Chris Hughes
Hi Jeremy, I too was “stopped in my tracks” by Lubarsky’s discussion of beauty. I realized that beauty is not an abstraction, something you say about an experience. It is the experience itself. The number six is a thing, an experience, in its own right but it is equally the product of two and three. You can factor beauty out of the experience and run with it as art. The experience is the relationality of a subject embedded in the relationality of its world and beauty is this complexity and harmony. An experience of ugliness comes from a being in a context deficient in such harmony, the difference between being in a forest versus a city car park. As interdependence drops of so does beauty. It got me thinking!
Hi Jamie, you raise good points. I also feel queasy when I stray from the path of “discrimination and reduction”. What I find comforting in ANW is that he strays from the path but does so in the context of investigating religious truth “when our ordinary senses and intellectual operations are at the highest pitch of discipline” (RM lecture 4 section 1). His investigations feel sure footed on what I often find is a slippery trail. This helps with the discomfort you mention. I am also just beginning to understand how he puts aesthetic expression on a par with scientific thinking. In RM he writes “there is a wisdom in the nature of things [which is grounded on two sources of evidence] first upon our success in various special theoretical sciences, physical and otherwise, and secondly upon our discernment of ordered relationships, especially in aesthetic evaluations, which stretches far beyond anything that has been expressed systematically in words.” Shifting our attention to the latter of these two, despite the discomfort, brings values, excluded by “discrimination and reduction” back into the picture. Might held us avoid the path to our own extinction …
Concerning “Good or Evil is an all-or-nothing proposition. Does not this polarity as well as divine perfection assert way too confidently an exact nature of things?” I feel that Whitehead is driven to express “an exact nature of things” because “religious truth must be developed from knowledge acquired when our ordinary senses and intellectual operations are at their highest pitch of discipline”. (RM lecture 4). He seems to want to establish God rationally before he will allow any religious experience let alone the magic you speak of. I wonder if Whitehead’s God with “G” representing the abandonment of a “harmony of truths” is part of his rational justification for God and shouldn’t be seen as a limit on what we see “in our minds and with our intuition”. After all he ends up with a very personal God by the end of Process and Reality.
Hi Charlie, this feels like a satisfactory explanation for all the passionate God talk in this forum, but does it answer to the numinous power of some peoples experience. I am thinking of Dan when he says,”I went to be with my father and when he prayed with me in the name of Jesus, an incredible column of power and peace came over me and I experienced what a New Testament author might have described as an exorcism”.
Zhenbao, you write “the light from Taoism is to reveal that there is a circulation of energy in us, if we are conscious enough.” and
“When this experience is gained, our perception of the external world and the internal world will become so sensitive that we know how prehension, be it physical or conceptual, occurs any time when we are eating, walking, reading, listening, talking and writing, or doing meditation. we will feel that we digest a new idea in exactly the same way we digest some food or drink something. They all evoke some experience of energy flow in us and lead to our transformation, physically and mentally at the same time. The experience of reading and the experience of eating could sometimes be so similar to each other, that it seems that they can replace each other, at least to some extent.”
… so the Taoist energy flow is the becoming of an actual occasion in which mental and physical are “two sides of the same coin”. I am not sure about “it seems that they can replace each other”. I think you are referring to your own experience of physical healing coming from such a crossing between mental and physical. Is this the transformation you speak of? If I am right here my difficulty is coming to terms with the idea that relatively low level societies of occasions such as cancer cells can be influenced by thought “reading, listening, talking and writing, or doing meditation.” I can see that when I decide to raise my arm my thought are crossing over into my bodily functions but what you claim seems of a different order.
Hi Dan, I am interested in the words “confirmed in prayer” you use in the title of your post. Reading about your vivid spiritual experiences with a guru from the Sri Aurobindo lineage and the transformative experience of prayer “an incredible column of power and peace came over me and I experienced what a New Testament author might have described as an exorcism” you speak to the power of numinous experience. In Religion in the Making, Whitehead says at the start of Lecture 4 “In human nature there is no such separate function as a special religious sense” and “religious truth must be developed from knowledge acquired when our ordinary senses and intellectual operations are at their highest pitch of discipline”. Your experiences seem a powerful refutation of these statements. What do you think is going on here?
It would be great to see you at the Zoom group on Sunday to discuss this. I think you are onto something that many of us relate too, including the difficulty of finding a Faith Community where one doesn’t feel “awkward and dishonest”.Hi Charlie and Dennis, I love Putin’s choice! Evil, and Whiteheads maybe “weak” treatment of it, keeps coming up especially in a world which contains the likes of Putin, Netanyahu (?) and Trump (?). We had I good discussion on the topic in the Zoom group last Sunday and it will never be exhausted. Dennis your contribution of evil as “unloading responsibility is a really nice contribution as it allows scaling from spouse to state. Hopefully you can both join the Zoom group on Sunday to discuss this further.
