank you so much.
I find myself reflecting on the response to Nagasena’s question, ““I, Revered Nagasena, know that there is wind; I am convinced of it, but I am not able to show the wind.” It is interesting that “showing” seems to mean pointing to visual effects rather than tactile and internal felt sensing. How profoundly true that physical prehension needs to be felt, external sensing and concepts help to reveal what is at heart a felt experience, and to reveal this we need to act, gesture or speak in coherent, heartfelt ways.
Mind you, there is an ancient, profound technology for revealing the wind: flags. Flags reveal the invisible in terms of the palpable wind, as well as the phenomenology the element wind and air points to. The ancients considered the elements as angels. I wonder if I could call it our living creative togetherness, not just as a living person, but how when we come together to commune and collaborate in deeply felt, coherent ways. The creative togetherness of a nation state, or any group of people, such as a club, like the Can Am Cruising Dinghy Association, can be signified as alive in the wind as a flag. Sails also reveal the wind in ways that move us. Any technology was numinous to those who developed it, carrying life forward in numinous and practical ways. So many examples of numinous technology such as bread, wine and surfing.
The earth also reveals the wind in the trees, grasses, flowers, and clouds. It can also perhaps be shown through gesture and speech in the response to a koan, where we participate in a deeply coherent way in the creative togetherness of subjective immediacy, such as Dr. McDaniel did in responding, “Mu!” to his Zen teacher. What a lovely, moving story full of wind and soul. Becoming wind, breath, soul.
I’m reminded of how Rilke ended The Sonnets to Orpheus (1993; Stephen Mitchell trans):
XXIX
Silent friend of many distances, feel
how your breath enlarges all of space.
Let your presence ring out like a bell
in the night. What feeds upon your facegrows mighty from the nourishment thus offered.
Move through transformation, out and in
What is the deepest loss that you have suffered?
If drinking is bitter, change yourself to wine.In this immeasurable darkness, be the power
that rounds your senses in their magic ring,
the sense of their mysterious enounter.And if the earthly no longer knows your name,
whisper to the silent earth: I’m flowing.
To the flashing water say: I amRereading this poem reminds me of a Tibetan Buddhist phrase, “banner of victory.” Let us plant it, may it unfurl in the wind for all beings.
Hi Douglas,
I think after downloading the text into Adobe, I had to select an edit text option to copy from it if I recall.
Warm regards,
Bill