Chris Hughes
Bill what a lovely introduction, and so much more than an introduction. I find your passion, the way your understanding, experience, practice and purpose support and propel each other so motivating. I want to hear the story of how you got there. The link between mindfulness meditation and process thinking, the former an experiential vehicle for the latter is something I need to explore. I am trying to harness this for my project but I feel clumsy. Is this the art and method of presencing?
Hi Dennis, what is the topic of your Doctorate?
Hi Bill, Dan, Rick, I hadn’t realized that my suggestion re pantheism vs panentheism would brand me a Whiteheadean heretic! But I loved the way you worked the suggestion right down to the paradox of the idea being a denial of the position it was advocating. That is how I am reading “you risk loosing the possibility of playing devil’s advocate”. (The following statement is true. The preceding statement is false.)
Isabelle Stengers in “Thinking with Whitehead” writes “The actual entity is a “feeling” of “its” world”. (p294) The statement emphatically forbids subject-predicate understanding. I think some of our discussion i.e. God his propensities, properties, natures etc., is falling foul of this prohibition. A stick is a stick on the other hand respects our feelings of the world. A full blown event ontology forbids the intersection of sets. We are left with a single set containing all events which can not be reduced, cannot be deconstructed in any way. Event relationships in this possibility space resist all part whole relationships and thus reject panentheistic statements about God and a “credal Jesus who is both fully God and human”, Dan. High and/or low Christology is meaningless distinction. Is our discussion one big category mistake? (The number five is a bachelor). On reflection I must be wrong, how could ANW have fallen into the subject-predicate fallacy?
Hi Rick, two things stand out for me in your post: “Christ is the best pattern for me” and “creeds … easily become bricks”. Straightforward truths to hold on to. I tend to get too lost in abstract details.
Hi David, you may have to start one!
Hi Dan, I like your idea of “low Christology”, but maybe low is also high if God is seen pantheistically and not panentheistically. All actual occasions are atemporal in their process only entering the temporal order with the objectification brought on by concrescence. Viewed this way all actual occasions share in God’s atemporal presence the difference being that God does not concresce into objective past the way we and everything else does. He is always becoming and has no moment of being. (I have probably overstepped my understanding of ANW here and stand ready for correction.) “A stick is a stick”, I feel all this thinking helps me grasp and enjoy this. Sticks, after all, help you get around.
Hi Eric, I like “Let evil creep in through actual entities and their sub optimal choices.” Yes! but for me the question remains: why are suboptimal choices even possible? Or “where is Evil creeping infrom”? … and that goes back to your solid point that if God contains all possibilities that set should include evil ones as well as good ones. Maybe we have to take God down a notch and accept that “shit happening” and “bad guys” are fundamental to the order of the world and as distressing to God as they are to us. This would give evil firm status in the cosmos and replace the defecit-in-harmony position with something solid: Christ & Lucifer with respective immanence. Becoming actual occasions can select from either the good possibility pool or the bad one. Put another way, why shouldn’t we find yin-yang here? Are we scarred of accepting Evil on these terms? Is Whitehead’s God requirement (the ontological principle) emotionally motivated rather than rationally? He loves to talk about the beauty of the sunset but not so much about the death of his son in combat.
I also like your point about Gods, Buddhas and eternal objects being helpers on the path and chances for self realization, which is perhaps another word for possibilities articulated in the words of other traditions. Agreed too that “progressive improvement” is tough to hold onto in the world of climate change, Ukraine, Gaza and fake-truth-politics.
I hadn’t really thought about God’s primordial nature being an unchanging, infinite set of good options “available to anyone in any age at any time”. We, and any other actual occasion, can tap into this set or not as we choose. The Consequent God suffers with us put the Primordial God is untouched. Hmmm … is this sufficient to do without the Lucifer I was just rambling on about …
Hi Bill, “Imagination is not something that has to be drummed up. It is something that is there all the time, if our certain way of thinking doesn’t get between us and it”. McGilchrist, implies that when we settle back into the deep seat of becoming, we find raw creativity. “God’s purpose in the creative advance is the evocation of intensity” (PR 105). Bottom line for ANW. BUT intensity has nothing to do with values. What’s more primordial creativity is indifferent to individual longevity. “His tenderness is directed toward each actual occasion, as it arises. Thus, God’s purpose in the creative advance is the evocation of intensities. The evocation of societies is purely subsidiary to this absolute end.” (ibid). We and our values are subsidiary to Gods ends! When “we dig down” we can’t find a transcendent legitimization for value. There is no God that “treasures us”. I am reminded of Nietzsche “How much truth can a spirit bear? How much truth can a spirit dare?” My “felt sense and imagination” does not want to go here. But if this is where digging takes me then I must give values the status of a compass built by man for the benefit of man. This could be an extreme interpretation of ANW’s words from Religion in the Making, “Religion is what an individual does with his own solitariness. If you are never solitary, you are never religious.” I’m being the Devil’s advocate here. But I am uncertain…
Hi Bill, you write “Values are what orient us throughout our day, an organic, living transformative compass.” and from Farhan Shah “For both Bergson and Iqbal, “pure time” is regarded as free creative movement.” I think “pure time” (i.e. not clock time) is the duration in which a becoming event passes from conformal prehension to satisfaction and concrescence. But I am bothered by where these values, the cardinal points of the orienting compass, come from. Religion always seems to end up attributing them to a transcending divinity and the concession that the divinity is relationally involved in the world (panentheism, Christianity & Islam) does not diminish their extra-human source. On the other hand, to see values as social constructions robs them of authority. ANW needed eternal objects because something cannot come from nothing. On the other hand, If values are pure potentials they only come into existence in the possibility space of a particular situation and never exist in any way outside of this-now. The sentiment of your post is lovely and so well expressed. You remind me that practically goals, purposes, destinations and values can fit together beautifully. Maybe there is no need to dig deeper. The reason I like ANW though is that he did dig deeper whilst at the same time preserving the beauty of the sunset.
