Bill Gayner
Hi Danny,
I find questions about Whitehead feel to me like invitations to come out and play. You asked, “is it fair to say that experience is our boat for sailing on the river of time?” I imagine by “fair” you might mean “reasonable,” but I also hear “beautiful.” That’s quite a question you are asking! Reminds me of an intuit print and sculptures I have seen of the shaman’s boat. Also reminds me of Dionysus’ transformative dolphin-friended, flowering ship, so close to my heart and soul. I would say these boats point to deep forms of experiencing, where soul participates in what is always more than us.
Mind you, you might have noticed I am using “experiencing” rather than “experience.” Whitehead uses the word “experience,” but I follow a line from Dilthey to Heidegger and Eugene Gendlin, where “experience” is an abstraction about what “experiencing” points to directly. “Experiencing” for me refers to opening into our embodied feelings, letting go of our assumptions, and discovering what emerges freshly from this, and then finding words that resonate richly with what is emerging that help us deepen and carry forward our experiencing.
So I am inclined to ask is experiencing “our boat for sailing on the river of time?” A beautiful question, and I would say Yes! to the beautiful flowering ship is deep experiencing. But I want to add, the beautiful ship includes the river, the wind, the light, all the elements, and time. Experiencing is always more. And: that time is experiencing unfolding. And that clock time is abstracted from experiencing.
So, I want to say, playfully: sailing experiencing unfolds the river of time.
How does that land for you, Danny? I hope I have not messed up a perfectly fine metaphor!
I just saw the whole process from another angle, Randall! It occurs to me that if time is the unfolding of actual occasions, then their discontinuity does not happen in time. That whole process of God breathing us in and out happens outside of time. And so one actual occasion happening into another might be continuous in time.
What lovely questions to feel into and contemplate, Randall, thank you! Richly situated in your understanding of Whitehead. What fun to join you in your wondering…
I found myself remembering something Whitehead’s wife Evelyn said about his philosophy, a quotation I imagine you may well know:
It must be seen not from one side alone but from all sides, then from underneath and overhead. So seen, as one moves around it, the prism is full of changing lights and colours. To have seen it from one side only is to not have seen it (DW, 14; quoted by Andrew M. Davis, Whitehead’s Universe: Philosophical Foundations of Process Theology, Preface, no page number (unpublished)).
I wonder if God is both midwife and, together with cosmos, birthing us as well. And loving undertaker as well. All in each moment. Actual occasions expiring giving themselves to the next actual occasion as causal efficacy. That this is made possible because we expire not only into the next moment of our becoming and into each other, but through God, together with all our relations constituting God’s physical prehension. Treasured by God and then exhaled by Her/Him/Them as fresh occasions receiving the last specific occasion along with all the latest news from our relations as our fresh becoming in this fresh context, lured by God into transformative beauty, love and the true. Time is the series of waves into each other midwifed and birthed by and from God with Cosmos. We are this series of actual occasions winking in and out from, with and into God and each other. I expect time as our unfolding is as discontinuous as any of the elements, a river, the wind, light or fire, or soil or rock, or participating in and as ether by walking down the street (cf, Matt Segall’s (2023) Crossing the Threshold: Etheric Imagination in the Post-Kantian Process Philosophy of Schelling and Whitehead).
If we and God are so deeply implied in each other, is there discontinuity? It reminds me of the peek-a-boo games children and parents play together as the children learn to their delight the magic of object constancy even when the object is “gone.” And the object constancy of integrating real love from someone into us, the confidence, coherence and self-efficacy it affords.
Are we God or ourselves? Do we lose ourselves in God? Somehow, God’s dipolar prehension happening into us and receiving us includes the whole cosmos arising and ceasing.
Is time like a heart beat?
It strikes me if someone does not want to imagine God midwifing/birthing/facilitating this magic, the important thing would be to feel into the magic, what is afforded to us in fresh becoming, how pregnant form and emptiness are.
