Randall Jones
Yes. I think that will preach well and is so much more true (if truth comes in degrees). However, lest we forget, this new adventure of the spirit may require us to take risky paths and to speak truth to power. Grace is not cheap.
I want to share a favorite article from Marjorie Suchocki, “The Trouble with Sin: Original Sin Revisited,” (1991). I particularly appreciate her treatment of original sin as those structures we all share that lead us to look down on others, to consider some others as of less value than ourselves. I do find this appreciation of collective original sin very useful in our always continuing progress toward the Kin-dom.
Thanks, Dr. Davis. I do have SMW and will read the Abstraction chapter later.
Thank you.
Bill – How do you characterize words. They seem to me to be abstract, distinct from their many exemplifications or “tokens,” but they do change.
I wondered about this too. Here’s how I worked it out for myself.
The prehension of the future is grasping the range of possibilities for actualization. I do not think these are defined by the objective past but are rather limited by it. I think of the possibilities as being made available to the actual occasion as the (one of the) role (roles) of God, God as provider of possibility. (I admit I have been contaminated by, perhaps pop, process theology). I assume one of the possibilities is repetition but there is always (?) room for creativity in choosing a novel actualization (satisfaction?).
Just a thought. If you don’t like “God” and I admit I often don’t, well, I’m not sure how we account for possibility and non-repetition. But I don’t know what Whitehead would say or even if this is part of his concept of God.
Dennis, I feel with you. And with Robert and Nelson. I am frustrated and fearful and feeling, well, powerless, by which I really mean without adequate coercive power. I can’t will the change I believe we need; I cannot cause it to happen. Turning to relational power, I think I understand Nelson’s call for resistance from the grassroots level and find myself considering what I can do from this level.
Grassroots might mean different things to different people, as no doubt most everything does, but I am going to take it quite personally tonight. Grassroots, my grassroots, are those with whom I am in personal relationship. So what can I do with these, my friends? Not a lot. But we can all start something. It doesn’t have to be big or organized – attributes I’d guess more of coercive power than relational. Just start doing what little things that can be done.
I’ve decided to start with folk music. So I post on FB Woody Guthrie singing “All You Fascists Bound To Lose” and invite my friends and their friends to post “something good” too. I intend to do this very often. I think we need more folk music just now.
Yes, that’s tiny. And that’s maybe what we need right now. Lots of tiny little occasions. I’m pretty sure I’ll feel better doing this. That for now is how I start.
It is nice to see Woody’s guitar with the sticker “This machine kills fascists” too. We could use more of those.
IF there is no self, then in the versions of Buddhism that teach re-birth, what is reborn? I was told that it was the unfinished karmic “energy” that continues, not a soul or person. I find this little less mysterious than the idea of a soul but it does seem similar to the causal web that provides continuity in the succession of actual occasions.
So what happens when we die if we are Whiteheadeans then? Where does all that causal efficacy go?
I’m thinking that we perhaps are scattered, spread about. In subsequent actual entities that are not our direct successors, actual entities that were in our personal lineage are prehended and may act as influence/cause. This is I think a rather beautiful way of understanding our immortality as a widening circle of influence that, I suppose, rather like the ripples when you throw a stone into water, slowly spread and diminish until there is peace. This peace, however, remains active beneath the surface and may again and again arise in actual occasions we never imagined.
I cannot imagine the above would satisfy anyone committed to personal survival after death but it satisfies me. I think Bernard Williams wonderful essay on immortality was a turning point. (“The Makropulos case: reflections on the tedium of immortality,” Bernard Williams, Problems of the Self, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1973, https://www3.nd.edu/~pweithma/Readings/Williams/Williams%20on%20Immortality.pdf).
Dr. Sam Karp, one of my math professors at NYU who was also a spiritual mentor to me, pointed out to me that discontinuity would not change our experience since there would be nothing between bits of “actuality.” I agree that would be true – we would not be able to tell from experience whether or not our experience was discontinuous. I was thinking then of the world like a computer process that shared processing time so that its state would periodically be written to memory as other processes got processing time and then returned to active processing. From the internal perspective of the world process, our (outside the process) time in between actual processing times would not exist. I hadn’t much thought about this for years but this class and your post has set me to remembering it again. In my computer processing analogy, for Whitehead I suppose god would play the part of memory.
Reading your post this morning, in contrast to this computing analogy I also thought of Ajahn Buddhadasa’s teachings regarding rebirth. This also comes from long ago so my summary will likely not be exactly as he taught, but as I recall Aj. Buddhadasa taught that rebirth is not physically dying and being physically reborn again but happens as a repeating process in the here and now. A desire arises, we work toward its satisfaction, and then we find that the realization is not satisfying but is rather unsatisfactory (dukkha), so this episode dies and we are reborn in another desire, which we work toward fulfilling but the fulfillment of which is again found unsatisfactory, and so it goes. I think I do indeed experience this in my life. And I like that desire is the motive power in the process (isn’t this the same for Whitehead?).
