Bill Gayner
Thank you for reading my sharing so deeply, Dr. Davis. Heartbreaking for her to have passed on with both of you so young. And beautiful, your appreciation for how she continues to live in life forwarding ways in and with you.
Warm regards,
Bill
Daryl, I look forward to reading this book. Does it address issues such as how success attracts interest from the deep state and their corporate/oligarch sponsors? Consider what happened to Christianity when it was appropriated by the Roman Empire. I have a paper somewhere where a scholar describes how scholars were having problems making sense of changes in Mahayana Buddhism until they realized sudden changes in doctrine correlated with regime changes. The losers ended up shovelling dung in the stables. Empire seldom tolerates authentic loyal opposition.
Max Blumenfeld from the Grayzone argues that the environmental movement has been captured by the deep state, much the way USAID, despite so many people truly depending on the good work it did, was also a CIA cutout deeply implicated in colour revolutions around the globe.
I wonder if any process relational philosophers have dealt with how so may narcissists, sociopaths and psychopaths, along with a small minority of truly evolved people, rise to the top of so many large institutions and governments?
Daryl, That is brilliant! deep, goes down easy, lured me in to reread it several ties, works on so many levels and gave me a new appreciation for the barkeep, he’s a keeper! Thank you so much for coming out to play!
Nelson, seems to me either there’s only one and you had better drink it now, or maybe there’s a whole cosmos out of IPAs proliferating. I suggest savour them all in the one now and let us know what you discover.
I love how you are expressing how the “way, truth and life” you have learned to trust from your experience functions as a paint swatch for making sense and bridging to other peoples, cultures, and religions. This makes deep sense to me. I find when people share different, deeply felt explorations, their own explorations are enriched and deepened.
I love the way you disentangled that paragraph, Greg. Evokes a felt sense of affording me more freedom to slip into my body and feel and breathe, thank you. I find myself wondering how my felt sense will resonate with these terms and concepts, and feeling wonder that it is the body and the felt sense, not the terms, that is the heart of the matter, with a sense of deeper freedom, aliveness and a kind of coherent self-efficacy in this.
“Conscious” evokes a sense for me of being above the water and how we can submerge into the unconscious and still discover a kind of subjective immediacy in dreaming when asleep for example. What is the difference? I want to say there is a difference of some kind, but what is it. It will take a lot more exploring… Perhaps, a kind of distinction of unfolding with a more limited sense of context, such as projecting a premise on a dream to preserve some sense of self in it. I wonder how much that is what we do in waking life as well. Another example would be the slipperineness of waking dreams and hypnogogic imagery, so suddenly compelling and then gone. There’s a lot to explore there, that makes me wonder about how much a word like “conscious” can gloss over when I take it on too easily, as if I knew what it means already. The word “conscious” feels to me like a tool other people use more often than I do, and I would have to discover how to use it within experiencing for it to feel more ready at hand.
Wow, feeling into them, these words
Very interesting and useful, Jay!
I had already signed up for your course with Kathleen Wakefield, Creative Becoming: Process Philosophy and the Arts, and was thinking about writing my paper on Homeric Hymn VII to Dionysos. The imagery of this story, Dionysos’ dolphin-friended, flowering ship, appeared in meditation to me a year before I understood what myth it was from, from reading Robert Johnson’s (1989) Ecstasy on Dionysos a year later. The myth functions as a transformative proposition in my life with fresh meanings in new phases and contexts in my life. Back then it lured me into a home-cooked alchemy for befriending the ordinary, experiencing the sacred in embodied experiencing, enabling this puer eternus to address spiritual bypassing, learning a craft people understand and would pay me for (social work/psychotherapy), getting nailed to a spot and severely pruned. It worked.
