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Charlie, I am hoping for an opportunity to discuss the meaning of experience in class. It’s a profound and central question. Well,I admit it haunts me.

The claim that humans have “innate or intuitive knowledge of mathematics” would imply that we have all kinds of knowledge we don’t know we have until it is made use of (maybe not even consciously at times). It would seem, that likewise we carry in our bodies the wisdom of our physiology and its responses to both our interior and the outside world (as if now we can ever think that way again!).

Just two brief thoughts for now.

Thank you, Zhenbao for that saying of Xunci;it is now part of my notebook for safekeeping. I will also commit to memory.

I would be interested also, thought I am not sure I will be able to attend each week – I suppose that will be true of all of us, anyway.

Thanks for the great idea!

Evan,

This is quite a beautiful thought: “In Lakota thought, when you put all creation on the earth and in the universe together and include yourself, then that is Wakan Tanka.” I am wondering if Whitehead’s concept was not one of supreme being, the word supreme implying “above,” a hierarchical ordering of power as traditionally envisioned in Christianity. In Jay’s words “Whitehead did not think of God as a being cut off from the world by the boundaries of divine transcendence.” And not as coercive and all powerful, but deeply relational. It feels to me, knowing the little I know and the writings you have shared, that there are some shared areas of vision.

One chapter in Randy Woodley’s book Indigenous Theology and the Western World View talks about decolonializing Western Christian Theology. He described the results of his research on the shared values of Native American communities in North America around the theme of “the harmony way.” Many jive with Whiteheading values (We are all related”, etc.) but many are unique, and non-natives should take note of them! Humor is one that I began to appreciate more in Kent Nerburn’s moving Neither Wolf Nor Dog trilogy in which the narrator, at first, does not find humor in what his companions on their shared journey take delight in. These books turned my heart/mind inside out and upside down in a way for which I am grateful.

The novelist Richard Wagamese, in his book EMBERS: One Ojibway’s Meditations, shares a conversation with a native elder early in his life which echoes Albert White Hat, Sr.’s words:
ME: Why am I alive?
OLD WOMAN: Because everything else is.
ME: No. I mean the purpose.
OLD WOMAN: That is the purpose. To learn about your relatives.
ME; My family?
OLD WOMAN: Yes. The moon, stars, rocks, trees, plants, water, insects, birds, mammals. Learn about that relationship. How you are moving through space and time together. That’s why you’re alive.(p.41)

In a later conversation he asks about the purpose of prayer and meditation.The Old Woman says it is to bring him “closer to the Great Mystery.”:

ME: So I can understand it?
OLD WOMAN: No, so you can participate in it . . . (75)

How different from religious traditions that start from doctrine and exposition!

For me, Whitehead bridges my interest in Buddhism and Native spiritualities. Instead of trying to mesh them in some perfect way with the tradition I inherited, Christianity, and with which I struggle, I try to receive it all as I am able, knowing my understandings are quite limited. My spiritual path is weird, wide and zigzaggy.

Thank you so much for your postings on Indigenous spirituality and world view, Evan. We need it.

Ryan, I think that “perishing” here means that that moment of time, that entity will never again the way it was; each “event” flows into the next. One simply could not grab a hold of it (that which was never a substance), though one can in memory re-envision it, a new actualization). Like you, I find talking about God as an actual entity seems confusing: perishing and taking up into it all becomings? I know I need to read and reread more Whitehead to deepen my understanding. I would love to hear what Jay has to say here.

I agree with you regarding the need for more relational ways of being, all around.

Yes, this is where I get stuck, too.

Tom, The Loomer quote that relational power is “the capacity to sustain a mutually internal relationship” may be one of the most beautiful things I’ve read here. Unequal power makes that hard to achieve. I think a lot about how communities of deep listening such as experienced in your Quaker assembly come into being and continue. Safety, some experience in listening and being listened to, and the wisdom of a tradition may be helpful. I am part of a meditation practice, Buddhist leaning but nourished by other traditions; once a week participants may share their thoughts after the meditation, much as in yours. It is always a life-giving experience.

Back to power. I was invited to a workshop with a member of the Haudensaunee people. She spoke about an experience of leading some young woman in a retreat in which they got very excited about feeling empowered and started chanting, Power, power! She felt deeply troubled. She told them that power is responsibility. Just having it isn’t what it’s about. A major art gallery in the city where I live posts a red sign by the front door that says “Knowledge is power.” No, knowledge is responsibility, I want to tell them. Power in and of itself is not necessarily good.

