Bill Gayner
Thank you so much, Christie, for your warm, generous, thoughtful, heart-warming response! It’s encouraging and means a lot to me.
It is so interesting that we have been reading the same books! Yes, I agree, McGilchrist’s books are wonderful, and I share your reservations about how his use of “‘non-normal’ ways of being, moving, thinking-feeling, becoming in the world (schizophrenic, autistic) as support for his hypothesis [is] somewhat careless and potentially harmful and would be interested in talking through that aspect sometime.” It is almost as if when he writes about this, he forgets that he will be read by neurodiverse people, forgetting to presence with them. It would be worthwhile to figure out how to address this in a more careful, empathic, compassionate way.
How cool to be a wonder scholar!
So interesting your informed speculation that “high-stakes testing of predetermined standards and curricula” could account for pulling students out of presencing, foreclosing on wonder. It reminds me of something that happened to me in grade 1 in Chicago’s North Shore. I had attended a Waldorf kindergarten in Sao Paulo, with their emphasis on learning through epiphanies. I had an insight in class that filled with me wonder. I went up to the teacher and asked her — I don’t remember the exact words I used, but something like, “This addition, subtraction and multiplication we are learning, are these like rules about how the world works?” She replied, “No, just memorize it.” I love telling this story to mathematicians. I was crushed, of course, not so much because I believed her, I had some sense that her response was off somehow, but because she had not joined me in my wonder, validating and celebrating it, and helping me to carry it forward. I was learning I was in a world now where the adults did not know how to presence with me, that school was no longer a refuge from this.
I love your “wondering about experiencing a sense of wonder as possibly a way to talk about directly experiencing God”! I wonder if it would be possible to talk about it in journals in a pluralistic way, using words such as “numinous” or “sacred” or “spiritual” and emphasized the different ways people experience this that may or not include theistic beliefs. I wonder if John Vervaeke’s work might provide a bridge for that, his project of bridging the cognitive neurosciences and spirituality. I think he is head of cognitive neuroscience in Psychology at the University of Toronto. I like his terms such as “relevance realization” (the way organisms are able to integrate what would otherwise be combinatorially explosive into a coherent assessment of a situation) and “transjective” (Transcending the distinction between subjective and objective, or referring to a property not of the subject or the environment but a relatedness co-created between them” (Wiktionary). He himself combines Buddhism, Taoism and neo-Platonism with the neurosciences. He is big on Youtube. He had an interesting dialogue with Matt Segall.
It’s also reminding me of Thich Nhat Hanh’s translation of the Heart Sutra, which he renamed as “The Insight that Brings Us to the Other Shore.” It describes Avalokiteshvara, a bodhisattva known for compassion, having an insight and sharing it with a fellow practitioner, Sariputra, a disciple of the Buddha known for his wisdom. They are not talking about God, they are talking about the transformative heart of their practice, emptiness in a way that has a lot of heart, and to me it resounds with a sense of shared wonder and affection between these two practioners, people exploring deeply together and sharing with one another. It is worth listening to the practitioners at Plum Village chanting it together in English towards the bottom of the translated sutra, beautiful:
Avalokiteshvara
while practicing deeply with
the Insight that Brings Us to the Other Shore,
suddenly discovered that
all of the five Skandhas are equally empty,
and with this realisation
he overcame all Ill-being.“Listen Sariputra,
this Body itself is Emptiness
and Emptiness itself is this Body…”Thich Nhat Hanh, The Insight that Brings Us to the Other Shore, Plum Village. Retrieved from:
https://plumvillage.org/about/thich-nhat-hanh/letters/thich-nhat-hanh-new-heart-sutra-translation on May 3, 2024.also: Thich Nhat Hanh. (2017). The Other Shore: A New Translation of the Heart Sutra with Commentaries. Berkeley, CA: Parallax Press, page 22. Kindle Edition
If anyone would like it, I annotated this with a brief explanation of all the technical terms.