Von Franz’s book The Problem of the Puer Aeternus based on a series of lectures she gave 1959-1960 at the Jung Institute in Zurich acted as potent medicine to bring to my attention how I and so many of my dharma friends had been captured by this archetype. She used Antoine de Saint-Exupéry’s The Little Prince, to exemplify this archetype. That was in the 1990s. I tried rereading her book out of gratitude recently, but it was far too homophobic for me, something I was accustomed to wading through back in the day, more severe forms of heterosexism so much more prevalent then.
Dionysos has most recently connected with my understanding of Yeshua’s teachings from the Aramaic. Some ancients intuited a connection between Dionysos and Ariadne/Persephone/Rhea on the one hand, and the pairing of Alaha with Sacred Wisdom (Hakima, Hockmah, Sophia) on the other, with Yeshua understood by his earlier followers as an embodiment of Hakima. I follow Douglas-Klotz’s (2022) Revelations of the Aramaic Jesus that Yeshua’s breakthrough was how to open to transformative togetherness and eternal life by bringing heart to the small self (the neighbour, naphsha (Aramaic), nephesh (Hebrew), nafs (Arabic)) in a way that becomes soul (ruha (Aramaic), ruach/ruah (Hebrew), breath, wind) alive in Alaha. Before that, seekers had to kill or disappear the “ego” and other confusing self-parts. I feel Yeshua’s ways as a potent lure enabling us to draw on myths such as Dionysos in gentler more integrative ways.
I am seeing now how drawing from process relational philosophy, I can use “togetherness” and “togethering” as a way to speak about spiritual practice and the touching the earth mindfulness approach I am exploring/developing that is deeply pluralistic, a range of potential forms of spiritual practice ranging from panentheistic mysticism to Thich Nhat Hanh’s interbeing, to more like Mike Slott’s and Winton Higgins integration of secular Buddhism and Marxist activism (Slott, (2024), Mindful Solidarity: A Secular Buddhist Democratic Socialist Dialogue).
Your understanding of fictional characters as propositions described in your post “Harry Potter, Hamlet, and God: A Process Approach to Characters in our Imagination,” provides a way for speaking about the role of the imaginal in spirituality that ranges from Harry Potter fans, to a kind of Bishop Shelby Spong or the secular Buddhist Stephen Batchelor’s ways of engaging with potent transformational metaphors to Henri Corbin’s sufism or my own less sophisticated mystical presencing with Alaha/Allah, Sacred Wisdom/Sensing, gods, angels, and saints and bodhisattvas such as Yeshua and Gotama. I know some of these figures have functioned in a range of such ways for me, from my young childhood imaginal friend Jesus who was like a loving older brother to me, to deeply meaningful archetypal metaphors for transformational life patterning and styles such as Dionysos was for me when I began to study and contemplate his myths, to sacred mystical togetherness presencing with and through me.
Thank you very much, Bob, for sharing your brother-in-law Jeff and his partner’s story with me and with us. Sounds like they both really showed up in their lives and for each other. I deeply appreciate how you and your family so lovingly supported them and continue to love Jeff’s partner, as well as your including hospice training and supporting gay men dying with AIDS along with your medical ethics training. And your empathy for the issues of external and internalized stigma for LGBTQ folk, and how that can be compounded with a stigmatized disease like HIV, a kind of perfect storm. Means a lot to me.
My condolences for your sister’s passing, Bob. Thank you for continuing to show up in the midst of your grief for our course. It is good to hear your family is such a deep source of support in grieving the loss of a loved one.
Thank you for your kind words about my posts and your heartfelt response.
It is very expensive to buy online, but available for free through the internet archive: https://archive.org/details/marxwhiteheadpro0000pome
Thanks for the recommendation, Daryl! I will take a look at this book! Seems to me leaving a class analysis out makes it very difficult to understand issues our overlords understand and know how to manipulate all too well. They know they are fighting a class war.
Thanks for sharing this, Daryl. It does look fascinating! I have registered for it.
This reminds me of an encounter Jung had with a native American elder which he recounts in In Memories, Dreams, Reflections (1973).
