Daniel Stevens
Hi Chris. So good to see your updated Introduction and have another opportunity to appreciate your unique background and perspectives. I had to skip Ecological Civilization because of various family responsibilities so it will be good to see you via Zoom again. With my limited scientific knowledge I will be trying to absorb as much as I can by relying on my general understanding of Whitehead.
I feel very fortunate to have made this connection with you, Matt. Thank you for expressing an interest in my thoughts. A critical analysis of my early thinking would be most welcome. Thank you for the link. I look forward to studying your essay.
Thank you Bill.
“God is everlasting. The consequent nature retains all that enters it in full immediacy. Thus the value that is attained and quickly lost in the world is everlasting in God.” Three sentences which are very healing. A nice short prayer.
Sorry I missed yesterday evening’s Zoom meeting. I attended my younger sister’s 62nd birthday party. BTW… I just finished signing up for “The Way of Aramaic Jesus” so I will see you on May 29th! Nothing like a crash course in Aramaic. I better get to reading his book. Thanks again for the suggestion!
Dan
Thank you, Bill, for addressing Chris’ comments touching upon pantheism. I didn’t know quite how to take that in and assess its implications. Your analysis is very helpful. Also, thank you for turning me on to Neil Douglas-Klotz. I just now went onto Amazon to view the book you quote from. His approach to understanding Yeshua sounds like it could be very helpful to me too. I’ve read scholarship that attempts to sort out the possible original words of Jesus (in Greek) from the interpretations of the later Gospel writers, but that only takes you so far. I need to learn a bit about “the Syriac Aramaic text in the version of the Bible still used by Aramaic Christians today” that Neil uses and read his “Revelations of the Aramaic Jesus”. Using the Aramaic version of Christian sacred language instead of the English version may also liberate me from the old dogma and metaphysics that I’ve rejected.
Chris and Rick, I actually believe the concept of Incarnation just doesn’t fit into Whiteheadian metaphysics. Identifying Incarnation with the Big Bang illustrates this. At the end of the day, trying to finesse Incarnation into a Whitehead friendly worldview results in our trying to substitute the word Incarnation for the Whiteheadian term actuality. For Whitehead, God and the world are interdependent. Without the world, God would have no actuality. A world, actuality of some kind, must have always existed along with God.
It has been a long time since I’ve read Rohr’s “The Universal Christ”. I had difficulties grasping his metaphysics. It seemed like he took John’s “Logos” and relabeled it “Christ”. I do remember him making a statement that “Christ is everything”. It seems like he ends up with a kind of monism, distinct from Whitehead’s strong pluralism.
Thank you, Evan, for your sharing. I don’t consider myself deeply wounded in my relationship to Christianity, but I find myself late in life still trying to overcome my early childhood programming in crude Christian theology which was dumbed down for children, such things as original sin… why did Eve have to eat that apple? Jesus died for me, better be good if you want to go to heaven… you get the idea. These unhealthy ideas do plant themselves deep in the unconscious and they are not easy to pull up. Whitehead’s thought is a wonderful antidote and I want to develop some mantras/affirmations as a way of counteracting some of my programming. Buddhist practice, if I could maintain it, is another route. Cognitive Behavioral Therapy insights also are helpful.
Stopping use of the word “God” may be a major help, but it is a difficult habit to break. I’m thinking that this could be a major help to me if I could settle on an alternative and stick with it. During Jay’s class I found the term “Soul of the Universe” attractive. Your “Beckoning Presence” also is attractive. Longer phrases, though more descriptive, seem too awkward to use in practice. Got to keep experimenting.
It sounds like you’ve known Jay McDaniel for a long time. I love not only his thinking but his demeanor and how he communicates lovingly with people. I feel very fortunate to have connected with him.
Thanks again.
Thank you, Rick and Leslie, for your thoughtful posts. I certainly personally embrace the idea that our understanding of the mind of God and our Christian version of scripture has been a process of evolution. Whitehead’s presentation of God has certainly been a crucial further step in that direction. The problem is that a very large percentage of Abrahamic believers haven’t gotten or read the memo. The argument goes something like this: “God said WE are his chosen people and he told us to take your land and kill you”, “No! God said WE are his chosen people and he told us to take your land and kill YOU!” ad nauseum. And you can easily find scriptural support for both positions in their respective traditions. I also know many people who have given up having any faith in any version of Christianity at all because they were taught some version of the inerrancy of scripture.
At this stage of my life, I am particularly sensitive to being as honest and transparent as I can be, both with myself and others. I am striving to discern the outlines of my own personal faith and I am also trying to discern how to be honest with others when my beliefs do not match up with theirs. This second task is particularly challenging as each situation has its own unique context. My sense is that we need to be willing to challenge others more often. Thanks again for taking the time to respond to my post as it helps me process my thoughts and feelings in this difficult area.
Thank you, Rick, for this remembrance of Thay. He has always been an inspiration to me. Having suffered through the horrors of the Vietnam War (or more properly the American War) and his subsequent exile, he endured so much suffering in life yet was an island and refuge of peace for so many. He made Zen Buddhism available to so many Western seekers like me; we are all in his debt. Wonderful musical performance.
Thank you Bill for this uplifting post. Focusing on values rather than goals and systems of ideas may be the best way to foster unity and peace both within ourselves and within the human community. Appreciate this very much.
As to the comments in this thread addressing the relative merits of direct religious experience versus abstraction, my one comment would be that a careful balance is imperative. Walking on one leg is not only difficult but dangerous. My separate entry “Does Metaphysics Really Matter?” addresses this issue using an example I have some familiarity with.
