Bill Gayner
Beautiful, Bhavana Nissima. I love that you are “feeling into these thoughts.” And love the thoughts you are feeling into:
“The many become one, and are increased by one.”
“…that everything is in everything in the process of becoming.”
“each happening is a factor in the nature of every happening”I an not familiar with the concepts of Prarabdha Karma, Sanchita Karma, and agami Karma, but feeling into the whole paragraphs, it opened to me and made lovely inspiring sense, and combined with “Aham Bramhasmi”– I am That. Very evocative and inspiring, even if I have not read the verses you are naming, nor familiar with the tradition.
Hi Nelson and Robert,
It seems to me that actual occasions are enacting us as our dipolar subjective experiencing. Experiencing is our participation in the cosmos. Only experiencing is actual, ours and all our relations. The point is not to try to experience the actual occasions constituting us, the point is, they constitute and enact us as our experiencing.
The whole cosmos produces us in each moment, and especially those aspects such as our body and its societies of societies of actual occasions that are most recently and closely contributing to us. Our external senses and thinking have the potential (should we respond to sacred ingression) to mentally prehend what physical prehension is implying through us as our experiencing, helping us deepen experiencing and engagement in life forwarding ways.
Warm regards,
Bill
So interesting, Robert, thank you very much for responding!
Feeling into your response and reflecting on it, I notice that “appreciate” is one of my favourite words, how it implicitly includes experiencing, valuing and understanding. For example, appreciating jazz. I take it, you are interested in enacting appreciating “the full extent of our world and not destroying it,” rather than exploring the phenomenology of how experiencing informs valuing and understanding?
It also strikes me that as useful as “god” is in Whitehead’s metaphysics that creative togethering is a principle that positing a God does not explain. It seems that not even god understands creativity, actual occasions such as humans and god(s) are only able to enact creativity and to cultivate its exemplification.
This is a point made in the early Pali Buddhist cannon in the Brahmajāla Sutta (the Supreme Net). The scripture describes a highly accomplished sage dying and being born as the first inhabitant of our world. He gets lonely and wishes for companions and when they begin to appear, he believes that he created them and tells them that he created them, and they believe him. Some of these gods die and are reborn as humans, become sages themselves, remember their past lives and recall the supreme god telling them that he (she? they?) created them. They pass this on to their followers and so we come to believe in a creator god. The scripture claims Brahma was mistaken. So, this early Buddhist cosmology agrees with Whitehead that creativity is a principle beyond even the highest god.
Hi Nelson,
Thank you so much again for responding to my invitation; it means so much to me.
You wrote:
And they also carry the possibilities of the future, which could be a lake, bay, sea, ocean… or a devastating flood. Other streams of drops join in with their own past and future possibilities. How similar or different are they? What holds us together in this river (metaphorically this time)?
Feeling into what you wrote here, it fills me with wonder this implicit sense I feel how every drop (everyone of our relations) and the whole continuum of our own subjectivity emerges in and through creative togetherness with all actual occasions.
“What holds us together in this river (metaphorically this time)?” I love noticing how there seems to be this creative togethering happening continually constituting us, resonating in my felt sense. Togetherness is a word Whitehead uses throughout Process and Reality and which the Vietnamese Buddhist monk and activist, Thich Nhat Hanh almost chose to use to point to the creative heart of emptiness (sunyata) in our lives, before settling on “interbeing.” I wonder if “creative togetherness” might help non-theists and theists fruitfully discuss together the heart of the phenomenology we are savouring here.
You wrote:
Perhaps taking the metaphor far beyond what Whitehead and others intended, if these merging streams of experience carry both their objective past and their subjective possibilities of the future, how does that work if we encounter streams that merge from vastly different starting points? In the process of processing, do these differing pasts and possibilities merge together? What if the possibilities conflict? If we believe, as Whitehead posited, that all of the past and all of the possibilities are retained in the universe, how does that happen in a universe that includes diverse streams of experience? I can see why Whitehead would propose that something like God, or a luring entity, might be needed. For now, I find myself trying to imagine how Whitehead’s philosophy plays out without a luring entity.