Jung described his encounter with Native Americans he met in New Mexico in 1925. This event, though brief, had a profound effect on Jung, and he referred to it many times in his writings. He commented that his experience in New Mexico made him aware of his imprisonment “in the cultural consciousness of the white man” (Jung, 1973, p. 247).
At the Taos pueblo, Jung spoke for the first time with a non-white, a Hopi elder named Antonio Mirabal (also known as Ochwiay Biano and Mountain Lake), who said that whites were always uneasy and restless: “We do not understand them. We think that they are mad” (Jung, 1973, p. 248). Jung asked him why he thought the whites were mad, and the reply was ” ‘They say that they think with their heads . . . . We think here,’ he said, indicating his heart” (p. 248). Impressed, Jung said he realized that Mountain Lake had unveiled a significant truth about whites. (Thompson, 2007)
This points to the profound implications of the reversal Whitehead and Gendlin recommend for us. To discover ourselves not as disembodied objective thinkers and perceivers, but as and through our embodied, heartfelt felt sense as a body-environment process, where thinking and perceiving function in revealing and intensifying the possibilities of what our becoming in the world with all our relations is implying.
Similarly, “mindfulness” might have been better translated as “heartfulness” and “bellyfulness,” it happens phenomenologically in our heart and belly rather than in our head.
Reference
Timothy C. Thomason. (2007). Lessons of Jung’s Encounter with Native Americans. https://jungpage.org/learn/articles/analytical-psychology/881-lessons-of-jungs-encounter-with-native-americansI was rereading my post above and was struck by how Elliott et al.’s (2019, pages 246-247) description of the first form of empathy as a fast, almost automatic route of emotional simulation and resonance reflects an implicit bifurcated metaphysics where our felt resonance with others depends on external sensing coming through “a fast automatic route” into the limbic system from the senses, rather than Whitehead’s understanding that our felt resonance with someone depends primarily on our physical prehensing them “from within,” integrated with our mental prehensing of them through our sensing, where our senses are the implications of what our togetherness with others is implying.
I am an emotion-focused therapist, but its bifurcated implicit metaphysical assumptions present challenges for using emotion-focused therapy’s underlying epistemology, dialectical constructivism, to orient Touching the Earth, the emotion-focused mindfulness approach to life cultivation in community with others I have developed. Instead, I have oriented Touching the Earth to Gendlin’s philosophy of the implicit integrated with EFT emotion theory. Practitioners are free to bring this into dialogue with whatever philosophy, religion, spirituality or psychology influences and inspires them. For me, that is Whitehead, various forms of buddhadharma, Douglas-Klotz’s midrash of the Aramaic Jesus, and the mythology of Dionysus.
Gendlin is in deep agreement with Whitehead on this. As Gendlin put it, “it is interaction first”:
Philosophy cannot begin with perception. It has long been traditional to consider perception as the beginning and model instance of all experience. What has been said here leads us to challenge this ancient assumption, and to replace it by giving bodily interaction priority over perception. It is perception which has led to the whole problematic of space, time, and appearance—the conditions of appearance which cannot appear in the appearance.
Perception creates two dualities. The percept as “an appearance” splits itself off from the reality which it only indicates. Secondly, the percept also divides itself from the perceiver to whom it appears. The to-whom cannot appear [I suggest carefully feeling into what “to-whom” refers to. Seems to me that it is not just “the perceiver,” but the perceiver in a passive mode, i.e., as “to whom” perception appears]. Since the percept appears and the to-whom does not, the percept seems to come first. The to-whom seems to be something added on. Percepts are flat, passive, seen, imagined, presented. Their to-whom drops out. The assumption that a location system must overarch empirical events can be traced to the assumption that experience is perception. With the percept comes the whole familiar problematic of interpretation (and Nietzsche’s puzzle: there are only interpretations; nothing to interpret). This problematic will surely arise if one takes perception as the basic model of experience (events, situations …..). The world presented by science is made along the lines of percepts. The perceived order is “already there.” Human interpretations must be brought to it. It has only external relations, and even these must be lodged in observers. The relations are between points, locations, positions. The number 14 is defined by its position between 13 and 15 in the order of counting. But the continuity which defines the positions happens only if someone counts. The positions do not relate to each other of their own accord. Science presented organized entities whose relations are given to them by an external observer who maintains the continuity of their relations.