Hi Alexandre,
I wonder if it what is retro in that experiment is their salience to and for each other. If the fresh becoming of all actual occasions is given to us through the sacred in every fresh becoming, then the changes in those close to us changes us as well from within through causal efficacy.
I guess what is their shared salience is the experiment, including the powers of hybrid creatures such as ourselves attending to them. This create might create a context, a latency that means their fresh becomings have a more intense feeling for each other, and so they change direction together. Is a key part of how our own bodies form actual occasions feeling a shared telos together?
I wonder if the separation between actual events is not actual, it takes place on the receiving/treasuring/potential part of the sacred process that co-constitutes us, where we are as potentials everywhere with everyone. So there is no “actual,” experiential separation, only actual occasions flowing into each other, gifting themselves to each other. But this flow has a glow that is a gift from the sacred processes that imbue creative becoming with the aliveness of all our relations and the sacred’s love for us.
I wonder if all the gods are aspects or dimensions of Alaha/Abwoon/Harmonies of Harmonies?
New discovery at lunch today with my partner: “Abwoon” has “boo” in it. My partner Sjarif and I call each other “boo,” a term of endearment I was not familiar with until I met him. He picked it up in his teens in Maryland. I love it, that feels more like it, if Jesus thought Abwoon was also Daddy, my sense is Abwoon is like a “boo” as well. Including the pun in the word “boo.” Loved ones can scare us too, lol, when they appear out of nowhere suddenly, lol.
Reminds me of a meditation a few years ago, when I saw something hard and sharp smash through a wall I didn’t know was beside me. Startling! Then I realized it was a mother bird breaking open the shell of an egg I was inside and I was being born into the world, fear turned to wonder and opening in wonder and aliveness to a world that was welcoming and parenting me with loving tenderness.
I too didn’t like the word “God” and didn’t believe in God. I rediscovered the sacred through the nontheism of Buddhist modernism (although ancient and contemporary traditional Buddhism has lots of devas/gods). Now that I am a panentheistic polytheist (lol) with lots of Buddhism in the mix, I like the word, “God,” including its obvious shadows, the history of its terrible misuses and reification, a history I know very well as a gay man who only recently discovered my spiritual ground was a Walforf kindergarten in Sao Paulo, who grew up Roman Catholic, who painfully came out in the early 1980s, and who worked as a psychotherapist for more than two decades in a psychiatric HIV clinic. I want “God” in my home-cooked stew for the deep flavour and heart it affords. It’s been around the block a few times and I’m 65. “These battered wings still kick up dust” (Peter Gabriel, Only Us).
Only Us
It wasn’t in the words that kept sticking in their throats
It wasn’t with the angels in their quilted coats
These battered wings still kick up dust
Seduced by the noise and the bright things that glisten
I knew all the time I should shut up and listen
And I’m finding my way home from the great escapeThe further on I go, oh the less I know
I can find only us breathing
Only us sleeping
Only us dreaming
Only usI hear you calling me
Yes I hear you calling me
Home from the great escape
Yes I can read you loud and clearThe further on I go, oh the less I know
Friend or foe, there’s only usI’m coming home again, home again
And I hear you calling me home again
I am coming home againOnly us
Hi Danny,
I really appreciate how you are feeling your way into describing Whitehead’s perspective in your own words.
Interesting point about how Whitehead combined all three of those perspectives (materialism, idealism, and empiricism). I can see how he combined idealism and empiricism, but how does this include materialism would you say? He seems to have turned materalism inside out and upside down.
I’m not sure that his motivating concern was that there was a trend to no god, because he himself despite a strong early interest had become some kind of agnostic or atheist himself, but rather more about addressing the bifurcation in the world, to help make science performatively coherent, and to take seriously all the different domains of human activity, experience and understanding. My sense is that it was in the process of developing a metaphysics to accomplish this, he discovered he needed God to fulfill specific functions in his speculative metaphysics. And that his concern for that trend you named may have emerged from this, rather than the other way round. But I don’t know. Happy to be corrected.
