Rolla Lewis
Hello Charles, As always, thanks for your insightful comments and resources.
Joe, Funny that you would mention Point Fermin Park and Lighthouse. When I was about 10 years old, I went to a summer camp for employees of Los Angeles City. I had been invited by the police officer father of a boy who was in my YMCA Indian Guide tribe. He told me that there would be a lot of different boys, and they all bleed red blood. It was important to get along with each other. Needless to say, the week may have been an initial aim. There were grunion runs, crafts with abalone shells, talks about the history and national history of the area, etc. I had been to the beach many times but not in the way I had there and certainly not with so many different boys getting along. So, yes, nature and being around diverse people opens us up to, as you say, to “how life grows, diversifies, and demonstrates the processes of interrelationship building.” I would add, illustrates the magic that the Point Fermin Park and Lighthouse can bring into the lives of Angelenos. Thank you for triggering that memory. Experience all the way down…..
A passage in Adventures of Ideas helps me:
“There are two current doctrines as to this process. One is that of the external Creator, eliciting final togetherness out of nothing. The other doctrine is that it is a metaphysical principle belonging to the nature of things, that there is nothing in the Universe other than instances of this passage and components of these instances. Let the latter doctrine be adopted. Then the word Creator expresses the notion that each event is a process issuing in novelty. Also if guarded in the phrases Immanent Creativity, or Self-Creativity, it avoids the implication of a transcendent Creator. But the mere word Creativity suggests Creator, so that the whole doctrine acquires an air of paradox, or of pantheism” (p. 236).Living in Portland, OR, I am an urbanite and have no idea if this reflection will be of any help, but the topic brings some experiences to mind.
I have lived in rural Idaho and rural California for extended periods of time. I might not be the best person to comment here because I moved from a nearly 6000 acre cattle ranch in rural California to live in Berkeley where my wife would have an opportunity to connect with other Swiss nationals, like her. When I lived on the ranch, I had intense and enjoyable conversations with the cowboy-rancher. He was a Reagan Republican, but much more of a libertarian who grew and smoked marijuana and just wanted the government out of his business. Although I have to say, he knew every government program that would assist him. My point is that we could talk, banter, and play in our conversations. He taught me to look at the land in new ways, like a rancher, looking at grass as feed, understanding not to overgraze, and recognizing his value that the hills were “good for one thing”—grazing. I entered his world, listened to him tell stories about ranching and growing up in the area that was about 50 miles from San Francisco. He was a buffer for me when other cowboys would come to help for round ups. He even let me ride my mountain bike to help gather cows. I’d ride up and the other cowboys would grumble about me on my bike until I would come riding down a hill flushing cows out of areas that were difficult for a horse. There was a bit of community during round ups, and thanks to the rancher, I was never punched when I would confront racist talk, etc. Enough on that. My point is that there are islands of loving community in rural areas.
Toward the end of Science and the Modern World, Whitehead talks about the “power of wandering.” He continues, “When man ceases to wander, he will cease to ascend in the scale of being. Physical wandering is still important, but greater still is the power of man’s spiritual adventures—adventures of thought, adventures of passionate feelings, adventures of aesthetic experience” (p. 207).
I have a close friend who has lived in rural Idaho for over 45 years who models wandering in the same place for decades. He moved there as a hippie and worked for the Forest Service for most of his career. During the time he has lived there he has always engaged his neighbors and community in conversations. They might disagree but my friend knows how to maintain a respectful dialogue with his neighbors. He amazes me because he is willing to talk with compassion and curiosity about any topic. He expresses a respectful live and let live while challenging his neighbors to greater compassion. He is not alone. There is a small creative community that he engages with and that community offers all the space he needs to construct a satisfying life with his partner.
Connecting to Charles reference to the Bantu, this story from a Maori friend in NZ came to mind. My friend teaches counselors and teachers to conduct meetings called a hui with youth in schools. He orients those he teaches to start each meeting by saying in both Maori and English, “I am who I am. You are who you are. Let us move together in tandem.” It’s time that our rural and urban brothers and sisters embraced this a bit more.