Hi Andrew,
You have put your finger on something important here. If everything is in process, what is memory? It is difficult to imagine a process, like a river, remembering. Does it help to imagine us as a relatively stationary unmoving thing, like a rock? How could something unmoving have memory?
I wonder if part of the problem is that we are imagining rivers and rocks as inert, lifeless, unfeeling things. Perhaps if everything feels and to some degree is gifted with the resonance of the whole cosmos, all our relations, and our whole history, along with what is most salient in our unique becoming, as well as in our becoming gifted an aliveness to what is afforded us, then perhaps it becomes easier to imagine. Not that it does not remain mindblowing, but that we can notice this happening in our experiencing. It feels coherent to me that complex exemplifications of this cosmos such as ourselves, whales and elephants, are gifted with the whole history of the cosmos, our becoming already alive to this and to all our relations, and our senses explicating the opportunities all that our own unique becoming is implying in each of moment of our life.
Mind you, the other dimension here in Whitehead’s vision is that God, or a living and therefore experiencing/valuing/understanding creative cosmic process of some kind, inspires us to recognize what is particularly ripe in this moment of our becoming, luring us into creative unfolding, like a gardener tending a garden. And this Always More than Us receives every moment of our becoming, treasures it and returns it to and as us along with all our relations in a series of deeply interrelated, mutually supporting becoming. So that our own becoming and the whole cosmos around us resonates with memory in fresh creative becoming.
My sense is that this vision resonates deeply with the ancient semitic nomadic sense of life as a caravan with our ancestors in front of us turning back to support us and we in turn creating a path for those who come after us (Neil Douglas-Klotz, 2022, Relevations of the Aramaic Jesus). As well as how the ancient Greek singer/poets asked the gods to help them “remember” the ancient epics which they would then freshly create and share (cf Gregory Nagy’ The Ancient Greek Hero in 24 Hours). Also, Rupert Sheldrake’s theory of morphic resonance. Interesting to notice how the ancients imagined the Buddha’s awakening as him remembering all of his previous lifetimes and from this creatively recognizing how to navigate life, what Stephen Batchelor refers to as his fourfold task (the more ancient part of the scripture that includes the four noble truths) and I would creatively phrase as: presencing with our existential situation including the whole range from frozen suffering to the wholesome, with arising and cessation, and cultivating our life.
So glad to meet a fellow Daniel Stern fan, Christie!
And, oh my gosh, Christie! Wow!
Thank you so much for sharing this wonderful example of wildfire phenomenology, of “feeling dipolar prehension,” and — so well and helpfully expressed — “the increase in felt vitality that may accompany direct consciousness of the processual-relational dimension of the world.” I love the rich, poetic way you express and reflect on your experiencing including drawing on the literature with wonderful quotations in a way that deepens my appreciation (experiencing/valuing/understanding) for your and my own experiencing.
So far, I have read your reply three times. There is so much there!
Your passage reminds me of the story found in Buddhist tradition and practice, but not in the early Pali scripture, of how when the Buddha-to-be sat down in the meditation that led to his awakening, Mara, an evil demon king saw what he was up to and sent his demon army to discombobulate the Buddha. They were shouting at him things like, “Who do you think you are?!” He leaned forward and touched the earth, and the earth witnessed him, supporting and encouraging him with all the transformations that had brought him to this meditation. He carried this forward into the processes of his awakening.
It also reminds me of what Eugene Gendlin has written about how to break through the public language barrier, by allowing a felt sense to arise about what we know so well but have not been able to articulate, and finding words alive to all the felt sense is implying, including allowing our words to have new meanings that the felt sense is implying. This is a key step in his phenomenological method, thinking at the edge (TAE).
Also, how so many of us learned to cope with suffering — but also joy and wonder! — when we were young by coming upstairs into our head and into abstraction, uprooting ourselves from the living ground of our embodied feelings. How many children have been shamed for expressing wonder and ecstasy?