In philosophy this problematic has long been traditional and accepted, as if there is no way out. But this is so only because perception is assumed to be the basic kind of experience. We should not begin with perception. If we do not, then it does not seem strange that an interactional order is wider than positional logic. Perception and logic are inherently products that point beyond themselves. They point to interaction. We can build on the work of Wittgenstein and Heidegger: we do not first interpret things; we live and act in them. We inhale, cry, and feed. We are always already within interactions (situations, practice, action, performance …..)…
Can we put interaction first? Wittgenstein and Heidegger give us leads in this direction. We can say that every living species is a being-in its world. Its living activity “discloses” possibilities of the responsive order, which cannot emerge in any other way.16…
Perception and interpretation must be considered secondary within already ongoing interactions.
(Gendlin, 2018, Part 4, Chapter 14 “The Responsive Order: a new empiricism”)
Reference
Gendlin, Eugene. 2018. Saying What We Mean: Implicit Precision and the Responsive Order (Studies in Phenomenology and Existential Philosophy) (Function). Chapter 14. “The Responsive Order: A New Empiricism,” was originally published in Man and World 30 (1997): 383–411.- This reply was modified 1 year, 2 months ago by .
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Monte and Bob, I just realized I lived as a little boy near you, in Kenilworth. About grades 1 and 2. My father was a young Canadian diplomat at the Consulate General. He came back as Canadian Consulate General after serving as ambassador in Iraq during the Iranian revolution in the early days of Saddam Hussein. My parents lived in Winnetka and then the Gold Coast. Our next post was Wellington, New Zealand.
Congratulations on the article on your art, Kaeti! How wonderful! https://cobb.institute/blog/novel-becomings/carasoul-the-imaginal-mind/
I love how in your post you consider God in the light of Dr. Mesle’s three parts of relational power. How we breath God and all our relations in and out in this creative transformational beauty is such wonder!
Thank you so much for this lovely, coherent, life-forwarding post, Dr. McDaniel. It seems to me you have felt into the various questions and insights emerging in our cohort’s dialogue and, in this post, trying to help to carry it and us forward. There is so much here. I have been musing on the last three paragraphs in particular. I feel lured into them, a lovely, beckoning series of koans or opportunities for transformative wildfire phenomenology that are opening now for me and which I am feeling into and wondering/wandering in.
For months now, I have been letting go into a felt sense that loves the image of a concrescing cresting wave its white cap carried in and received by the wind. For how all that I am presencing with in arising and participating in transformation is received by God, by the sacred, the ruha (wind, breath, soul) by/in/with/through Alaha (God). Your words let me wonder into feeling and saying fresh things about this, something about subjective immediacy participating with all our relations, birthing from God and Wisdom’s cosmic gathering and hospitality letting go into God and received home by God. How it feels like this may not be letting go into something or someone who is somewhere else (how, I realize now, I was implicitly assuming it was), but the whole cosmos concrescing now as a who, a loving subjective immediacy who appreciates everything this implies, appreciating what all of us are implying. God’s consequent nature and treasuring us. This cosmos conscrescing now, a loving presencing we participate and let go into who gets what we have all been up to and who is thrilled and lovingly heart-broken about what’s happening and where it all could go and how we can respond together in life forwarding ways. And we are invited to participate in and contribute to this! So beautiful! An invitation to come out to play that is so deep, sweet and true and worth everything, walking and dancing in the beautiful, in loving and always more true than we can say. How Yeshua and Gotama got lured into coming out to play.