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Just seeing this, Rolla. I’ll share with Richard and see if there’s some way we might develop a list. Good idea…and thanks!

Leslie, I think this is an excellent idea. Very creative, novel, relevant. Go for it.

Just one thing to say about the initial aim. It is a fresh possibility, lying within the depths of immediate experience, coming from God, which is the best for the situation at hand. It is a leading edge, to be sure, and can be a source of creative transformation, openness, love, peace, courage, etc. It is a gift of sorts. We discover it, we do not create it. It’s a kind of grace. However, we need not choose it or actualize it. We may choose another possibility, less promising for us or for others. In that instance, the “subjective aim” of our experience is different from the “initial aim.” In Abrahamic language, we “miss the mark.” Back to the initial aim. It is different at each moment in terms of content, because the situation in each moment is different. But we can live our lives, as best we can, in a kind of openness to initial aims, such that are we, naturally and spontaneously, obedient to the call of the moment. Such obedience is not rule-bound or rigid; it is open and free, spontaneous and natural, with a hint of improvisation: receptive to the gift of the new.

Jace and Thomas, let’s make sure in class that we spend a little time talking about the difference between “eternal” and “everlasting.” Whitehead suggests that the primordial nature of God is eternal (that is, timeless) and that the consequent nature is everlasting (that is, has no beginning or end, but flows). It is imaginable that there are forms of mysticism which, as it were, rest in the eternal side of God and others that dwell in the everlasting side, which might be a bit like what Whitehead calls Peace in Adventures of Ideas. At least worth considering. I’ll be talking about mysticism, meditation, and prayer on Saturday.

Perfectly accurate to me, Kevin. Thank you for sharing your experience and the ideas (wisdom) that you’ve acquired from it.

And Jace, thanks for you comment above. I found your account true to life and to a Whiteheadian point of view. I think it important to recognize that, when it comes to prehending past prehensions, we do not always “choose” what we prehend from the past. Prehensions from the past, and perhaps misapprehensions as well (which are a form of prehension) can and do flow into the present, quite apart form conscious choices we make. It does seem to me that they often do so without our being “consciously” aware of them, so I still find a general distinction between conscious and unconscious experience helpful, although I’m sure it’s not hard and fast – and that in fact there is a continuum. Whitehead’s claim is that consciousness is a form of experience, but not all experience is conscious. This seems true to me and corresponds to much research these days on the unconscious workings of the brain. Let it be noted, though, that for Whitehead the self is not precisely identical to the brain…maybe more on that later.

What a nice, helpful, and beautiful response, Charles. Thank you. You give clarity to my thinking and take me further.

Kent and Scott…what thoughtful remarks.

Scott, it might interest you to know that, for John Cobb, the phrase “creative transformation” plays a prominent role in his understanding of God. God is, for John, the spirit of creative transformation at work in the world, This spirit operates, not as unilateral power, but rather as an inwardly felt lure to work with what is given for experience, pleasant or painful, fortunate or tragic, to create meaningful, felt contrasts that empower. You might say the lure offers a Way to move beyond either-or situations, or impasses at hand, into something more creative. It works through the provision of novel and often unexpected possibilities. Its content changes moment to moment, but always it is for the good. Moreover, it is in the whole of the universe, not humans alone. It can seem a bit similar to the Dao, understood as a cosmic power.

And it would indeed be a source of fresh possibilities, no matter what the circumstance. A source of novelty or, to use Kent’s delightful term, potentiation. (Thanks to the Russian professor.) The upshot of this is that no clay, no matter how fragile, broken, cracked or overused, is bereft of possibilities for creative change. Indeed, the clay is always changing. The molding comes from the Dao, yes, but also from its own inner resources in responding to the Dao.

Thomas and Kent…I do not know how much Whitehead was, or was not, aware of the analytic philosophy of his time. But I do think you are right (Thomas) to key in on his distrust of language as an adequate expression of ideas. He believed in leaps of intuition beyond language, and in poetic, non-literal language (e.g. Wordsworth.) in the link please fine a very good essay on the Whitehead-Russell relationship, both philosophical and personal. https://www.openhorizons.org/mudddleheadedness-and-simplemindedness-ndash-whitehead-and-russell.html

Thanks, Thomas. Along with Rolla, I appreciate your sharing. We have much to learn from you, and with you.