Hi Chris. Thank you so much for your response to my post. When you ask, “What do you think is going on here?”…This is the question I have been trying to address since my initial experience of prayer… so for the past 45 years. In a few sentences, I believe the answer is that we certainly do have inherent spiritual experience and it is not a “separate function” that we would describe as a “special religious sense”, which implies that it is historically and culturally based. At the same time, the proper interpretation of our spiritual experiences requires both very fine inner discernment and rigorous philosophical analysis. So, at the same time, I also believe that “religious truth must be developed from… intellectual operations at their highest pitch of discipline.” My words “Confirmed in Prayer” points up the fact that Whitehead’s principle of relativity and mutual immanence confirms Jung’s concept of the collective unconscious. Our normal, everyday conscious ego experience is, in fact, only the tip of the iceberg of our psyche; there is great depth and complexity to the structure of our psyche and we are not closed systems. In Whitehead’s language, we prehend both our actual world and God, and they us. All actual entities really are interconnected and interdependent and this is especially marked in the psychic realm. From my personal experience, this is both a beautiful thing and also a potentially dangerous thing and our subjective experience needs to be balanced with intellectual discipline and discernment. I plan to join the Zoom call tomorrow. Talk soon!
I think this discussion of experience is extremely important since it is so central to Whitehead’s thought. But we need to keep Whitehead’s Fallacy of the Perfect Dictionary in mind: thinking that everything can be expressed in already existing language. At most, we can aim for a convergence of closely related words and ideas. So as to experience, here is my most recent take inspired by a passage in Hosinski Chapter 2:
In describing Whitehead’s Reformed Subjectivist Principle, Hosinski says, “Initially this can be most easily understood simply by reflecting on the fact that as experiencing subjects we are affected by other humans and that we in turn can and do affect other humans. Just as we are qualified by what others have become and done, so other human beings, as experiencing subjects, are qualified by what we have become and done.”
The Merriam-Webster Dictionary defines the verb affect: “to produce an effect upon someone or something; to act on and cause a change in someone or something.”
So, for me, to experience is to be affected. In the category of perception, when we hear “experience” we tend to think in terms of conscious perception in the mode of presentational immediacy when we should be thinking in terms of causal efficacy which gets at this idea of being affected quite nicely. Using “to be affected” also embraces the other categories of human experience such as imagination, dreams, etc. equally well.
To experience is to participate in creativity and to be affected by it. In Whitehead’s world nothing can exist by itself. There aren’t substances that require nothing else to exist. Absolutely everything is interrelated, interdependent. So, to participate in creativity, to be part of the universe means that you will be affected by and you will affect others. The only thing that differs at the various scales of reality is the form and degree of the subject’s awareness of being affected. This is where Ken Wilbur’s work is so helpful. BTW… “to participate in creativity” can also be expressed as “to become”.
To be affected equals to experience equals to prehend. So, in Whitehead’s language of prehension, to prehend something is to be affected by it. There are degrees of being affected. When people use Whitehead’s term prehend, the most passive and mild expression I have seen is “to receive”. In the middle of the spectrum, you frequently see “to grasp”. At the active and strong end of the spectrum, I have seen “to take into one’s internal constitution”.
Thank you, Jay, for pointing out Whitehead’s Extensive Continuum and the possibility of other dimensions. The more nuanced vision that you articulate is something I would like to explore further. However at this point, I personally feel most comfortable with Whitehead’s PR model where, regardless of numbers of dimensions or any other characteristic of the physical universe, it is foundational that all finite actualities perish. His PR model of reality has only one atemporal actual entity, God. The ancient desire in some cultures for humans to take on the divine attribute of everlastingness is understandable but I don’t believe that is supportable in the PR model. At this time of my life, both Buddhism and Christianity are important to me and Whitehead’s model of reality uniquely accommodates both. I have studied Buddhism on and off over the past fifteen years while the overarching trajectory of my spiritual life has been Christian. As to immortality, it feels liberating for me to let go of my grasping ego consciousness and feel part of the web of relations and processes in the universe. At the same time, I believe the archetype of the ideal human, the Anthropos, is uniquely embodied in the historical person Jesus of Nazareth and the power of the archetypal realm is accessed readily by those who share this conviction. My “Introduction” forum entry fleshes this out in my personal history. For me, Buddhist practice provides a wonderful approach to gaining insights into reality and their implications for how to order one’s daily inner life; while the person of Jesus and related archetypal power provide an empowered way to live one’s outer, social life in ways that Buddhism doesn’t as readily address. Please include me in any process Buddhism activities you are planning including the one you are considering with your Milwaukee Zen Buddhist priest friend. Thank you so much, Jay.
Early on Greek philosophy focused on Truth, Goodness and Beauty as the primary metaphysical values/ideals. Philosophers would attribute primacy to one or another of these. I believe for Plato, they were fundamental to the eternal transcendent world of the divine forms/ideas, the actual world being an imperfect reflection of that more perfect world. Whitehead considers Beauty primary, with Truth and Goodness playing supporting roles. Of these three values/qualities Beauty is the one least able to be measured by an objective checklist. And I believe Beauty was chosen to be primary to be consistent with Whitehead’s larger view of the philosophy of organism, which is all about relationality and seeing God as the divine poet. Rather than a mechanistic universe, Whitehead’s universe is ultimately all about subjectivity.
Thank you, Jin! I’m also glad we can share this journey together!