I am going to wander off in a seemingly different direction here on the topic of power, but bear with me. I find the Whitehead’s language and concepts fascinating, but I am obsessively trying to relate his philosophy to the nitty gritty of the lived life and the art which I make, which seems to be in the spirit of the importance he gives to experience. This past week I was with a small group of people trying to help a schizophrenic, homeless woman from a very marginalized group, at moments hallucinatory, at others lucid. Because we didn’t have on offer the kind of food she wanted (a repeated occurrence), she was enraged; the tension and anxiety about how violent she was going to get filled the room. She felt her power. I grant her that power, this woman who has few choices relative to others and suffers deeply, and whose ability to live in community, in relationship, is deeply compromised. Good power, bad power? One that could be destructive, but she has a right to assert her feelings and her capacity to manage that is difficult. One of the volunteers started to raise her voice hoping she could help the woman control herself and protect us. Only because I worked in a public library in difficult situations, I knew this would not be helpful. I gently touched her on the elbow and she quieted. Eventually the other woman calmed down and left off to continue her homeless life. Now we might talk about sin, a subject which has come up in these forums. The sin, the failure of a society which can’t take care of the mentally ill and homeless? Were we part of it at that moment? How responsible was the woman for her threatening and what some might consider abusive behavior (not very, in my opinion; no question of using the word sin here). How much freedom did she have? In retrospect, I sense there was power in quiet presence of community, which is ultimately what we all – including her – able to become; her presence in that community was enormous and she deeply affected us. We had been a society of individuals in crisis coming into some sort of relation, not wholly satisfying. Did God come into this? I believe that nexus forming and reshaping itself more than itself, that each of us was receiving all kinds of lures, and working hard, including, again, the woman who I apologize for leaving nameless. I left saddened and with a sense of the limits of our power, yet humbled by the faith of those surrounding me. Each of us now carries that experience for the future.

Communities of silence are not always good things, though, especially when voices are silenced. The voices of the mentally ill and homeless.

Silence. Power. Sin. Freedom. Every word has a different valence in different situations, in every story. Whitehead is right about the fallacy of the perfect dictionary.

Ryan,
I have been pondering some of the same questions as you and really appreciate your articulation of them. I wonder if might look at “mature” humans as still being developmental, always in a state of growth, much as we do children. Are we really able to receive and actualize all the most life-giving lures God gives us? We would have to be perfect to do so; we would in some way be “completed.” In fact, we would not require them? Of course humans make destructive decisions and participate in destructive acts, but is not choosing the best lure necessarily a sin? And certainly there are ways to receive and actualize a lure, some hesitantly and others whole heartedly. What if the outcome is less than what might possibly be? At what point, in what degree of non-acceptance or poor execution, can we say something is sinful? Where is role of compassion here for the vulnerability, frailty and imperfection of human and other life?

I find Jay’s statement regarding the source of counter-lures/temptations very helpful, that they “come from the independent self-creativity of creatures.” Yet does this creativity exist apart from God?

I find the language of sin very difficult.

On the use of the word religion, which I know some traditions do not use (I appreciate the word “way” myself), I have found David Dark’s book Life’s Too Short to Pretend You’re Not Religious helpful. He takes the word back to its etymological latin root, religio meaning “obligation, bond, reverence” based perhaps on religare “to bind.” He then goes on to explore the many things/activities in this world to which we bond, to which we tie ourselves for better or worse. I found it an illuminating, moving, and yes, fun read.

I really appreciate all these responses; actually I chuckled and bowed to you all for making me not feel alone with my attempt to wrap my head around this. We are in this game together, which I find quite beautiful. It’s an unending one . . . let’s say it continues in its becoming.

I am fascinated by the powerful concept of a nexus, which has made me really look at “things” (relationships) differently. I relate to your deep sense of relationship with a landscape in one of my own, Mendon Ponds Park outside of Rochester, NY, which has amazing glacial features. I often walk the forested ridges of what are known as eskers (the stone and sand remnants glaciers left behind). I call my favorite one The Shoulders of Time. A friend with whom I often walk has named the rolling ravines on either side “cradles.” On these walks this friend, who started the Holocaust Center here and is a translator of Yiddish, has shared the horrific stories which she has translated. We have also simply paused to wonder at the landscape, in all seasons, and share joys. This landscape nexus, complex in it own right, holds all of that beauty and terror and life, all our words and silence offered to it.

I find this question so provocative and important that I hope we can discuss it in class. Perhaps there are many forms/kinds/variations on Beauty, as Jay notes (WPT,90): “In process thought, there are many kinds of beauty:love and courage, wisdom and compassion, creativity and laughter, faith and hope, struggle and peace. All are forms of harmony and intensity.” It seems that each, in every occasion, might be felt and received differently by different people/entities.

Tom, this is a fascinating question, but I am thinking (with all my newfound, immature knowledge), that Whitehead would say no. What about those times we make a decision which benefits some and thus introduces some beauty into the world, but tragically hurts others (one of those “common good” issues). That “evil” would be twinned with the good. I hope I am making sense. This is no way answers your question.

Hayden,
As I feel tossed around by all of my questions,
multiple ways of envisioning and engagement with Whitehead’s thinking, I deeply appreciate your question:”how can we artfully bring forth what we find in the depths and offer those findings back to others with courage, strength and faith while simultaneously holding humility and uncertainty?” along with your images of sea-legs and sailing.

Of course, I have no answer at hand, but I wonder if the possibility of creativity lies in the uncertainty and not-knowing, which then becomes strange bedfellow with humility; that wonder at our being and becoming in this universe can sustain us when discouragement and not-knowing prevails.

Yes, to courage: a beautiful addition!

Thank you, Jay, for posting John Cobb’s essay and your thoughts on it. I am half-way through and want to complete reading and meditating on it before saying much more. For now, I want to say how incredibly helpful the discussion of the evolution of Whitehead’s thought is in developing an understanding of the terms he uses. More later . .