Whitehead used different names for God towards the end of his life including “Harmony of Harmonies” I believe and I think “Eros” if I recall. I read this recently from Mesle or McDaniel I believe, but can’t find the reference. Does anyone have it?
I personally like the Aramaic names Yeshua used such as Alaha and Abwoon, for use in prayer, but I don’t have a lot of confidence that people will know what I am talking about if I use them talking to others outside of very specific circles. I appreciate Jesus’ use of “Abba” or Daddy, although it doesn’t appeal to me for my own use. Still, it’s nice that it is in the background of the name, “Abwoon,” the name he uses to start his prayer, the universal, cosmic parenting processes that are continually birthing us through the marriage of heaven and earth. I also like “the always more;” and “the everlasting Life” is growing on me. And “the sacred” is handy. I believe Islam has a thousand (or was it a hundred?) names for God. I also like Brahma from Buddhism, how he inspired the Buddha in his lifelong teaching vocation, as well as his brahmaviharas, or values, which I have revisioned as Friendliness, transformative Compassion, transformative Appreciation (experiencing/valuing/understanding), and Homecoming/Homing. But I learned from my journey as a gay man to reclaim words distorted by history and structural oppression (such as “gay,” “queer” and “old”) as well as learning from Eugene Gendlin to allow words to be infused with the meanings I discover through my own felt sense, so they can function in the way I need them to function to help carry forward and express rich experiencing. So why not repurpose God, as well as praying with Meister Eckhart to God to free us from God.
I like Eros and to that I would add Dionysus as well. And then there is Hakima (Aramaic), Hokhmah (Hebrew), Sophia (Greek) — Wisdom, she who gathers us as consciousness, the breath of fresh insight and presencing, integrating opposites, who returns us to the Source. As proverbs says, she was there from the very beginning with the everlasting Life, and she refers to us as her children.
My sense is that we learn appropriate names for the sacred through rich presencing in and with it as well as through deeply felt study. Gendlin emphasizes what he calls breaking through the public language barrier in order to help language reflect our experiencing, rather than distort our experiencing and understanding to fit strictly defined, predetermined words. Both Wittgenstein and Gendlin point out that words always have fresh, context-dependent meanings. And this was clearly Whitehead’s practice, finding words to breathe new meanings and life into.
Hi Robert,
My initial response to your first question was yes, but when I stopped to wonder about it, I realized my felt sense of it is that there is always something more to actual occasions than bad/hurtful/damaging, there is always some capacity to be lured towards the beautiful, good and true, even if it would look quite different when constrained by a lifetime of poor decisions. Also, actual occasions are constituted by all our relations, all the actual occasions in the cosmos are included and our whole shared history. And that we are being continually received, treasured and returned by god. So I want to say there is something even innocent in actual occasions, even with a long history of bad decisions, and with potential to be transformed. I think of a mass murderer who was ordained as a Buddhist monk by the Buddha. When he entered villages after his ordination, people would pelt him and he would endure this as a way of atoning for his negative history. But there is no doubt the choices we make shape and constrain the salient history that shapes our new arising in each moment. I think of people I have worked with as a therapist who recovered from severe drug addiction, for example. We need to work on recovery and stabilizing their recovery before we get into deeper transformative healing.
I am curious what you mean by would all actual occasions be mediated as well? If what is mediating an actual occasion is actual, then it would be an actual occasion as well. That might lead us to an infinite regress. Matt Segall argues that all actual occasions themselves form what the ancients called the aether in his (2023) Crossing the Threshold: Etheric Imagination in the Post-Kantian Philosophies of Schelling and Whitehead.
On the other hand there are interesting complex relationships between the societies of societies that constitute complex organisms’ bodies such as ours and the dominant actual occasions that integrate and oversee the whole experience of the organisms. Our experience is enriched by this complexity, and I could imagine how it might feel like a form of mediation.
Thank you, those were interesting questions to feel into and consider.