My path was from a different direction. I was in a Dialectical Social Ecology reading group with John P. Clark, an anarchist philosopher, author of The Impossible Community, Between Earth and Empire, and others. He is a scholar and social activist who was mentored by Murray Bookchin but declared a heretic when questioning some of Murray’s positions. That said, the group decided to read Process and Reality because Whitehead’s process resonated with the dialectical and Daoist thinking in so many ways. I invited a number of folks I heard about in the Cobb Institute to join, but ended up with no one. Andrew Davis was kind enough to suggested that we read Stubborn Fact and Creative Advance: An Introduction to the Metaphysics of Alfred North Whitehead by Thomas E. Hosinski. We read it with relish. I cannot say we resolved how dialectical Whitehead was, but the experience did send me in the direction to learn more about Whitehead. As for John, the dialectical is a process that continually informs communities. I don’t know if this helps. But your reflection brought to mind the wonderful reading group where we tried to understand Whitehead from a dialectical social ecology perspective.
Thomas, Thanks for your kind words. Yes, my hyphenates should always have etc.
Leslie, thanks for making the connection to Pieter Bruegel’s painting, The Fall of Icarus. It’s vital to see beauty in everyday life. The tragic is there, even if it is off to the side. As Tolstoy said, “life is everything.” Beauty and tragedy are bound together. The notion of intense harmony helps. Still, the tragic is a constant companion, and the mundane is where most of our life takes place. When I am busy reading, attending meetings online, pondering Whitehead, injustice, overshoot, tragedy, ecological collapse or other ideas, my partner asks important mundane questions: “Who’s going to water the garden? When are we going to clear out some of the junk we have accumulated in the past 40 years? Did you notice that morning glory climbing up the fence between the two yards? Should we have our granddaughter over for a visit? Are you going to go visit Mark at the hospital?” etc. Icarus has fallen but there are fields to plow, boats to sail, etc.
The suffering does not end and is not denied but our everyday tasks may liberate us to cultivate receptive and responsive loving practices with those around us. I dunno.
I missed the mark there. Thanks for the clarification.
I appreciate your description that initial aim is a gift to be discovered– a form of grace. In my mind that translates into living life with an openness to initial aims and opening our hearts “to the call of the moment.” Since initial aim is not choice, it seems to arise from a deep listening to the call of the moment.
I’m all for deep listening.
As lovely as grace sounds, I have challenges with “God” and “Calling” because these terms have supernatural implications for me. I am comfortably post-theistic, and am even referred to as a religious naturalist and pantheist. I experience cognitive dissonance when the supernatural slides into conversations because of a history of being around religious discussions that devolved into righteous positioning, anger, familial division, etc.
When conversations slide toward the esoteric and obscure, as we are going, I experience anxiety and look for concrete practices that can ground me peacefully. For instance, after taking courses in college and reading a variety of translations of the Tao Te Ching, I had an intellectual perspective about the Tao and Taoism. But it wasn’t until I learned and practiced tai chi with Sifu Fong Ha that I started to appreciate the Tao and chi. Fong embodied Taoism. The Tao and chi were taken beyond the head into the hands and heart. We sit, we stand, we walk; everything else is commentary. Now I see the Taoist practices embodied in my gardening, my relationships with family, etc. The process is lived.
I’ll leave it there.
Now I’m wondering: Are initial aim and lure connected?
Quite elegant. Thank you.
Charles, thank you for your thoughtful reflection on how process, panpsychism, and panexperintialism are respectable theories, and that embracing this venerable tradition does not tie you to “intellectually slack fringe New-Agers.” It does, however, link you to Bruno, who was burned at the stake in 1600 for giving voice to such ideas that brought anthropocentrism into question.
That’s the thing I love about the Cobb Institute. As far as I know, they don’t burn folks at the stake in person or metaphorically. My experience has been one of invitation. They invite participants into dialectical spaces where curiosity about differences, critical exchange about ideas, and respectful dialogue are cultivated in the spirit of learning and development.
Coming out of the closet as embracing a process, panpsychist, panexperientialist philosophical tradition is a challenge, partly because it is a long conversation in a quick conversation culture, and once expressed, the position can be greeted with a dismissive “New Ager” label. After which, panexperientialists like me, look for safe spaces, like conversations in the past with John P. Clark (author of The Impossible Community and Between Earth and Empire) and our Dialectical Social Ecology study group. Or when I take my 80 year old neighbor for long walks in the forest, teaching her a loving kindness metta, some chi kung, and showing her how to recite poetry to the trees while tying the conversation to Suzanne Semard and Merlin Sheldrake’s works. It’s important to note that for me, as a panexperinetialist, so much is learned and shared via practices and experiences, that talking about the philosophy is difficult. My tai chi Sifu used to say, sit and stand with me for 100 hours and then you’ll start to notice chi much better. He was right. Your reflections are helping me to emerge in this community.