Thank you, Rick, for sharing this article. Very interesting and well-written and right on target. I like the way the author links the idea with Greek philosophy and with Buddhism (Nagarjuna).

Reminds me of this image:

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Jace,

With your interest in heart-centered spaces, you might be interested in this essay in Open Horizons on six types of spirituality that resonate with process thought: daily life, integrative, contemplative, transpersonal, prophetic, and mystical. Take a look if time allows: https://www.openhorizons.org/process-spirituality-six-types.html

Imagine that someone, a Buddhist, says “Emptiness is the Ultimate” and someone else, a Jew or Christian or Muslim, says “God is the Ultimate.” They believe that, if one of them is right, the other is wrong. Then imagine that someone says: You are both right. Emptiness is ultimate in one way and God in another.” That is Both/And Thinking at a metaphysical level. Now imagine that someone says, “If a person is happy, she cannot also be said.” And yet she says: “I feel happy and sad at the same time. I am happy/sad.” That is Both/And thinking at a psychological level. Process thought encourages us to say Both/And before choosing Either/Or.

On the matter of safety and adventure, there’s no quarrel. We humans need to be rooted in the past, with a sense of security, and open to the future, with its new possibilities. We need roots and wings. Whitehead is about this combination. Here again, it’s Both/And not Either/Or.

Hope this helps a bit, Jace.

I’m glad to know of your interest here. I think (along with Thomas Oord and many others) that process theology is best understood as one form of open and relational theology, of which there are others. One of my former colleagues, John Sanders, is an open theist, but not a process theologian. His way of thinking, emphasizing a more narrative approach, is also a form of open and relational theology. A major difference between open theists and process theists concerns God and self-limitation. Both believe in an open future, such that God knows the future as possible but not as actual until it occurs, and that God always acts in a loving way. But open theists believe that God could act in a coercive and non-loving way if God so chose, where process theists believe that God cannot act in such a way. For Thomas Oord, who stands in the process tradition, this is because God is, in his words, essentially kenotic. This means that it is part of God’s very essence to be loving, and God cannot not be loving. God doesn’t decide to love; it is who God is. There’s ultimately another issue afoot here. In process theology as influenced by Whitehead, the world is inherently creative. There is something like self-creativity within the depths of each actual entity, and this self-creativity cannot be overridden by God. Open theists do not like this idea, because it seems to make God subservient to something more ultimate than God: namely creativity. Amid these difference, though, there is a fundamental agreement that God is loving, that God lures the world but does not coerce it, that God sympathetically responds to (and shares in) all the sufferings of the world, that that God is, in these ways, in process with the world, thus having a temporal side. This means that process theists and open theists are, as it were, cousins, and that neither are Calvinist in spirit or principle. These days, process theology is not Christian alone. One of the leading process theologians is Jewish: Rabbi Bradley Artson. And there are some emerging Muslim process theologians as well. I try to make my website – Open Horizons – a platform for all forms. But I’m certainly interested in Christian process theology. For a quick overview of one version of it, easily shared with others, check out this slide show on the Cobb Institute website: https://cobb.institute/educators-toolbox/christian-process-theology-marjorie-suchocki/. And make sure, if interested, that you sign up for Process and Faith: http://www.processandfaith.org.

To be continued…

Hello Scott, so glad to have you. Let’s make sure that, somewhere in our course, we talk about dying and grief. Such important subjects.

To get started, you might check out these “process” reflections on life after death: https://www.openhorizons.org/life-after-death-process-reflections.html. But there’s much more to say.

Here’s another beautiful reflection on grief: https://www.openhorizons.org/grief-takes-a-road-trip1.html. Written by one of our leading process novelists, herself a pastor, it has helped me and many others.

To be continued…

It seems to me that, for Whitehead, God functions as a counter-entropic lure within the whole of creation, and that a more positive way of putting it might be to say that God is a lure toward novel forms of self-organization in far from equilibrium states. A lure toward novelty – has a more positive ring. God or no God, there does seem to be such a lure at work in the universe. At one stage Whitehead casually speculated, as did Teilhard much more vigorously, that this lure might be operative in non-three-dimensional domains of existence, even as in three-dimensional space “entropy” seems to reign in some way. The the universe may be evolving toward more immaterial modes of existence. Some find this spooky or absurd, but in Whitehead’s world, much is possible that may or may not be actual.