Hi Jeremy, Point taken re “do not tell this to our Evangelical friends” and I like your extension of pulpit to social/political equivalents and Donald Trump. You write “I have many more doubts about whether the public education classroom is a place where the world is being steered” and cite your experience with college students who are the products of those classrooms. Maybe the lack of steering from the classrooms of the world is my point. Despite efforts from organizations like LVE (Living Values In Education Values Education for Children and Young Adults, Morals, Character | Living Values) science is taught from within the bifurcated world view of the seventeenth century, that is within res extensa the split from res cogitans never being mentioned. Students swallow the scientific outlook, Naturalism-sam, whole, meaning and value are worse than trivialized, they are excluded. This coupled with “commoditization as a matter of policy” (and I am not sure if I know what you mean by this) is what I had in mind when I wrote,“A place that does steer the world is the public education classroom.”. I would love to hear more from you on this. Perhaps you can make the zoom group on Sunday?
Doug, “That’s a longer story, but one that also goes to your thoughts.” I am curious now about this “longer story”. Maybe on Sunday …
Hi Bill, your experience of loosing God and then “meeting [him] again freshly and coming to appreciate how this Friend has been with me every step of my life.” resonated with an experience I recently had. My Dad was an Anglican priest, so I naturally gravitated to religion as a child. I remember when I was maybe eleven or twelve sitting in St Mary’s church Harrow on the Hill (north London) knowing that God was calling me to be a priest and my future was clear. It was an intense experience that I never forgot. Of course I did forget it as university, mathematics, physics, family, climbing … came my way. Whitehead brought me back to the possibility of God and last summer, on a visit to England, I went to St Mary’s and sat in the same pew …
Hi Kevin, interesting! What comes first, actual occasions or Space-Time as Einstein understands it? My take on what is going on here is that actual occasions come first and they exist in a prehensive context where the mental pole dominates. There is no physical pole as there is no physical to be prehended, no matter to curve space-time, no physical laws in the initial datum. “Each event in this chaos was, therefore, influenced by prior events, and each event influenced future events” i.e. the normal behaviour of prehending occasions. Here time is needed for concrescence and becoming but it is not time in the physical temporal sense, more experiential before-now-after time. The “creation of our universe” subsequently emerged from this (and it could have emerged different) as actual occasions took a path to quarks and electrons (the Standard Model). Thus physical space-time emerged into our world and Einstein told us about it. For me this makes sense of Griffins claim that “the creation of our universe was not the beginning of temporal relations and hence of time”.
Hi Kathleen, you write re God, “I know he does not want us to think of God as a “person.”. In your other post, LARGE CLAIMS, you gently question Johnson for having “more knowledge of God than we can possibly have.”. His (Johnson’s) knowledge seems to come from exactly that, attributing to God mental behaviour we are familiar with such as selecting what to remember. The “some” in Johnson’s phrase “some positive values are not lost” is odd. It is one thing to drop the negatives but to select from the positives seems unnecessary in a being capable of holding all possibilities and all concresced actualities. If God drops stuff, how is he the “fellow traveler” who suffers with us? My understanding was that God’s consequent nature embraces everything that occurs in the temporal world, all good all bad.
I found the “he loses nothing that can be saved” quote in Process and Reality:“The consequent nature of God is his judgment on the world. He saves the world as it passes into the immediacy of his own life. It is the judgment of a tenderness which loses nothing that can be saved. It is also the judgment of a wisdom which uses what in the temporal world is mere wreckage.” (Page 346 in my Kindle edition)
It seems that the phrase might not imply a restriction. I am interpreting the phrase as “everything is saved, nothing is lost”. Probably need a Whitehead scholar to sort this out!
Hi Bill, I think there might be a bit of a misunderstanding going on here, and maybe the issue is “front loading”. I am using Penfield and the mind brain problem as his procedure is an accessible way for students to grasp the separation between mental and physical, the grand bifurcation, that Whitehead’s philosophy opposes. His system solves, avoids this classic dualism which still haunts us today, (See Religion in the making Lecture 3 section 6 “Body and Mind”), with actual occasions having a physical and mental pole, a neutral monist solution. Following the lesson in the Practice, I want to try and lead students into a personal, emotional space where they experience how unsatisfactory dualism is. I want to “front load” a focusing exercise. This is the “troubling situation” I meant earlier on. My concern was whether Focusing techniques would work in this rather different context.
