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Is this another way of saying it; “…the concrescent creature is objectified in God as a a novel element in God’s objectification of that actual world”? (Pg 345)

No one could me more surprised than me😉

Thanks Jay, that makes good sense.

Wow! The last 5 sentences! Actually one cannot extract any of it. It is all gorgeous. Amazing how the most fundamental truths keep cropping up. This could have been written by a Zen master with some acquaintance with Western philosophy.It also puts the lie to most forms of “the power of positive thinking”, explaining why they are more properly understood as attempts at “anesthesia”. thanks for sharing.

An interesting aspect of this is that Keats was referring solely to the realm of aesthetics, attempting to define what it is that constitutes greatness in this realm, but the concept of “Negative Capability” is clearly transferrable to other fields. It also shows how the field of aesthetics can guide humanity in the constructive use of “intuition. Thoughts?

Thanks so much for sharing this. I consider this to be the underlying problem of our time; how to utilize conscious reason without narrowing our aperture to where we are not allowing intuition to influence us, or, rather (since it will ALWAYS influence us), to allow it’s influence to be acknowledged in our metaphysics as a positive one. Of course we can’t go backwards, to a time before conscious reason. We must, in Ken Wilber’s phrase, “transcend and include” the phase we are struggling out of now, the NECESSARY phase of reason’s dominance.

It strikes me that your explanation of the synonymity between “actual entity” and “actual occasion” is actually the revolutionary heart of Whitehead’s thought, the reason it is called “Process” thought. Does that ring true to others?

[Michael Nieman]

Jay, poetry is one of my main preoccupations. I have just moved house, and most of my books are in boxes. It may take a few weeks, but when I unearth my copies of Olson, and of Keats’ letters, I’ll try to write up a little essay for you.
I sincerely hope you get into the Barfield book. I could really use some help with it. Thx

• This reply was modified 5 years, 7 months ago by Michael Nieman.

Where are the “Tuesday Talks” to be found? Thx

Jay, I agree wholeheartedly, but I am sure there is and will be a lot of last ditch resistance in some parts of the scientific community to the idea that there is any kind of metaphysics underlying their view of the world, since that undercuts the privileged status of science that is based on the supposition that it is dealing with the really real unmediated by any metaphysics.
Yes I am extremely interested in the Cobb Institute science advisory board! I am quite familiar with Matt Segall. I purchased his PHD dissertation in book form and read it, and follow his blog. In fact he once mentioned to me, in a response to my response to a blog post, that he felt that Colerdige was under-appreciated as a philosopher.
Ah, Coleridge! I have been interested in him for many years. I can’t pretend i understand him that well, but based on what I do understand i am floored by, more than anything else, how totally alien and original he was in his historical context. I have always been surprised that process folks don’t talk about him more. Fruitful work could be done on the relationship between he and Whitehead. If I live long enough to understand either one of them maybe I’ll do some!
I’d be excited if you wanted to read the Barfield book. I have read it twice and don’t half grok it. Maybe we could read it together! Barfield is an EXTREMELY interesting figure and thinker. Enough for now. LOVING this course. Thank you.