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I want to clarify that in speaking of hunter-gatherer societies I was referencing our earliest human ancestors who led difficult lives. They certainly have things to teach us, but I suspect we might not choose to lead their lives, if we are honest. I was not making a general statement about Indigenous Peoples. The Haudenesaunee People whose homeland I live on invite all people to participate in activities at their Ganondagan site, which I have been blessed to do. My apologies if I offended anyone.

I recently went hiking with a group of people I didn’t know. At one point I had a conversation with a cluster of three other people, younger than me, who were expressing their desire to be part of a spiritual community but felt unable to find one. I hinted that maybe they were the beginning of one. As relative strangers they did not seem comfortable with this idea.

In response to your question, Ken, and your thoughts on it, Rolla, I would hazard that this is not a one-sided, one solution issue (those hardly exist, anyway). Connection, spiritual and otherwise (see Jay McDaniel’s OpenHorizons.org descriptions of spirituality) combined with some sense of real agency which requires real opportunities to be engaged would both seem to be essential. One feeds the other.

Opportunities and some form of spirituality are hope-givers, motivations for engagement. As sense of having no agency is a despair creator.

Of course we must address the systems and practices that are destructive to the environment. They lead to such opportunities.

As a writer of poetry, I can say that contemporary poetry holds many voices that have not been heard until only recently, many from traumatized groups. There is lot of anger expressed here. I see in this the human desire and need to be “seen” which goes as far down as the child in the family to marginalized peoples. To all of us, no matter how we might choose (or not choose) to classify ourselves. In Whitehead’s words, to be valued as one who has “intrinsic worth.” As to Rolla’s point with regard to our political choices, I think that we are indeed lacking leadership that “sees” our young people. Sad, considering that they will be shouldering the current and future burdens of the world.

How can we help our young people to be “seen”? To see another and to be seen, to experience mutual acknowledgement, form a deep spiritual practice.

I feel as if this course isn’t ending – in a way, it’s just beginning. I love having all these suggested readings to continue the journey with. Onward!Thanks again – this has been an amazing experience.

I am looking forward to reading these books and chapter. It is wonderful to have more places to continue exploring all of the above. Thank you for the suggestions, Dr. Davis.

I am grateful for all of responses to my post and to each other; so much to reflect on here. And to Dr. Davis for the suggested book!

Yes, yes, yes to this conversation! I have been struggling with time and the “creation” of the universe along with you, Kevin. I find your thoughts illuminating, Chris, taking me further down the path of understanding when you say “There is no physical pole as there is no physical to be prehended, no matter to curved space-time, no physical laws in the initial datum” and “Here time is needed for concrescence and becoming but it is not time in the physical temporal sense, more experiential before-now-after time.” Well, it is hard to wrap one’s mind/body/experience around this concept of “not time in the physical temporal sense,” which doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist. I think it is time for me to re-read Lee Smolin’s book on time.

I thought Griffin’s essay was going to solve the problem for me when he described Nicholas Berdyaev’s concept of “relative” nothingness. (footnote 13 to pursue). I would like to pursue the meaning of the word “relative” here to see if I am understanding it correctly, which seems essential to the task of further understanding. Does the idea that “God eternally exists in relation to a world” play into this?

Griffin says “The relative nothingness out of which our world was created was a chaos of momentary events, lasting [note word “lasting,” time implied] (in the primitive states existence) less than a billionth of a second. Each event embodied some iota of creativity, which is the twofold power of an event to exert self-determination on itself and then to exert efficient causation on subsequent events.Each event in this chaos was, therefore, influenced by prior events, and each event influenced future events, so that the creation of our universe was not the beginning of temporal relations and hence of time.” It’s the last clause that I am having difficulty with: “so that the creation of our universe was not the beginning of temporal relations and hence of time.”

I have a lot more thinking to do in real time.

Dennis, I suspect you are not alone here or among the great swathes of humanity through the ages. Society’s labelings of what is religious or spiritual can be, I think, limiting to how one thinks of oneself in relation to the world. Johnson has opened a door to Whitehead for you and these classes have opened it further, a great process you are engaged in. Another headset for looking at being/becoming in the world. Decades ago I had a pastor who said that we all have our own grassroots theology. I breathed a little easier because I didn’t feel like I belonged in church with my openness to other spiritual traditions and deep orientation toward nature as spirit-filled. It makes sense now to remember Ralph as someone who loved the images of the Hubble telescope and talked about the cosmos in his sermons!

