Bill Gayner
George, our conversation is helping me feel into this more, thank you. Getting a better feel for what it might mean to say that God’s primordial nature is God’s conceptual prehension–an idea I was already familiar with, but which I am coming to better appreciation now. Whitehead wrote,
In the first place, God is not to be treated as an exception to all metaphysical principles, invoked to save their collapse. He is their chief exemplification. Viewed as primordial, he is the unlimited conceptual realization of the absolute wealth of potentiality. In this aspect, he is not before all creation, but with all creation. But, as primordial, so far is he from ‘eminent reality,’ that in this abstraction he is ‘deficiently actual’—and this in two ways. His feelings are only conceptual and so lack the fulness of actuality. Secondly, conceptual feelings, apart from complex integration with physical feelings, are devoid of consciousness in their subjective forms.
Thus, when we make a distinction of reason, and con- [522] sider God in the abstraction of a primordial actuality, we must ascribe to him neither fulness of feeling, nor consciousness. He is the unconditioned actuality of conceptual feeling at the base of things; so that, by reason of this primordial actuality, there is an order in the relevance of eternal objects to the process of creation. His unity of conceptual operations is a free creative act, untrammelled by reference to any particular course of things. It is deflected neither by love, nor by hatred, for what in fact comes to pass. The particularities of the actual world presuppose it; while it merely presupposes the general metaphysical character of creative advance, of which it is the primordial exemplification. The primordial nature of God is the acquirement by creativity of a primordial character.
His conceptual actuality at once exemplifies and establishes the categoreal conditions. The conceptual feelings, which compose his primordial nature, exemplify in their subjective forms their mutual sensitivity and their subjective unity of subjective aim. These subjective forms are valuations determining the relative relevance of eternal objects for each occasion of actuality.
He is the lure for feeling, the eternal urge of desire. His particular relevance to each creative act,† as it arises from its own conditioned standpoint in the world, constitutes him the initial ‘object of desire’ establishing the initial phase of each subjective aim.
(PR, pp. 343-344)
I am getting the sense that it is not so much that God’s primordial nature is “unconscious,” but that “as primordial, so far is he from ‘eminent reality,’ that in this abstraction he is ‘deficiently actual’—and this in two ways. His feelings are only conceptual and so lack the fulness of actuality. Secondly, conceptual feelings, apart from complex integration with physical feelings, are devoid of consciousness in their subjective forms” (ibid).
God’s conceptual prehensions lack the fullness of actuality, just like our conceptual prehensions (thinking and external sensing) lack the fullness of actuality. It is physical prehension (our inner relations as the native say), that are alive to the fullness of our actuality, but conceptual prehension is helpful in deepening our understanding of and carrying forward what the inner relations of our physical prehension are implying.
Thinking and external sensing in we humans has a thinness, a superficiality, that comes alive in relation to our physical prehension instead of distracting us from it as our civilization tends to do. Conceptual prehension lacks full consciousness, but plays a vital role in consciousness and deep forms of experiencing, so I am not sure it fits to say that it is “unconscious.” Rather than “unconscious,” conceptual prehension is a key ingredient in co-constructing consciousness when integrated with physical prehension. I would expect that if this is the case for us, then it would likely be the case for God as well, if, as Whitehead said in the passage above, “In the first place, God is not to be treated as an exception to all metaphysical principles, invoked to save their collapse. He is their chief exemplification.”
In a sense it no more makes sense to say that conceptual prehension is “unconscious” as to say that thinking is “unconscious.” When thinking is abstracted from full participation in physical prehension it lack the fullness of actuality. An example would be when we fall into the fallacy of misplaced concreteness, thinking our abstractions are more real than experiencing. But it would not mean that these thoughts are unconscious.
Hi George,
That is so interesting, thank you for sharing your process and the response you got, an interesting learning experience for me.
There is an aspect of this that I wonder about. Deepseek produced, “Since the primordial nature *only* deals with eternal objects (pure possibilities) and does not yet interact with actualized events, there is no contrast—and thus no consciousness.” But I thought the primordial nature of God also cherishes us and from this emerges the initial aim in God’s participation in the creative togetherness that births actual occasions.
Also, I thought physical and conceptual prehension interacts in concrescence. Does experiencing perhaps require the interaction of physical and conceptual prehension? I wonder.
Thank you for this opportunity to feel into and wonder about interesting questions that I will continue to carry forward with me. Curious if you or anyone else has any feeling and thoughts about it?
Thank you! It sounds like your thesis will be a lovely, enriching next step for me.