Your physical prehension implying so much and habitual defences we all have that were once so needed and now need to come in for a hug so we can soften and open into the depths of our life waiting to be lived:
Something important is moving and dwelling there, pleading to be seen, to be heard, longing to express itself, literally ALIVE (and maybe even trapped?) there – but I start to despair again – who am I to do this work? Who am I to speak on behalf of wonder? And what approach to languaging might allow wonder to be heard?
You look out the window and presentational immediacy (so beautifully described!) proposes and lures you into something beautiful you are already feeling within you:
Like old and new coming together at the same time (a memory of the future?). An intensification is moving here, entertained from my vantage point, with my perceiving body. I feel it doing something strange with/in and with/out me, in the depths of the between, in the thickness of the strange light. What is going on here?
You look outside the window again, the visuals specifying what your felt sense is so richly implying, and you are drawn beyond the reified self and bifurcated lifeworld so familiar to us into participating in and with the beauty, and, oh, the petals: “I feel them enjoying it!” Self and lifeworld transformed now, out in the open dancing with all our relations! Playing through you and around you and with you.
What processes of production and perspectives are at work here? I look back out the window and the cherry petals are gone, but the painting, the strange light, continues. And then – Oh! Another flurry of petals! How moving! Something is moving again! Translucent pink dancers – they seem to be, no, they certainly are enjoying this strange light, this breeze, this moment of being carried beyond the bloom branches together. I feel them enjoying it! And I catch myself enjoying it too, being carried without intention, without deciding, just flowing. I am right there in the midst of it, and I feel my too-tense muscles soften into the rhythm. All of these bits together: pink petals, flutter, wind, my untensing body, glass window, philosophical text, vivid color blocks, thickening air, strange light – are these the “raw materials” taken up in some kind of ‘new process of production’? It feels like I am tapping into, and becoming part of, a process, an intensification of some kind of swelling aesthetic on the move.
I could really feel the intensification you asked about, and the wonder of it. “The thief only comes to steal, kill, and destroy. I have come to give life energy to people and something even more” (John 10:10).
I hope you will forgive me a digression into one of my interests here which also seems highly relevant to our discussion here. I love how Douglas-Klotz (2022) points out that in the Aramaic, Jesus probably said ina’na, which means “I I,” not “I.” He points out that the gospel was written in Greek, but with Aramaic ears.
“I-I is the way.” The first I is our naphsha, small self, the modes of self we tend to identify with. Douglas-Klotz argues Jesus’ breakthrough was not needing to kill or disappear the small-I in order to open to the larger self, soul, but instead relating with heart to the small I, discovering this opens us out into the second I, as ruha, breath, wind, soul participating in what Jesus named as Alaha, the everlasting Life, Abwoon and Abba (what is wonderfully, I feel, freshly named from relational experiencing and participating in what is always more than us).
Where was this whole evolution of human consciousness leading? According to Yeshua, a ripe development would be that our newly separate (and so newly freed) individual self would become fully aware of its life in universal soul. The heart would be able to turn from self to self at the proverbial or actual speed of light. The awareness of ina’na [I I] which he introduced was revolutionary.
We could then be aware of our Source, aware of this moment in time, and aware of inter-being with the natural world that preceded us. In other words, we’re talking about the awareness, with naphsha and ruha fully present, mediated by what Aramaic calls the leba, the heart.
This is what Genesis 1:26-27 outlines as the original human potential. It was not to “dominate and subdue the earth” (an egregious mistranslation from the Hebrew), but to “learn how to manage our own earthiness” and help all the beings created before us to fulfill their purpose along with our own.
It seems to me your example of being drawn by presentational immediacy into the beauty and wonder of participating more fully in what was already being implied in physical prehension (all our relations!) exemplifies what happens when we open into rich felt sensing of the dipolar prehension that constitutes us including “the increase in felt vitality that may accompany direct consciousness of the processual-relational dimension of the world.”