Thank you, Charles, for your reflection.
Thank you, Eric, for asking the question that created the space.
Charles, thank you for your thoughtful reflection on how process, panpsychism, and panexperintialism are respectable theories, and that embracing this venerable tradition does not tie you to “intellectually slack fringe New-Agers.” It does, however, link you to Bruno, who was burned at the stake in 1600 for giving voice to such ideas.
That’s the thing I love about the Cobb Institute. As far as I know, they don’t burn folks at the stake in person or metaphorically. My experience has been one of invitation. They invite participants into dialectical spaces where curiosity about differences, critical exchange about ideas, and respectful dialogue are cultivated in the spirit of learning and development.
Coming out of the closet as embracing a process, panpsychist, panexperientialist philosophical tradition is a challenge, partly because it is a long conversation in a quick conversation culture, and once expressed, the position can be greeted with a dismissive “New Ager” label. After which, panexperientialists like me, look for safe spaces, like conversations in the past with John P. Clark (author of The Impossible Community and Between Earth and Empire) and our Dialectical Social Ecology study group. Or when I take my 80 year old neighbor for long walks in the forest, teaching her a loving kindness metta, some chi kung, and showing her how to recite poetry to the trees while tying the conversation to Suzanne Semard and Merlin Sheldrake’s works. It’s important to note that for me, as a panexperinetialist, so much is learned and shared via practices and experiences, that talking about the philosophy is difficult. My tai chi Sifu used to say, sit and stand with me for 100 hours and then you’ll start to notice chi much better. He was right. Your reflections are helping me to emerge in this community. Thank you.
Kyle’s comments on Twain also reminds me that when Huck and Jim escape by raft on the river, they are traveling south. It’s been years since I reflected on this so this is loose. Twain knew the forces of the river and that going south meant going deeper and deeper into slave states. He might have had that professional view, but his knowledge of the Mississippi River informed his creative masterpiece that illustrates how the slave is free and that those who would enslave are him and others are crass, cruel, and at risk of losing their humanity…. So, I would say his profession informed him to see the river in a certain way but his creativity liberated him to see it afresh. My hope is to navigate beyond either/or into both/and.
I love your notion of “intimacy” with the world and how Whitehead nurtures it.
Thomas, Thanks for sharing your journey, especially your pathway into Whitehead. I found it illuminating.
I love this thread and the connection to scifi.
Harmony and Holism are important topics. I won’t rattle on but just stick to something that came to mind when reading the thread.
I think back to Alfred Lord Tennyson in 1850 who in her Canto 56 refers to man:
Who trusted God was love
indeed
And love Creation’s final law
Tho’ Nature, red in tooth and claw
With ravine, shriek’d against
his creedWe have a time from the mid-19th century when Darwin’s notion of evolution and natural selection was disrupting a way of being in the world. His ideas were being reframed into “survival of the fittest'” “Social Darwinism” and other terms that had both biological and social implications. Those social implications lead to justifying the debasement of the poor, laborers, colonized people, etc. This was a real hateful capitalist mix that lead to rationalizing the exploitation of others by the predatory rich and powerful.
There were also other pathways that included biology. I think Peter Kropotkin’s Mutual Aid: A Factor in Evolution was the first intellectual, empirical field study in Russia that brought red in tooth and claw into question, or at least offered a counter argument. In 1914, he offers examples of mutual aid among animals, insects, and people throughout history…
So for me, harmony is intense, and not one way or the other in nature.
I think certainly within the socially constructed human world, there is the capacity to cultivate harmony and holism by showing greater compassion, offering mutual aid, etc. It’s a process.
It gets me thinking about Whitehead and anarchism. I don’t think Whitehead spent much time reading the anarchist literature of his time, but I did see that an anarchist scholar from Iceland was linking Kropotkin to process philosophy….. I’ll leave it there. I just thought I’d riff on what you guys were talking about. This may be off topic a bit, but for me I see a connection.