I found it by Googling “Chris Daniels PhD Whitehead” which gave me a number of options including: https://ucalgary.scholaris.ca/items/28a0a1f8-45d7-42fc-b243-10f17b61aaa3
Warm regards,
Bill
Thank you so much for your kind, affirming, empathic and encouraging words, Dr. Daniels! They mean so much to me, brought tears to my eyes.
What publications would you recommend to me for exploring your and Griffin’s perspectives on experiencing and prehension? Would my next best step be your doctoral thesis which I have just downloaded?
Warm regards,
Bill
Hi Bhavana,
I love your deeply felt reflections on Oneness. I am largely in agreement with you, although I find it interesting your statement that Oneness is a quantity. I am not sure that, if all is One, how Oneness could be a quantity. I wonder, if for something to be a quantity, we need an observer measuring the number of objects, but with the One, there is no outside observer. Is Oneness quantifying herself? Also, how could the One be an object? I am just wondering along with you here… Of course, that makes two of us.
I sympathize with your complaint about how you are “sensing the number as a compression of the complexity of God and the Divine.” For me your concerns remind me of James Hillman noting the shadow of religion as looking down from above and making everything conform to its predeterminations. Of course, if the One looks down from above, then there is two and if there is two, I suspect the many are not far behind. For example, surely making everything conform to one is to teach a lesson, keeping that unruly mob obedient.
These concerns remind me of Meister Eckhart praying to God to free him from God, i.e., to free him from what Whitehead refers to as the fallacy of misplaced concreteness. Interesting that Thomas McEvilley (2002) in The Shape of Ancient Thought traces the emergence of an emphasis on Oneness accompanying a tendency to abstraction and the search for a unifying explanation. I wonder as well about with the emergence of abstraction a tendency towards the fragmentation of the left brain’s abstractions and a need to overcompensate for painful feelings, which is all about suppression. Along with that comes the buffered self.
I really resonate and love what you wrote here:
I think the Whole is the “Essence,” both zoomed in and zoomed out. That I am not connected to you because we have the same essence-energy running through. But because all-of-me is never all-me. I am you, yours, our histories, our futures to come, and all of them-theirs-us, without ever being peeled out of the self-evolving creation. I am simultenously a kind of Universe and yet am not.
How wonderful! It seems to me if we were to use numbers here, we need them all to come out to play, one, zero, two, three, and the many. I really can’t imagine one of them without all of them. Surely one needs zero most of all, but then, look, we already have two integers, and we know the many are not far behind.
Warm regards,
Bill
Interesting comments, Monte and Nelson. Reflecting on your perspectives, I realized that I am particularly interested in John Cobb’s transformational pluralism: trying to listen deeply to someone else’s path and then discovering what I can learn from this that transforms and carries forward how I am cultivating my own life and path.
For example, I found what Dr. Daniels shared about ““… if you can relate through your internal relationships to the natural world, they are persons while relating” and his connecting this with Griffin’s perspective on emphasizing physical prehension over immediate perception, deepened my own path. I posted on this in the Indigenous Life Ways section on our forum in the last couple of days, late to the party.
I found a lot of what Dr. Long shared about Hinduism and Whitehead, especially the emphasis on practice without negating the value of intellectual study and reason remind me deeply of my Buddhist teachers as well of Eugene Gendlin (someone who has influenced me deeply but whom I never met). Also, the integration of all these cultures and religions in ways that allow individuals discover the way that best suits them. It felt like home, reminding me of the roots of my own practice I deeply value and trust. Listening to Dr. Long’s talk helped me deepen my sense of feeling at home and welcomed on my own path.
Have any of the talks changed how your own paths in life forwarding ways?
Hi everybody,
The Zoom Café Study Group continues to meet every Sunday at 3 p.m. Pacific time. We have met every week except for the Easter long weekend.
We will also not meet on May 25, because of the Memorial Day long weekend. (We will meet on May 18 even though it is a Canadian long weekend and I am Canadian.)
If you have any questions about this, feel free to email me at bgayner@me.com.
TIME: Weekly on Sundays at 3:00 PM Pacific
URL: https://us02web.zoom.us/j/83075205655?pwd=iSqrnwrG0DL4q4C8wPbfXQlPmagaj3.1
ID: 830 7520 5655
PASSCODE: 823864
ONE TAP MOBILE (US): +16699006833,,83075205655#,,823864#
PHONE (US): 669-444-9171
Find your local number: https://us02web.zoom.us/u/kMbhKgQvkWarm regards,
Bill
Hello Leslie and everybody,
I unfortunately won’t be able to attend the classes live unless my weekly 8 p.m. Eastern therapy client cancels or reschedules, but I look forward to watching the videos afterwards and participating in the forum and the weekly Café Zoom Study group I facilitate (see my post in Course Logistics on our Forum for details).