How we slip out of a small preoccupied version of ourself, lured into participating as ourself in what is always more than us and which is also birthing, receiving, and returning us to ourselves with all our relations.
Reference
Douglas-Klotz, Neil. 2022. Revelations of the Aramaic Jesus: The hidden teachings on life and death. Charlottesvile, VA: Hampton Roads.Thank you so much, Daryl, for coming out to play! And your observations took me into a deep dive as I described above to Greg into what Whitehead meant by conceptual prehension and presentational immediacy. I was intrigued by the phrase you used “negation process” and wanted to learn more and make sure I was understanding it right or at least thicken my approximations for what he means.
I imagine I am playing catch up here with you, you may know all of this already, but the last two paragraphs in the following passage seems to resonate with your realization.
Thus far we have contrasted pure physical feelings with hybrid ones. In this section we contrast “pure” conceptual feelings with “impure” or “propositional” feelings. Occasionally Whitehead speaks of “pure” feelings without making clear which contrast he has in mind. The reader should be warned, but not troubled. This double use of “pure” causes few problems. The context usually makes clear what is meant.
A pure conceptual feeling is the feeling of an eternal object as such. This was the only form of conceptual feeling that we had in view in the section on this topic above.
The contrast here is with an “impure conceptual feeling,” which Whitehead sometimes says can equally well be considered an impure physical prehension. This is also called a “propositional feeling.” Its datum is the “contrast” of the datum of a conceptual feeling with that of an “indicative feeling,” that is, a physical feeling stripped of its actual characteristics. This contrast is a “proposition,” which is also known as an “impure potential for the specific determination of matters of fact,” in distinction from an eternal object, which is a pure potential…
…This is different, however, from simply integrating a “physical” and a “conceptual feeling.” Another kind of abstraction has taken place. The “physical feeling” was of “actual entities” with many complex characteristics. The “proposition” does not integrate that prehension with the prehension of “eternal objects.” Instead it strips the “physical feeling” of all the “eternal objects” that characterized its datum. What is left, Whitehead says, is an “indicative feeling.” It is this indicative feeling that is integrated with the conceptual feeling. That integration provides us with the prehension of an “impure potential,” that is, with an impure or propositional feeling.
Cobb Jr, John B. Whitehead Word Book: A Glossary with Alphabetical Index to Technical Terms in Process and Reality (Toward Ecological Civilization Book 8) (Function). Kindle Edition.
Could I try out an example? I would be interested in what you think.
An example that comes to mind, meeting a longtime therapy client on a Zoom call. Gendlin points out it is “interaction first.” Our physical prehension already before consciousness emerges is implying so much between us. Warm affection already implicitly arising in me from our shared physical prehension. I see their smiling face (visual perception/conceptual prehension) and this explicates what physical prehension is already implying, creating even greater specificity and luring me out into a warm, “Hello!”
The specific expression on their face contrasted with so many other potential expressions of reserve, displeasure, or appreciation (negative constrasting), but this specific expression, the visuals of it, expressing, symbolizing and helping to carry forward the specific feeling that is already implicitly expressing itself through us. Our shared warmth and affection carrying forward now into new implying.
Hi Greg,
Thank you for your thoughtful, deeply felt responses. Yes, I look forward to feeling our way into some of these threads together.
1. Yes, that’s my sense to that, I expect “for Whitehead there is *always* a felt sensing ground in play, but we should look for evidence re that.”
2. I find The Whitehead Wordbook a very useful companion when reading process relational philosophers here reading Mesle and including denser texts like Faber’s books.
So interesting and relevant, the passage you quoted from Cobb:
Similarly, an occasion of human experience is not to be understood as a person experiencing. There is no person beneath or behind the experiencing. The act of taking the past into account and constituting itself with a view to the future is the actual occasion. The person is constituted as a long series of such occasions growing out of one another and out of the body.