You are reminding me of Michael Basseches and Michael F. Mascolo’s (2010) Psychotherapy as Developmental Process, a first effort of integrating the vast fields of developmental psychotherapy and psychotherapy. They view psychotherapy as a developmental process that creates a safe, nurturing context for clients to feel into the tensions between a thesis (e.g., the implicit belief that authority figures take care of us) and an anti-thesis (e.g., this authority figure (parent, boss, priest etc) shattered my trust. How will I carry on?) What emerges is a creative synthesis and more complex way of experiencing, understanding and navigating life. For me, this points to how therapy draws on the deep creativity and togetherness that is continually birthing and luring us into living potentially fulfilling lives.
Another rich example of this is when two of our key values come into conflict. Being able to tolerate and explore this is central to healing and growth. What I mean by “values” is our compass in life, what orients us in bringing us alive. Values in this sense are not oughts and shoulds heaped on us by society and family. Nor are they goals, things we can achieve and cross off our to-do list. (e.g., Whew, glad I’m a good parent now! What’s next on my list?)
What a wonder that there is a creative togethering we can cultivate in life that helps us deepen our experiencing of such conflicts so that we are able to heal and grow from them!
I can see why Whitehead would propose that something like God, or a luring entity, might be needed. For now, I find myself trying to imagine how Whitehead’s philosophy plays out without a luring entity.
As you may know by now, I am continually discovering that I am a panentheistic polytheist (lol; it is surprising to me). But I am very interested in feeling and thinking along with people who are nontheistic, because so many of my clients and friends are nontheists. (Also atheism seems to be the polite default in so many contexts in late capitalism.) I am interested in cultivating contexts where both theists and nontheists can explore phenomenology together.
It strikes me that we are all able to feel the lure whether we believe in a god or not. For example, turning towards frozen suffering and trying to resonate with it, how compassion tends to emerge. Or looking forward to a holiday with loved ones with joy and wonder. I know that before I had an experience of “god” and “gods,” as a kind of Buddhist modernist, I was able to feel an implicit sense of embodied creative togethering, interbeing, interdependent arising. I didn’t need to believe in god to feel it. Also, how I was able to turn towards frozen suffering, saying hello to it, and experience compassion emerging luring me into deeper empathic resonance and felt shift transformations into more coherent, life forwarding becoming felt sacred to me without believing in a god or gods.
It seems to me what is vital here is cultivating participating in creative togethering and responding to creative lures, stepping forward into transformation, and then discovering what kind of lifeworld/cosmos we discover ourselves experiencing and explicating this in life forwarding ways. May a thousand petals bloom and may we benefit from them all!
Warm regards,
Bill
Thank you so much for accepting my invitation to come out to play, Nelson, I really appreciate it! I love how you dove in and worked with it so willingly and creatively!
I love your “hydrological science baggage” and how it gave the currents in your river a life of their own. Reminds me of the first part of an ancient Coptic text about Holy Wisdom (Hakima (Aramaic); Hokhmah, (Hebrew)):
Thunder Speaks: Mind Embraces All Opposites, Part 1 (Coptic)
(from the Nag Hammadi Library text “Thunder, Perfect Mind”)First lines of George W. MacRae translation: I was sent forth from [the] power, and I have come to those who reflect upon me, and I have been found among those who seek after me….
The Voice
The Power sent me.
I appear in the minds I make restless.
I am found within by those who look for me.
If I disturb your mind with images, why not look at them?
If you can hear me in a sound, why not listen?
Whoever waits for me—here I am, embrace me!
Don’t deny you’ve seen me,
Don’t shut my sound out of your ears—or your voice.
You cannot fail to “know” me, anywhere or anytime.
I am both what knows and what denies knowledge.