I thought of two beautiful books you might like: Beldan Lane’s THE GREAT CONVERSATION in which he describes a many year relationship with a old cottonwood tree near his house and David George Haskell’s THE FOREST UNSEEN, a series of essays about visiting a patch of woods in an old growth forest in Tennessee everyday for a year.

I am delighting in all of your thoughts here and appreciative of the time you took to express them. Tender to the ears. I quite agree with both of you. One of the things I got from John Cobb’s essay on Whitehead (Session 4) was a deeper understanding of the evolution of Whitehead’s thought.I am convinced that reading more and more of him (a life’s work) is truly necessary for appreciating the fullness of his evolving vision. I find he is worth fighting with, and fighting for.

Thanks, Chris and Dennis for your company here. I keep wondering if I am being being hyper-focused on the language and (1) being too critical or (2) maybe I am not getting what he is saying (proper understanding).I hope Dr. Davis weighs in on these concerns!

Well, there are reasons why (sometimes the poet does not know them at the time) that “things” appear in a poem.I spent a lot of time with angels when I studied late medieval and early Renaissance Italian art (I am very fond of Giotto’s) but have had no personal experience of them, although I have had what some might call mystical experiences. For me, those angels speak to a deep longing for the felt presence of God. Images are one of the ways I think. I am intrigued, Dr. Davis, by Whitehead’s words and will be exploring them. And if what Mary Oliver (thank you for the poem, Tom) says is true, maybe I will.

The doors are not closed.

Hi Douglas,

I just posted a poem as a response to Chris Hugh’s post: “God: infinite limited finite” which also relates to your thoughts above.

Thank you for the link – I look forward to watching it.

Addendum: this poem does not necessarily mean I subscribe to one beginning, but who knows, there may be many.

Sometimes I work through ideas imaginatively by writing poems, by being playful when my mind finds pure rationality unsatisfying. I offer one here (please do not copy and extend out into the world – thank you). Angels here are imaginary but a way of talking about the God/world relationship and musings about whether this is all mathematics-or not.

It’s Not What You Think

You wonder if god’s nothing
more than numbers working

the universe. Think of us,
god’s angels stirring up

possibilities, the margin
of error by which you came

into being. We wanted
to enter the world of flesh

and blood, speak with
the urgency of tongues.

To be at your side,
as real as your desire

to be blessed. Loved.
However you see us,

tender or aloof,
you’ve got it wrong.

We wept in the great
storm of the beginning,

our faces washed away.
Imagine terraces of light.

—Kathleen A. Wakefield

I couldn’t agree more with you, Jeremy. I am a poet and teacher of creative writing: poetry is process in all the ways you describe above, not simply the writing of it, but the reading and rereading of it, on new occasions. I lead a poetry discussion group in which energy ping-pongs across the room as ideas, readings, analyses, and personal experiences are shared, each time opening up new ways of looking at a piece of writing and the self. Occasions of revelation.

Art creates a place where paradox, ambiguity, complexity, contrast and beauty are “live” and can be entered afresh again and again because we are never the same.

Suzanne Langer, who I understand was a student of Whitehead’s, talks about art – including drama – as the creation of an illusion (not delusion), experienced in time, changing, in much the same way as you do (Feeling and Form).

I am also a singer and remember the day I told my voice teacher I wished I could sing a challenging piece just the way I had done for the upcoming recital. She said that would never happen: each performance is different, and in that regard beautiful, for new aspects are brought to the singing, even if flawed.

There are non-theists who are Whiteheadian/Process Thinkers minus God so you are not alone.

What I am getting from Whitehead is that there seems to be a valuing/ordering of goodness, truth and beauty in the cosmos, values recognized almost universally, leading to novelty and increased beauty, not total chaos and destruction, which for him necessitates a God. And for him there is something in human religious/spiritual experience that confirms this. I struggle with Whitehead’s rationalizations, too, but have a deep sense of God’s tender care – at times – that I cannot resist.

Does some of this boil down to individual experience? Do those who lean toward a concept of God but struggle with it find a way back to God through Whitehead? Do those who struggle with evil find a way to believe in a God because of Whitehead? Does Whitehead appeal to many thinkers because of his metaphysics of change, being and becoming, and the way it applies so beautifully to so many levels of reality?