[My bold]
I ran into a very similar challenge as you described:
… I doubt that *Whitehead* would intend that I feel a bit more uprooted … which brings forward the interesting question / speculation: how does (did) *he* experience *himself*, holding, as a handle for his being present, ‘being a series of actual occasions’? … => A thing to look out for is traces of his speaking directly from his first person experiencing in the text of P&R.
i’ll get into my experience below.
3. I love your puzzlement “by the thought that we might *not* be able to “experience” “dipolar prehension” if it’s a pervasive process in our lives.” A really good point, and so yes, “… Grasping our own process *as* we are becoming is the territory, I guess, so this becomes a question about reflexivity, I take it …”
I have run into similar challenges as you describe above, feeling uprooted by or fused and frozen into his concepts when trying to encounter what they are pointing to in my experiencing. For example, discovering the flow of experiencing frozen awkwardly into a sculptural wave, refusing obstinately to let go into flow, lol — I was getting caught in the fallacy of misplaced concreteness. My experiencing mirroring my fusion with the abstract. But I find if I stay with Whitehead’s concepts and the felt sense, they function as a kind of koan for me, breaking open into fresh forms of experiencing self and world.
I had something like your feeling of uprootedness, I was finding the idea of a stream of actual occasions as a stream of waves felt too “thin” somehow for me and then realized I was unconsciously visualizing them as if their stream was linear clock time imagined as a straight line with no width at all. That wasn’t feeling like experiencing at all. Then in class last week, I found myself wondering, if space is abstracted from physical prehension, perhaps actual occasions have no fixed perameters or location, a bit like God. Space reveals probable opportunities but is not perhaps a fixed limit, so that actual occasions while happening in a tiny moment of time, are in other ways unlimited by space, happening before and outside of space in some ways. Perhaps our perceptions of space are more like opportunities in this place. Perhaps actual occasions are like sub-atomic particles, appearing here with some likelihood, but potentially anywhere, and so are we a bit like God? “A circle whose center is everywhere and circumference nowhere” (Voltaire apparently). After all, physical prehension includes all our relations and the whole history of the cosmos, not just what is most salient now.
This intuition opened a sense of vast spaciousness in my playing with the concept of “a stream of actual occasions constituting my experiencing”. More like your “embodied living presence”.
Daryl’s reply sent me into a deeper dive in The Whitehead Word Book into what Whitehead meant by conceptual prehension and presentational immediacy, and I woke up this morning with a lovely shift, a letting go of my holding dipolarity of prehension as separate parts, letting go into experiencing a vivid sense of wholeness in dipolar prehension, all the colours turned on in the world, a lovely whole feeling from within and an experiential understanding of how… how to say it?… can I say, how our senses reveal and lure us into what our wholeness is implying in this moment, how in the felt sense of this, sensing explicates the felt sense in a way that is already creativity and wonder. Rumi said somewhere “we come from the garden to the garden.”
Also god and we, interweaving, the sacred breathing us in and out, form and emptiness, barely here at all and yet so much… Leave it to Rilke:
XXIV
Silent friend of many distances, feel
how your breath enlarges all of space,
Let your presence ring out like a bell
into the night. What feeds upon your facegrows mighty from the nourishment thus offered.
Move through transformation, out and in.
What is the deepest loss that you have suffered?
If drinking is bitter, change yourself to wine.In this immeasurable darkness, be the power
that rounds your senses in their magic ring,
the sense of their mysterious encounter.And if the earthly no longer knows your name,
whisper to the silent earth: I’m flowing.
To the flashing water say: I am.Rainer Maria Rilke. 1993. The Sonnets to Orpheus. (trans by Stephen Mitchell). Boston: Shambhala. Pages 107-108.
I’m not sure I close the loop on my speculation above, perhaps what becomes an eternal object functions outside of time and so can provide God with a lure for us within becoming that is particularly salient and close to us, like a mentor who inspired us or learning interesting new words just after a test. And that this as eternal object then no longer is constrained by the laws of the actual, becoming and time, and so can appear at any time or at a particularly salient time.