Hi Andrew and Dennis,
You might be interested in this Youtube audio of James Hillman’s talk “Back to Beyond: On Cosmology” at a conference organized by the Centre for Process Studies held at Claremont University Centre and Graduate School on Whitehead, Jung and Hillman:
There is also a fascinating book that emerged from this Archetypal Process: Self and Divine in Whitehead, Jung and Hillman, edited by David Ray Griffin. I particularly enjoyed Griffin’s introduction (so eye-opening to learn that Jung believed that God is unconscious!), Catherine Keller’s “Psychocosmetics and the Underworld Connection,” and Hillman’s response, “Back to Beyond: On Cosmology.” Hillman addresses the limits of his over emphasizing the via negativa and in his talk attempts to address his own acknowledged failure to explore metaphysics. As someone who took a deep plunge into Hillman decades ago, I find his response in his paper and I presume in this Youtube talk (which opens exactly like the paper) therapeutic. My sense is that he had over-emphasized image and seeing-through, sacrificing embodied feeling. Wonderful to read him addressing that here.
You are very welcome, Andrew. So glad to hear my response was helpful. Thank you for your warm reply.
Thank you, Dennis.
I really like how you are being true to your experience, simplifying Whitehead in order to describe what you discover to be true for yourself. Feels to me like a ripe way of exploring.
Hi George,
Yes, thank you, I heard an interview with her, fascinating. Have you read her book?
Hi Dennis,
I have recently been inspired by exploring the interrelated relationship between between causal efficacy and presentational immediacy. It seems to me like that the causal efficacy/physical prehension dimension of actual occasions is the embodied felt resonance of our experiencing, whereas presentational immediacy, i.e., our five senses, reveal the possibilities being implied by causal efficacy. Causal efficacy is constituted by everything/one interaffecting everything/one as well as most salient and unique in our own unfolding. Presentational immediacy (our senses) reveal the opportunities in this moment afforded us. I find the more alive I am to felt embodied experiencing, the more alive my senses become.
You asked: “(1) Can anyone offer an example relating to the misinterpretation by our senses of the causal web?” Yes, any optical illusion would be an example. For example, a ship in the far distance that seems to be floating in the air; a straight stick we put into the water suddenly looking like slants off on one direction; magical tricks; and jumping into a cold water plunge and then jumping into a pool, how the pool feels like a warm bathtub.
“(2) Am I correct in believing that concretizing processes creating actual entities occur irrespective of my sensing/consciousness/caring/etc. actions?” The stream of actual occasions that constitute us will continue to stream unless you decide to do something life threatening. But you have the power to bring the stream to an end, of course. However, if you say yes to how sacred ingression inspires you into greater beauty, love and truth, this will affect the quality of the history and the possibilities that will be afforded you. For example, choosing to be lured into beauty, love and truth, you are more likely to experience beauty, love and truth.
“(3) Truthfully, I have never thought about causal efficacy until now. Is it important for the carrying on of everyday life? I do find thinking about this to be stimulative but, perhaps, not necessary. (A bit facetious here.)” I find exploring dipolar prehension, causal efficacy and presentational immediacy experientially is deeply inspiring. Something about exploring how each function in the way they interrelate bring them both more alive.
What a lovely question, Kaeti. It leads me to wondering what do the key words in this thread mean for each of us? Also, do you discover a God or gods in your heart and presencing with and through you, and how do he/she/they/it seem to you?
When I ask myself, what does “perfect” mean for me? It initially conjures a round, hard, shiny, silver ball that excludes. That does not feel like the sacred, God, and gods I meet in presencing, who presence through and with me. A part of me resists naming these familiar, loving presences as “perfect.” Oh! Turning towards that part of me, I am discovering he is a boy who discovered himself in a world where the adults did not know how to presence with him. I am hugging him and he is saying to me, “Thank God you found me,” and coming in for a hug. I’m going to spend some time with him now…
The boy is integrating into me like light and love and a gentle breeze throughout me. The core of my body is shaking loose and free.