The first thing that strikes me on reading your detailed response (and many thanks for that) is that there is in clinical Focusing (I watched Anne Weiser’s beautiful demonstration) an assumption that a troubling situation exists (e.g. Anne’s sister’s death) and that this situation is deliberately invoked in therapy after the client has been relaxed using traditional mindfulness techniques. Attention is then directed to the emotional/bodily manifestation of the problem and the clients stays there and explores. Articulating what is being experienced is tentatively explored, words are played with, until a fit is found. When the fit feels right (new concept formed, Rogers) the client “might make some notes” and move on. The difference between this and what I am trying to do is that my students don’t have a troubling situation. In fact, I am trying, at least initially, to generate a troubling situation. In the first lesson I am using footage of Wilder Penfield’s famous Montreal Procedure with conscious patients reporting on brain stimulation, to raise what I hope is the troubling correlation of an electrical probe at work on one hand and the experience of music on the other. I am excited by the possibility that the same procedure Anne Weiser demonstrates could be used in this context. What do you think? I recorded a 10 minute guided mediation along these lines after our exchange this morning and am reasonably happy with the result. The main difference as I see it, is that in clinical practice the intervention is prompted by an emotional dissonance whereas in the classroom the intervention is prompted by a cognitive dissonance which must be deliberately made emotional prior to resolution. My overall objective is to make process thinking an emotional experience, a lived experience rather than just an intellectual exercise. Both these tie in nicely with Whitehead’s ideas of prehension and concrescence.
I will try and attend your Marh 16 Presentation. I will also get in touch so we could have as zoom chat. Thanks again.Hi Bill, read your post with great interest. I am building a set of lessons for teaching high school students process ideas. (I was a high school maths/physics teacher and a mindfulness teacher). I have ordered Ann Weiser’s book “Focusing in Clinical Practice”, hope that is a good place to start. After each lesson of “teaching” I am including a practice section with the goal of shifting understanding into direct experience. I have been struggling a bit here as the mindfulness techniques I am familiar with cluster around avoiding all thought patterns and I am trying to get students to find the experiences that go with a particular thought pattern, process thought. The experiential shift from a deeply entrenched bifurcated world view to a view based on actual occasions sounds a bit like therapy. (My first degree was in Psychology and Carl Rogers has always been in the back of my mind). I would love to hear more about how you are “exploring how to integrate Thinking at the Edge” and Focusing into your work. I want to discover how to “cultivate these modes” as you put it. I think your comment about value in class pointed out not only the contradiction of presenting a value saturated system in a book like Process and Reality but also the inaccessibility of Whitehead’s thinking to so many people.
Gendlin writes:
The next thing that comes to the person to feel and say is not necessarily what follows logically from what was last said. Rather it follows from the feeling of what was said. . . . Imposing interpretations and schemes on oneself is useless, but allowing one’s next authentic step to form is, along with brave choices, the way to live one’s real possibilities forward.
My first thought is that in a guided meditation we could shift attention to the early prehensive stage of concrescence, exploring the subjective form of say an apple in a process version of MBSR’s raisin exercise. Am I on the right track?
If “creativity is <“embodied in all becoming” but is not actual doesn’t this exempt it from the ontological principle? If it is exempted how can it do anything? God was given actual occasion status to make him efficacious, why is the same honour not bestowed on creativity? If it is the formless ultimate for ANW’s system why is it not on the list of Categories of Existence? God is on the list as an actual albeit non temporal occasion. A formless ultimate necessary for everything but not existing is … odd. Its like yeast not being in the pantry when you bake bread, coming into being when … you mutter yeast over the mix? If the ultimate of creativity, and possibly freedom, dwell in the way c transcends aleph null in Cantor’s system, an uncountable > an uncountable, so be it. It just seems odd to me that ANW is not addressing this head on. “Creativity requires a medium of actuality (ontological principle).” Isn’t this subject predicate language? Similarly with, “this actualization is the expression of creativity” and “It requires embodiment in actual occasions”. Finally the fact that “Creativity does nothing by itself” does not negate its existence, which take us right back to the “ultimate”. … groan.
“There is a problem in saying that “possibilities never existed before” because if this is true, it was possible for them to exist.” Nice point! But it seems a bit linguistic. Math helps me here. If all possibilities, x belonging to ∞, between 1 and 2 are considered then there exist x’s in this set that have never been seen and there always will be such x’s. This is the “possibility to exist.” They only become actual when they are first seen. Thus √2 entered reality, concresced, when a Pythagorean worked with a 1,1, √2 right triangle for the first time. Now I get your point “the context made it possible”. Yay!
Your last statement “Only an actuality can be the ground of the possible – including the possibly of this actuality.” is a beautiful phrase which sums the whole thing up. Thanks so much.