Hi Rick – the Sunday Zoom is 834 8112 8493 pc 885857. Look forward to seeing you.
Hi Jamie, I love your “penny drop” account of how Theocosm unites God and the world in mutual necessity. I feel diving into process thought is experiencing a sequence of such moments, a trajectory which started for me when I realized how deeply my mind was entrenched in dualism. Process thinking seems 90% dismantling entrenched modes of thought to make way for the sudden deeply rewarding insights you describe.
Hi Bill, I’m not so much flying in the face “of Whitehead’s attempt to provide a metaphysics that embraces and encourages the processes of deepening our understanding through science, experiencing and religion.” so much as exploring what is going on when we say we are “deepening our understanding”. I think it depends on what kind of experience you are hunting. If you set your sights on an escalating series of abstractions that might lead to a deep “aha”, the single mother equation, the BIG TOE, then, to use ANW’s image, you take off in the airplane and fly higher and higher into the sky. Particularities fade and unities emerge. On the other hand, you might be hunting down the extraordinary in the ordinary events of the day, walking your dog in the woods. ANW’s metaphysics is then a spotlight that shines down from above on the ground your feet are shuffling through and makes you catch your breath with the wonder and beauty of it all. When I read your later comments, I think we are probably on the same track.
“Because the eternal objects may be “excluded from feeling” actual worlds may diverge.” (Stengers) This would account for different religious traditions, different actual worlds, but also suggest that a search for common threads in such traditions is a journey that takes such a seeker deeper into abstraction, an evermore select set of eternal objects, and thus away from consensus rather than towards it. Going in the opposite direction would be a journey into a broader set of eternal objects and ultimately into a place where the search was transcended, understood for what it was and abandoned. So for me process thinking does “open up new relationships between the world religions” by denying the possibility of abstractive convergence but endorsing the variety of actual worlds each of the great traditions has created.
Hi Leslie, I was reading a section of Isabelle Stengers “Thinking with Whitehead” this morning when I read your post. #3 got me going. The reality of process must be separated from questions of knowledge. Reality just IS without any burden of explanation, not imbedded in understanding, independent of the activity of knowing, not a system or a process, not an ultimate anything and nothing to do with God or quantum mechanics. We are always wanting to understand. It takes an effort to step away from this want and refuse its mandate, curtail its remit. Some sadness accompanies this, the game of knowing has been put in place. The first step of wisdom is to place knowing in its rightful slot as an obsession of man and perhaps a condition, an inescapable part of what-it-is-like to be a human. In this vein eternal objects might be called “abstract” but on condition that they are divorced from the activity “to abstract”. (Paraphrasing Stengers.) All this is another way of recognizing that ANW’s thought is a celebration of experience, a pointing at experience, rather than an attempt to explain it. This requires dogma to be surgically cut from religious experience. The activities of the great traditions belong to IS and are separate from “to abstract”. They fade from IS when the surgical cut heals, when the temptation to understand, this greed, wins out over the open-eyed wonder of experience itself. There is no breeze in a stuffy library. Dogma is about us. People are not searching for such arrogance when they enter a church. It seems in a world where knowing is prioritized that, as you put it, there is indeed a “risk … that there can become more observers of world religions than practitioners.” I think process would see this as the forced closing of a door on the IS of experience.
Hi Bill, what a thought-provoking response and so well worded. I hadn’t thought of the past-in-the-present in the sense of re-experiencing and thus transforming an obstinate fact of what-has-been into a new “obstinate fact”! The phrase “re-writing the past” is suddenly more than just a figure of speech. How amazing to think that we can create a “new past”! And I love the way you transitioned this into the wider idea of “heaven and earth marrying and birthing us anew, transforming all of us, including heaven and earth.” (I omitted your “?”) And there is even a symbol for this: Theta! Thanks so much, you made my day.