Be aware, this moment—
don’t claim ignorance of this mind.For I am first and last,
honored and dishonored
prostitute and saint,
experienced and virginal.
…I am the silence not grasped by the mind,
the image you can’t forget.
I am the voice of every natural sound,
the word that always reappears.
I am the intonation of my name—huu-khm-aah—
the breath returning from form to its source.Douglas-Klotz, Neil. (2011). Desert Wisdom: A Nomad’s Guide to Life’s Big Questions from the Heart of the Native Middle East. Worthington, OH: Arc Books, (pp. 98-99).
I remember the first time I saw imagery from a particular story of Dionysos, a myth I did not identify for a year, and which has continued to give generously to me in life-changing ways ever since. Imagery came up in meditation without much emotion: I was standing on the prow of a ship with dolphins dancing in the ocean around me. Then vines shot up the mast behind me and flowered and that irritated me, because up to that point everything had been pleasingly hyper realistic. The imagery including the vines shooting up the mast and flowering are from an ancient Greek initiation myth where pirates try to kidnap Dionysos and instead find the ship transforming on them, and them transformed into dolphins. What is out of our control (the god) deserves careful welcoming.
I love the questions you asked, as well. I look forward to returning and reflecting on them, but I have to see a client now.
The Buddha’s dying words, translated by Stephen Batchelor, reminds me of Yeshua’s dying words, translated by Neil Douglas-Klotz. Not “My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?” (Mark 15:34, KJV), but, “O Alaha, what a wonder–this is the purpose for which I was spared and released!” (Douglas Klotz, 2022, p. 101)
Here he is, embodying creative togetherness, responding to the lure, stepping forward in wonder, dying into Alaha. Douglas-Klotz explains:
“And at the ninth hour Jesus cried with a loud voice, saying, Eloi, Eloi, lama sabachthani? which is, being interpreted, My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me” (Mark 15:34, KJV)
El el lamana shbwaqtuni (Aramaic of what Jesus says.)Here we find one of the most troublesome of Yeshua’s reported sayings. If it were the divine will for him to be crucified, and so presumably also his own will, why would he feel “forsaken?” The simple answer is he didn’t. We are looking at a mistranslation here.
As you can see from the above, the word translated “forsaken” (shbwaqtuni) is another form of the same word we found in the sixth line of Yeshua’s prayer, meaning to release or untie. The Aramaic lamana does not pose a question but is better rendered by “for such a purpose”
The early Twentieth century Assyrian Aramaic Christian scholar George Lamsa says this word introduces an exclamation like “what a thing1” rather than posing a question.9 Lamsa further points out that Aramaic has two words that can mean “forsake” or “forget” but that Yeshua uses neither of them here.10.
Yeshua was misunderstood at the time, but in a different way than the above mistranlation does. This is reinforced by the following passage:
“And some of them that stood by, when they heard it, said, Behold, he calleth Elias [Elijah].” (Mark, 15:35, KJV)
No one comments that he is feeling forsaken. Instead, Yeshua is saying something like:
O Alaha, what a wonder–
this is the purpose for which I
was spared and released!(Douglas-Klotz, 2022, p. 101)
Reference
Douglas-Klotz, N. (2022). Revelations of the Aramaic Jesus: The hidden teachings on life and death. Charlottesville, VA: Hampton Roads Publishing Co.Whitehead says that because we live in a creative cosmos, time is not reversable. What is actual are the actual occasions happening now. The past perishes into us.
But how does it continue to live in us? It seems to me there is a lot to explore here, and to feel into. A lot of different dimensions. The resonance of it, how it also structures us, and the values and lures that are also transmitted to us. And what is going on when we feel the presence of someone from the past with us now, inspiring us into responding in creative ways? How is that person with us now? What is this immortality that the past enjoys in the present? In what way do the people of the past still live in and with us now?