What’s clear to me is I need to feel more into how possiblities, constraints and inspiration function in experiencing.
Hi Daryl,
How interesting! I love how you told us, “Don’t feel bad if you don’t know what to do with this, neither do I.” What a great invitation!
It took me down different adventures of speculation and feeling into and speculating on them. Some of them didn’t work out, but I’d like to share something that feels like it might have legs.
Neil Douglas-Klotz who has so fruitfully translated Jesus from the Aramaic, the language he spoke, describes how for people whose cultural roots were nomadic experience time differently, not in the linear, clock time that shapes the flat lifeworld typical of late capitalism, but like a caravan, with our ancestors not behind us but in front of us and turning back to us and offering us a way forward, and we in turn offering the future behind us a way forward as well.
I wonder about how our every becoming according to Whitehead is received by the sacred, by God, and cherished and returned to us as our new, refreshed becoming along with all our relations in each other in togetherness.
I wonder if I can say everyone whom God cherishes becomes an eternal object offering a possibility to us, and by everyone I mean every one of the actual occasions that constitute the stream of our becoming. I wonder if eternal objects function outside of actual becoming, offering possiblities to we undergoing the fresh adventures of becoming. Does what God cherishes become eternal and is the eternal outside of time capable of functioning like a lure in any time? Is that part of what nourishes telos?
Drawing on Whitehead airplane metaphor, I acknowledge I am flying way out there and who knows how it will land. But what fun! However it turns out, I feel invited to feel more appreciative of and more curious about whatever it is that “eternal objects” provide us with us. Exploring how they function feels more promising now, more luring somehow, even if this little adventure doesn’t prove to have legs when I get back to the ground.
A really helpful post, Greg, thank you. Where it took me is a deeper experiential appreciation for how the four elements feed us, for example, how water and air are vital forms of nourishment for us, and how light and earth feed plants that also feed us, both in the form of plants breathing out air we can breathe in and as plants as food we can eat.
How easily these supposedly dead inert mechanical bits join our body as nourishment! Doesn’t feel dead or mechanical at all to me now as I am writing this, but more participating in a living cosmos that supports and nourishes us.
Also how an appreciation for how eagerly all the various sub-cellular and cells join in the complexity that forms us. Feels like so much good will animating and orienting it all.
I thought I would try and see if I can post a response before my evening clients and then after that, our class. But it means I haven’t taken time to carefully read Christie, Dennis, and Bob’s responses. I will come back to do that.
I take your point, George, that “actual occasions” is only an abstraction. That would remain true even if it is a concept abstracted from a living experiential process. It is no more actual than space or the colour red.
Abstractions are not actual. But still, abstractions such as space and the colour red can afford us possibilities.
It leads me to wonder (in both senses of the word), what does the abstraction “actual occasion” point to in our living experiential process? What possibilities does it afford us?
I believe Whitehead said we are a stream of actual occasions. Can we experience this series of arisings and ceasings that constitutes us? I believe one of the five ascetics to whom the Buddha gave a talk after his awakening as well as the Buddha’s companion Ananda both when they awakened said, “All that arises ceases.” Or words to that effect. Feeling and thinking along with Whitehead, the abstraction “actual occasions” has functioned in a numinous way luring me into deeper more coherent presencing that has transformed my sense of self and lifeworld.
This is the first time I have taken the certificate program. Last year, I audited Andrew Davis’ course and then the world religions and the sciences courses. I applied to take the certificate program to late to join the program.
Yes, Zhenbao, glad to resonate with you in the written word here again and looking forward to more conversations in this deepening exploring together again!
Thanks so much, Dennis! Glad you are participating again!
Hi Dennis,
Good to see your name here and to learn you are taking the certificate course again. I only audited last year.
Warm regards,
Bill