As to waves, I don’t like being in the water except maybe at the very edge and so the metaphor of the wave is not so pleasant for me to contemplate but this Buddhist teaching of the arising, abiding, and dying of which our life is made resonates well for me, perhaps also because I really loved Aj. Buddhadasa – through his writings as I never physically met him. When I was at his retreat center in southern Thailand for a ten day silent retreat he was already very sick but just being near him was a good experience.
God plays no role in this Buddhist understanding of rebirth as sequential episodes constituting our lives though memory certainly plays a role in the formation of new desires. I will have to think about this more.
(As to the relational aspect of our selves, as an old sociology major reared on Berger and Luckmann’s The Social Construction of Reality and then on Alfred Schutz’s writings on the (social) phenomenology of everyday life, and Garfinkel’s ethnomethodology, you’d get nothing but agreement from me.)
Thank you, Dr. McDaniel, for sending me off on this pleasant reverie. It is not always pleasant to dip into the past but today it is.
(1) Does there have to be a beginning?
(2) The cross section, though no longer part of a living tree, continues as a process of becoming though perhaps at a different scale. Some processes are all but imperceptible to us at our scale, but nevertheless they continue occasion by occasion to make time.
(3) Not at all. Keep on truckin’.
Could you touch the cross-section?
When I was in high school, not just feeling different from the other boys but being perceived as different too, knowing that I was attracted to boys rather than girls but not knowing what to do with it, I happened upon an article in Harper’s Magazine entitled “New York’s Middle Class Homosexuals.” That article and those words gave me a temporary shelter, an identity in the making.
I did make it to New York eventually, after a few years in New Orleans where I discovered a rich gay world and another identity. I’m not sure I became middle-class in NYC but those labels did help to make possible the path I found.
At 80 I publicly identify as gay though there’s not much actual sex to support the label. I’m living in a small town in very red rural Missouri and it felt a little brave at first to be so public. Now it’s just ordinary but several people have told me that it has made a difference to our various communities that I am public about who I am. A different take on labels I guess – they can be part of transformation not only for the person who adopts them but for those around them. They’re relational all the way (down, up, around?).
After a long time identifying as a Buddhist atheist, I found it very difficult to reclaim the word “god.” When I use “god” now I do not mean a personal god, nor a supernatural interventionist version of god, but something much less like us, even a super version of us. I used the late Freud term “Eros” as a sort of stand-in for “god” for a while and it still figures in my internal dialogue. I came back to god I suppose because I really, really want there to be something operating in history urging us toward justice, love, the good. I once believed it was inevitable that we would someday get there and now I almost glory in the realization that this is an infinite task, never to be completed, but which can orient us toward the right way. This idea of the kin-dom always to come came to me from John Caputo’s The Weakness of God. The process god works well with the understanding that the moral task is infinite. It/God is always luring us toward this very contingent always out of reach final rest. Yes, I want to believe this but sometimes it is very hard.
I feel a little guilty in some places, e.g., Bible Study, using the word “god” knowing the other participants probably assume I mean something quite different from what I do mean but I also love the many times we find agreement despite the many voices our always ambiguous words contain. It’s metaphor. All of it.
Bill, In one of his Ask Dr. Cobb columns, Dr. Cobb writes “In Adventures of Ideas Whitehead identifies Eros with what, in Process and Reality, he called the Primordial Nature of God.” [Whitehead and Freud’s Theory of Eros (Love) & Thanatos (Death) – March 2010, https://processandfaith.org/ask-dr-cobb/whitehead-and-freuds-theory-of-eros-love-thanatos-death-march-2010/ ] The index to Adventures of Ideas has nine page references under “eros.”
An experience that stands out for me occurred many years ago when I was chairing a group that was having a war over the wording of something read at the beginning of our meetings. What we read asked people who were using mood-altering drugs not to take part in our discussions. However, there were people, perhaps not the coolest, most popular people, who took medically necessary medications that did have mood-altering effects. They wanted the statement changed. As I said, it was war, personalities were definitely being put ahead of principles, and it was a mess. We had a huge meeting to find a way out and it began just as one might expect. And then something happened. The discussion became productive, cooperative, and a way was found. It was not what either side had wanted initially but it worked, new wording was found, incorporated into the opening statement, and I don’t think there were any hard feelings. This was my first, or at any rate first really clear experience of the divine, the lure, leading us toward the good. I do not think it is coincidental that it was a group thing. I believe the lure is clearest in group phenomena, when we listen to each other with open hearts and minds. Peace.
My introduction to John Cobb was, if I recall correctly, the last chapter in Robert Mesle’s Introduction to Process Theology. It was this book and the discovery of Cobb that returned me to Christianity. Then I read a bit more – Hartshorne’s The Omnipotence of God and Other Theological Mistakes was quite wonderful too. During the Time of Covid I attended church online at The Church of the Village in my old neighborhood in New York (Greenwich Village) which is a rather process church. I remember Dr. Cobb giving the message there several times and saw other process stars (well to me) at services occasionally and got to say Hi to them. And yes, Tripp Fuller’s online ministry has been important for me.