Hi Bill,
I’m a little sad that you were not interested in my other offerings even though they did not answer your question directly. Please do respond to this offering. It is a huge topic and difficult to feel into and explicate and stay on topic. Okay then, returning to your original question, you asked:
Hosinksi says “All consciousness is experience, but experience is not necessarily conscious.”(p. 18) We all know by acquaintance what conscious experience is. It’s how the world appears to us when we are awake and seeing, hearing, smelling, feeling and tasting stuff. But what is unconscious experience? How would we know that we are having it? We wouldn’t, right, because if we did know that we are having it, it would be conscious experience. So how do we know we have had it? What in our moments of being conscious leads us to believe that some of our experience is not conscious?
Let’s explore two instances that might be examples. I have experienced everything I am going to describe within myself and as a therapist working with clients.
Example 1
Self-interruption, for example. This is the process(es) within us that interrupt our feelings, our rich participation in life. Most people typically experience it as the absence of feelings. They might notice they were feeling sad and now they are not feeling sad, they are up in their head entrained with thinking and not aware of their feelings or the body.In therapy, with most people, two-chair work is helpful for bringing this unconscious process that seems to happen automatically into experience. Place two chair close to each other, facing each other. In one chair, we imagine ourself (our feeling self) in the other chair, and we tune into the self-aspect that is shutting down our feelings, the protector and its interdependent unconscious emotions and intentions already organizing our body carrying intentions, needs and actions tendencies, and enact this mode. For example, telling our feeling side, tighten up your muscles, come up into your head, no good ever came from feelings etc.
Then we switch to the other chair and tune into our desire to feel, and we respond from this self-aspect. This conversation between different modes within ourself empowers the feeling side and helps us bring into awareness a self-aspect that had been previously functioning entirely unconsciously, helping him (or her or they) to soften, providing us with access to our feelings. The protector might even come in for a snuggle, he/she/they is after all very young.
But as one’s capacity to presence deepens, we can skip the chairs and presence with our unconscious self-interrupting self-aspect. The protector self aspect is slippery to work with, because he makes feelings go away. Protectors are like invisible, silent speedboats that go by, leaving a wake behind them that is the absence of feeling. In my experience, protectors (my protector and my clients’ protectors) are beautiful self-aspects that stepped into the impossible in contexts where adults did not know how presence with us when we were young feeling anguished so that we could continue on through the deserts that constitute so much of late capitalism. They are young soldiers that have been guarding our gate, that got so good at hide and go seek we were never found. They kept us safe.
If we are able to presence with the protector, to find the kind intentions within the processes orienting our shutting down as well as the anguish they are resonating with and trying to protect us because they don’t think we can handle it; if we are able to appreciate and thank the protector, then the protector can soften — respect and gratitude from us is the last thing they expect! Then we can invite them in for a snuggle, deeply relieving for him, her or they and for us, opening into deep integration, feelings of wholeness. Richard Schwartz who developed Internal Family Systems insists these self-parts are always with us, but my own sense is that they can integrate into our larger sense of wholeness, freeing us to respond in fresh ways that may or may not involve self-aspects enacting in us. My sense is that they constellate in certain contexts and can dissolve back into us. Nothing is always present, everything is always changing.
We are multi-process creatures and most processes are not happening within consciousness. But as we deepen experiencing, we can allow processes beyond consciousness to manifest within consciousness with a life of their own. A life that seems to have been preceded by a life that was outside of our consciousness, and now is being welcomed into consciousness, and which can deeply integrate with our sense of consciousness. One of the ways these self-aspects gain such independence within us is through the dissociation characteristic of trauma. Being able to experience more than one self-mode up and running at the same time is characteristic of psychological flexibility.
These modes happening outside of consciousness seem to have a life of their own. I grant you, these kinds of modes tend too also have a kind of automaticity to them until we bring them into awareness and free them to play more integrated roles within consciousness.