I grew up I thought a Roman Catholic and drifted away in my teens, but in the last couple of years have discovered the ground of the religious trellis upon which the living vine of my religious life grows includes the Waldorf prekindergarten and/or kindergarten I attended in Sao Paulo as a privileged son of a Canadian diplomat just before the military coup.
The trellis also includes the mast on Dionysos’ dolphin-friended, vine-covered ship carrying us home (Homeric Hymns, Hymn 7: to Dionysos), which emerged in meditation for me a quarter of a century ago, transforming my life with the help of archetypal psychology integrated with a predominantly Tibetan Buddhist meditation practice then, carried forward now by another wine god, the Wisdom tradition of the Aramaic Yeshua, which has opened for me gradually over the last 30 years through the midrashes of Neil Douglas-Klotz, an American Sufi teacher living in Edinburgh who has a PhD in the semiotics of ancient Semitic languages and contemporary somatics. Apparently Sufis believe everyone has a special angel, and his is Yeshua, as it was for the Spanish-born Sufi Ibn Arabi. I’m not a Sufi, nor a follower of Steiner, nor a Christian, but Yeshua has been my friend since before I can remember, but only recently recovered since I audited courses last year in the Cobb Institute. I find an ontological/phenomenological home now in the marriage of Hakima (Hockmah in Hebrew, Sophia in Greek, Holy Wisdom, Sacred Sensing, whom I also refer to as Creative Togethering) and the ever living Life, birthing us and all our relations, and luring us forward into transformation. The early Christians believed Yeshua embodied Hakima. I’m amused now to see the sense, experientially, in the RC Trinity I was taught but never quite got, although I also now appreciate there’s a range of ways in which these transformational experiences might be interpreted by me from panentheism to polytheism.
So Whitehead and his successors are also an important part of my religious trellis, as is Eugene Gendlin’s philosophy of the implicit and his successors, which led me to Whitehead as my spiritual practice deepened, opening to Hakima and God, and Jesus. I also have had a long, intensive engagement in Buddhism, so that God feels to me like the Buddhist supreme god of love and creativity, Brahma, (very Whiteheadian!) who inspired the Buddha’s teaching vocation, and Hakima like the Earth Goddess who encouraged Gotama in the meditation that led to his awakening. I also have influences from all the major Buddhist schools, including intensive past engagement with Secular Buddhism and American Vipassana since then. I am currently exploring orienting the community mindfulness practice approach I developed, Touching the Earth (https://ttemo.ca/; Gayner, Jan 5 and July 1, 2020), to the philosophies of Gendlin and Whitehead, with a deep bow to Buddhism and in a way that embraces pluralism so that practitioners can find their own way forward, as I am doing, supported by our community of practice.
Warm regards,
Bill
References
Gayner, B. (January 5, 2020). Touching the earth: Exploring a new, secular self-help mindfulness group approach. Secular Buddhist Network. Retrieved from: https://secularbuddhistnetwork.org/touching-the-earth-exploring-a-new-secular-self-help-mindfulness-group-approach/Gayner, B. (July 1, 2020). Update on Touching the Earth. Secular Buddhist Network. Retrieved from: https://secularbuddhistnetwork.org/update-on-touching-the-earth/
Wow, thank you so much, Greg, for your careful feeling into reflecting on Whitehead’s words and intentions along with Hosinski’s and Dr. Davis’ commentary. You are always so deeply insightful and value-added! Your words here are deeply relevant to the heart of our shared exploration of the resonances between Whitehead and Gendlin, and I will be returning to feel into and to reflect on them. Wonderful to have Dr. Davis’ response as well.
I wonder if exploring Whitehead’s reflections on the romantic poetry that so deeply influenced him might also shed light on the question of his experiential practices and experience of God. I am hoping this might be foregrounded in the upcoming “Course 5: Creative Becoming: Process Philosophy & the Arts” led by Kathleen Wakefield and Jay McDaniel.
Thank you, Christie and Nelson, for this discussion which fits my own encounter with Whitehead, how it lit a process of wildfire phenomenology in me. I came to Whitehead because of what was beginning to open for me in meditation and sharing and exploring meditation experience with others, and have found in Whitehead and other process relational philosophers, companions in deepening wonder-ing for and engagement with all that constitutes and carries us forward into life.
Christie, I love your last paragraph there, oh my gosh, yes. So well expressed, this encountering with and acknowledging what constitutes and inspires our own consciousness and experiencing, in the deeper intimacy of not knowing, discovering, and finding words alive to what we are discovering, that encourage our becoming in life forwarding ways. That it is not so much what it really, really, really is, because nothing exists in such a reified (Latin root, meaning to thingify) way, but to find words that help us deepen our intimacy with and appreciation for the sacred, our fresh becoming and engagement in life.
