Replies

Kevin,

Kevin, I am very sympathetic to your views on the “experience of non-conscious entities.” I’d like to further explore that in the context of the infinitely fascinating and frustrating subject of consciousness. If the universe has consciousness/mind, then it would seem that everything even in some infinitely small way would participate in it. Would that participation involve their now degree of mind/consciousness? Imagine a being far more advanced than us: what if they saw our “experience” as not experience, but barely conscious in their terms?

Is there a distinction between self-awareness and consciousness, or is one a more limited example arising out of the other which remains largely beyond our grasp? How elegant Whitehead’s statement that “Consciousness flickers; and even at tis brightest, there is small focal region of clear illumination, and a large penumbra region of experience which tells of intense experience in dim apprehension.” If at each moment there is the possibility of novelty, then novel thoughts, perspectives, feelings, and ways of being might emerge out of as much consciousness as you can bear to bring to an intentional exploration of one’s past and current experience. “You are a bundle of qualities, and a dynamic, changing bundle at that,” Mesle writes (47).The body/mind might be felt as one. I find that very hopeful for the therapeutic process.

This is a very thoughtful set of questions you offer, Evan, and I have enjoyed reading all the responses. Indigenous writers, including Randy Woodley (Indigenous Theology and the Western World View) and Richard Wagamese’s novels and his book Embers: Ojibwe Meditations have deepened my meager but growing understanding of the Indigenous world view of “All My Relations.”
When Wagamese asks the “Old Woman,” his spiritual guide, what the purpose of his being alive is, she answers, “To learn about your relatives.” “My family?” he answers. She responds, “Yes. The moon, stars, rocks, trees, plants, water, insects, mammals. Your whole family. Learn about that relationship. How you’re moving through space and time together.
That’s why you’re alive.” (pg. 41) So different from our Western world view! So needed.

All words have deep resonances that vary from occasion to occasion, and person to person. I think we might think of the “relatedness” words you mention as something to bring to the table of discussion, a feast to be shared.

I have been drawn to Buddhism and Indigenous understandings that have nourished me when frustrated with my inherited tradition, Christianity, especially with regard the disdain of the body, the oppression of other’s faiths/cultures, and creation of insiders and outsiders. There are, however, Christian traditions which are more non-dualistic and earth/nature centered, such as Celtic Christianity. John Phillip Newell (Sacred Earth, Sacred Soul) and John O’Donogue have written beautifully on this topic. Judaism is a deeply relational and ethical religion (Rabbi Artsen described it not as a religion, but a practice). For me the Sermon on the Mount is an expression of pure relationally, a plea for the mutual flourishing of all. A recent reading (revealing my ignorance) of a new translation of the Dao (trans. Brook Zyporin) revealed to me that the Dao was expressing in its own exquisite way the same urgings centuries before. Beautiful resonances across time and space. We need them all; we need all the “connective tissue” of words we can meditate on, together, our conversation an ongoing dance.

In response to Joel’s question about whether the experience of the divine is held only in oneself, I would like to believe that it is not; that if our experience of God is taken up to God and God is changed by it, then in our experience of the divine we are, directly or indirectly, the recipients of our other’s experiences? I wouldn’t think there is any need for our experiences to be the same, in fact we are deeply nurtured by the spiritual expressions of others we might absorb; think of the poems and writings of the mystics, paintings, and music. Even of scientists who express wonder, fusing science and spirituality (Ilia Delio, for one), and Rebecca Elson, astronomer-poet, in her book A Responsibility to Awe. In that diversity a kind of unity, impossible to fully grasp.

Charles,
I love this question because it essentially asks the question of how things do come into our consciousness. Do we become aware as things are happening or later; or sometimes both? If later, then, as I can best understand it from the little I know, that subjective immediacy is lost and now we have a different experience of deconstructing what we experienced.
Mysticism and the contemplative traditions interest me greatly and their relationship with poetry/langauge
. I suspect – please correct or add to this, anyone, please! – that we would be insane if we felt/were aware of every concrescence and our bodies generally suppress our consciousness of them most of the time. I have to believe, based on my readings and own practice, that cultivation of the meditative state, brings awarenesses normally not available to us. Is there a distinction between a meditative state and mysticism? Both involve a profound sense of connection with something larger than ourselves in a way that exceeds the capacity of language to describe, though try, we do.