Example 2
I have been exploring presencing with what happens as I settle into meditation, settling into the body and feelings, how muscle tension softens and lets go. I discovered there seems to a process I refer to as “feeling-feeling.” Feeling-feeling also relates to the example above, me feeling the protector and the protector feeling me, and the new opportunities such more complex togethering affords.It feels like as I become aware of tight muscles, the tight muscles feel me feeling them. We feel-feel each other. A sense of differentiated togetherness, experiencing myself as that integrative stream of experiencing that constitutes a living person encountering muscles as a nexus of societies of societies responding to gentle friendliness and ease from me as integrating subjectivity that is clearly not in charge of all of this.
it is difficult to adequately explicate all of this in ways that are going to stay on topic for your question, lol. But the experience suggests myself as a potentially integrative subjectivity that can encounter processes within myself that seem to have a life and intelligence interrelated with my own, but able to function outside of my awareness and able to communicate with me in ways that are intelligently responsive and exhibit some independence. My sense is that these degrees of autonomy and interdependence are found within the multiple systems within us as well as the larger systems we participate in as environment and world.
Reflecting on what I have written, it does seem clear to me that viewing and appreciating how the multiple processes that co-constitute me and the world have a life and experiencing of their own affords me deeper soulful intimacy with body, feelings, self-aspects, self, others and the world. It helps me better explicate and deepen presencing.
I am afraid I could spend the rest of the week trying to tune and edit what I have written here, but I am going stop here, lol.
It’s a great book.
Hosinski, Thomas E.. (1993). Stubborn Fact and Creative Advance: An Introduction to the Metaphysics of Alfred North Whitehead. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc.
The section “Mechanism, Organism and Science” in Chapter Six The Philosophy of Organism, Part II of Dr. Davis’ text seems particularly relevant:
Think about it for a moment: what analogy seems more intuitively adequate for the world as you know and experience it? Are you a mechanical robot situated within a larger machine called the universe? Or, are you a growing organism entangled within a fundamentally organic cosmos? It will be helpful to remind ourselves of some of the differing affirmations belonging to the mechanistic Newtonian universe and the post-Newtonian organic universe.
Mechanistic Universe
-nature is like a deterministic machine
-independent bits of (dead) matter
-external relationships
-not constituted by relationships
-externally designed
-push and pull
-surface level movement
-clock, watch, toasterOrganic Universe
-nature is like a growing organism
-living relational happenings
-internal (and external) relationships
-fundamentally constituted by relationships
-internally self-created
-evoke and feel
-real evolution
-plant, animal, humanIt is important to reiterate that the emergence of Whitehead’s organic vison was not simply a result of strategic philosophizing from human experience. He was deeply invested in the new insights of the sciences, whether in psychology, physiology, biology, or physics. In a deep way, each of these fields was taking an organic turn that Whitehead fully recognized. He saw that physics and biology in particular were supporting a kind of new organic awakening in the sciences.
David, Gendlin is dear to my heart and way of cultivating life with friends. His philosophy of the implicit orients me in engaging in wildfire phenomenology inspired by Whitehead (Faber; Davis; McDaniel, https://www.openhorizons.org/whiteheads-metaphysics-not-a-system-but-a-wildfire.html).
Bill, (well met, it is nice to encounter another Bill, there used to be so many of us, lol) if I recall, you are a philosopher with some familiarity with Whitehead, who is I expect completing our readings, I am curious how here in week 2 of our course on Whitehead you seem to be positing machines as a better metaphor for how life unfolds in our body beyond our conscious awareness than experiencing. Do you find the unfeeling automaticity of machines lacking in intentionality and aliveness to telos more appealing than Whitehead’s vision of interrelated intelligent aliveness of feeling and experiencing for how our microbiology, cells, organs and vast interrelated systems harmonize with each other and the cosmos in cocreating each of us? Is there something for you in the metaphor of dead inanimate things that lack responsiveness and aliveness that seems well suited to helping us better experience and understand the aliveness of our bodies? Could you describe for us an alternative to the inspiring, rich cosmic vision Whitehead offers us with experiencing whether exemplified as consciousness or not at the heart of the togetherness that is continually birthing us? Do you have a feeling for this togetherness within and around us, constituting us? Thich Nhat Hanh considered using the word togetherness, before settling on interbeing to point at the heart of what emptiness refers to; other Buddhists use terms such as interdependent arising; Gendlin refers to eveving, everything interaffecting everything; Sacred Wisdom’s togetherness is found in both the old and new testament. Do you have a feel for it? What the natives refer to as “all our relations.”