Opening into a feeling of being held and suffused with a loving presence who is always more than me, whom I participate with and in, with all our relations, who is always home, and who is interested in learning creatively through and with all of us, experiencing transformation through us. An invitation to come out and play. A gentle sense of wholeness rather than “perfection,” and I sense the possibility of allowing “perfection” to have new meanings, more like an intimate verdant wilderness of transformative becoming that is always already home. But the boy in me is tensing up at this idea of reclaiming “perfection,” lol, so I am going to go give him a hug…
There he is now, the boy, and I am reassuring him I am going to let go of reclaiming “perfection” for now and he is grateful for that…
Hi Daryl,
I find the Whitehead Word Book is an indispensable reading companion when reading books on Whitehead, as well as our own forum postings.
I think last year we read Hosinki’s book in Andrew Davis’ course Whitehead’s Process Philosophy, the next course in this series. Another wonderful book, really helpful.
I can see I have Kraus’ book in Kindle and have started reading it, but I don’t recall it, except a vague memory that it was very well reviewed. I look forward to revisiting it. Mind you, my forays into PR have not got very far yet.
You sparked an interesting discussion, William (Danny).
I am with you on the panentheism. I described in my post for week 1 an epiphany I had from our week 1 readings that for me Whitehead’s panentheism implies at least two gods, not just one: God and Cosmos/World/Wisdom. I described how you see this in Proverbs where Wisdom tells us she was there from the very beginning with the everlasting Life and refers to us as her children. Wisdom is Hokhmah in Hebrew, Hakima in the Aramaic Jesus spoke, and Sophia in Greek, as in the philo-Sophia we are practicing here together. The early Christians believed Jesus embodied Hakima.
Here’s a new translation/midrash about Wisdom from Neil Douglas-Klotz:
Wisdom’s Dinner Party (Hebrew)
(a translation of Proverbs 9:1-6 from the Hebrew)
chakhemot baneta betah chatzeba ‘ammudeha shib‘ah (1):
KJV: Wisdom hath builded her house, she hath hewn out her seven pillars (1):From the primordial, chaotic “within,” Hokhmah—the breath of nourishing insight— has created a separate place to live: By enclosing her unknowable, inner mystery, Holy Wisdom has created an address for her temple…
mi-feti yasur henna chasar-leb ’amera lo (4) lekhu lachamu belachami ushetu beyayin masakheti (5) ‘izbu feta’yim wichu we’ishru bederekh binah (6)
KJV: Whoso is simple, let him turn in hither: as for him that wanteth understanding, she saith to him (4),
Come, eat of my bread and drink of the wine which I have mingled (5).
Forsake the foolish, and live; and go in the way of understanding (6).“You who are open, susceptible, ready to learn, You who are simple enough to take a new direction— right this way, change here, this moment!”
To those who lack heart, whose vital passion is diminished, whose center of courage is blocked, she radiates certainty, command and praise, she promises (4):
“Absorb my understanding of radical wetness— of greening, growing, vital force. Eat my bread of freshness and beauty:In the form offered here, it’s all digestible. Drink wine distilled from my experience, my embodied breath, arising through the power that stands under and supports you. This liquor offers the intoxication of your soul (5).
“Free your open-heartedness and feel the energy of life! Release the power of your simplicity, stop getting ready and start actually living! Find the direct way, follow a path which goes somewhere. Begin a journey which leads to the education and understanding of your soul (6).”
Douglas-Klotz, Neil. Desert Wisdom: A Nomad’s Guide to Life’s Big Questions from the Heart of the Native Middle East (pp. 132-134). ARC Books. Kindle Edition.
Wonderful epiphanies, Danny! “In whom we ‘live and move and have our “BECOMING.”‘”
I love that: “The air is being re-arranged.” Reminds me how ancient languages like Hebrew, Aramaic, Greek, and Sanskrit use the same word for air, wind, breath, soul and spirit.