Meister Eckhart said that anyone who Jesus names three times, their name is already written in heaven. “Name” (shem in Aramaic) in the ancient languages referred to felt sense signature of someone’s unique way of being. Consider “acting in Jesus’ name.” You don’t write his name down on a piece a paper and then stride forth brandishing your piece of paper in hand aloft. You don’t have to announce his name in front of you wherever you go as if you were his herald and he just behind you. What are we doing? We are trying to embody and enact the values and ways of being/becoming Jesus exemplified.
For example, Meister Eckhart’s exegesis of the story of Martha and Mary, where Jesus responded to Martha, addressing her, “Martha, Martha, Martha.” He was not telling her as we were taught in RC Sunday school: even though you are serving well, your younger sister has chosen the better half, in other words, she is wiser than you. He was acknowledging in serving everyone there, she was embodying the whole path, her name already written in heaven, and while her younger sister only grasped half of the path (the teaching) — listening to Jesus, sitting at his feet, Jesus was reassuring Martha that one day Mary would join her in embodying the whole path in action and service.
It reminds me also of Carl Jung encountering his Self, I don’t remember the language he used for it, but a fuller more ideal sense of himself in a more ethereal form, contemplating his life.
Feeling and imagining with Whitehead, I wonder if our process continually lets go into and rests in God’s consequent nature and our frozen suffering habit formations as well as what we have cultivated harmonized in God’s primordial nature begins a resonance of our potential becoming which acts to lure us as God’s initial aim in each moment for us, and that this is something that all our relations do for all of us in our interrelatedness, but some angels/gods exemplify in this, especially for us those most drawn to us and with whom we resonate for whatever reason most closely. Perhaps because they most exemplify God’s initial aim for us and linked with this perhaps too because they had offended the same gods and found a way to harmonize with them, for example, as Dionysos offended Hera, as I offended the goddess of propriety and the state in my anger at heterosexism (and have also since then learned to love her, Hera, beloved of the ancient Greeks, goddess of the heiros gamos, sacred marriage) or how Kuan Yin despaired as I once despaired for years (Chinese version of Avalokiteśvara (bodhisattva of compassion). In this case for me I discover our relations who seem to most actively shine for me in how all our relations constitute and inspire us: God/Brahma, Hakima/Earth/Creative Togethering/Holy Wisdom and Yeshua. Yeshua as older brother, friend, with flavourings of Dionysos, Avalokiteśvara, Ānanda (the Buddha’s companion/attendant/cousin who exemplified the Buddha’s way after Gotama died, carrying the dharma forward) and Martha. These figures inspire me to step forward creatively oriented to the values they embodied in my own way and when I fall flat on my face, to pick myself up again. And when I am in a cavern that has never seen light, to light their candle of compassion and empathy.
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I asked,
I wonder if God is not uniquely an actual entity that is not an actual occasion, or if we all become some kind of ongoing participation in creative togethering after we die in some kind of bardos including the possibility of participating deeply in creative togethering as angels/gods/goddesses, saints and bodhisattvas and all the other names cultures and religions offer up.
It just occurred to me that each actual occasion that constitutes us and which extinguishes into us and all our relations and God’s consequent nature is us already in heaven in each moment. Each actual occasion that constituted us was already fully us and our whole past. Just because actual occasions are tiny in terms of the time they manifest as they unfold, doesn’t mean that in that moment they were not also the whole of us as far as we had already evolved, as well as implicitly all of our relations as well. Epiphany. We are already full happening in heaven and on earth and integrating this through the marriage of heaven and earth that constitutes us in moment. We are already fully supported and welcomed home. Everything you ever wanted is already happening.
Thank you so much, Dr. Davis, for reading and feeling along with me. It means so much to me!
I am sorry I have not been able to attend more of your lectures, but evenings here (in Toronto in the Eastern time zone) are prime time in my line of work as a psychotherapist. I am thoroughly enjoying your lectures and readings. They evoke wondering in me, transforming how I experience and understand my lifeworld, as they did last year as well. Thank you so much!
I am — we are — in each breath and step something/someone fresh and never before seen woven from star dust and rich soil and the light of the sun, stepping into unbecoming, repose, and becoming again. Each ordinary breath and step a unique rebirth and carrying forward of the whole history of the cosmos.
Coming from the infinite (no-time) into living finitude unfolding as time, the infinite radiates with and through and all around us, supporting us and inspiring us in each new step we take.