I love that, Christie, how you are feeling empowered to follow wonder’s lure rather than being distracted by your peers’ pressure to to prove that harnessing wonder will prove it’s good for something else, like helping kids pass standardized tests.
Hi Dennis,
Thank you for your helpful post and so interesting to read the progress you are making exploring “the distinction between perception in the mode of causal efficacy and perception in the mode of presentational immediacy.” Also interesting to note how closely related your post is to George’s most recent post, on the distinction between physical and mental prehension.
My sense is that these two forms of perception, physical and mental prehending, are always intermingled in our experiencing, but that we can sense implicitly these two deeply interrelated poles in deep experiencing. And that the key to understanding how foundational perception in the mode of causal efficacy (i.e., physical prehension is) is involves understanding that experiencing is participation in the world.
While it is true, as you describe, that the felt sense of this participating in the world usually starts hazy, if we explore it, aided by drawing forth patterns from it by means of thoughts, metaphors, images, gestures and our external senses alive to what our felt sense is implying, this reveals an infinitely rich felt sense about situations with very specific implications luring us into ripe conditions for felt shift/transformations into deeper coherence, fulfilling ways of engaging in life, as well as transformations in how we experience self, others and our lifeworld. Eugene Gendlin’s philosophical and psychological work was devoted to this.
Perception in the mode of subjective immediacy illuminates the possibilities that perception in the mode of causal efficacy is implying. We are born from the togetherness of all actual occasions, that gift has an objectivity George’s AI app referred to, the stubborn fact and structured relations we are gifted, but they carry with them fresh possibilities for novel transformations. Richly feeling the past we have been given to become reveals implications for future novel developments we are lured into.
Whitehead uses the phrase “sacred ingression” for how God illuminates and lures us into these possibilities. I am playing with the word “intimation” which has a similar root as “intimacy” and refers to “making known” and “announcing”, although “intimacy” also points to “inmost”. But how the felt sense as our participation in the world is always more than we can understand but also calls and lures us into deeper, more beautiful, loving, complex, authentic intimacy with reality and all our relations. Our experiential participation with all our relations creating the new through togetherness is always more than we can take in, but reveals itself to us in intimations of the next step, luring us into deeper, more differentiated, coherent, fulfilling and creative intimacy with all our relations.
Perception in the mode of presentational immediacy intimates the possibilities implied by the felt gift from all our relations in the mode of causal efficacy that is the ground of our new becoming.
Dr. Davis, I am feeling into how coming out to play with our relations — I think of Winnicott here, how deep wise compassion, resonance, appreciation and love affords play across the life span including serious play — is a kind of participating in giving ourselves to each other and the world through transformation and how all of this involves perishing forward. Feeling this freshly, never having thought it before: coming out to play and sharing deeply, giving ourselves away in togethering, exemplifies perishing forward together.
An example includes in group therapy where a client well supported and facilitated by a therapist arrives in the heart of traumatic, frozen, structure-bound suffering, takes in the whole of what this experience longs to imply and is released through this, how most of the group benefits and learns from this, their hearts breaking open together, the group becoming a tribe, has each other’s backs, and experience each in their uniquely salient way life-altering transformation. The group literature had had difficulty demonstrating vicarious learning, but those of us who lead emotion-focused therapy groups have seen it live many times in transformative emotion work. It’s best when psycho education and training follows such deep, fresh, undeniable experiencing and it is still reverberating in us. Nothing esoteric about it then.
Warm regards,
Bill