Replies

Hello again, Rolla, and thanks for joining the class! I find your background in appreciative inquiry fascinating, and your novel approach to your resume disarming! San Quentin is a sobering destination for a former student, and I’m pretty sure there’s a story there worth hearing.

I’m struck by the many great minds enrolled in this class, and excited to be part of it.

Glad you decided to join the class, Charlie! I’ve always enjoyed your contributions in other cohort spaces at Cobb Institute, and would like to hear more from you.

Welcome to the class, Don! As a biologist and naturalist, I think you have a lot to offer our class. I certainly agree that the stories of “atoms and void” and omnipotent deities have lost their explanatory power — never fast enough for my paltry patience…

Thank you for being here, and I’m looking forward to learning more from you.

Welcome, Dan! It’s wonderful to learn about your encounters with Jung and process thought. I imagine David Ray Griffin and Sheri Kling to be excellent resources, and Sheri’s A Process Spirituality is on my reading list.

I’m 72, and also retired. Greetings from Palo Alto, neighbor! The journey this class is offering us has greater allure by the day.

Welcome, Doug! It appears that the journey you’ve taken to arrive in the class has been full of initiatory experiences. It must be hard to live with Chronic Fatigue Syndrome, and I send you strength and health as you move toward the light.

Someday I hope to share with you a poem I once wrote about “our medical treatment.” Who came up with the idea of industrialized medicine, anyway? Thank you for being here — I feel you have a lot to share that will help others.

Welcome to the class, Mark! You’ve clearly put your education to excellent use. I too fear the myriad ways that AI will amplify dominant power structures. The creator is inevitably in the created thing, and it’s hard to discern how process-relational thought will emerge from it as long as our culture remains steadfastly on the track it’s engineered for itself.

Now I’m feeling a lure to investigate Matt’s encounters with ChatGPT — but not until I’ve completed the reading for tomorrow’s class <;^)

Looking forward to learning more from you!

Welcome to the class, Bill! I’m so impressed with the volume of helpful ideas you’ve shared already in this introduction thread. Your ministry to marginalized people who’ve suffered so much under the weight of illness and invalidation is a marvel, and I look forward to learning more about it. Your life appears to me to be an initiation into a more evolved consciousness born in a crucible of suffering, and it’s an honor to be trusted with your vulnerability and self-revelations. May our suffering have meaning.

As it happens, Neil Douglas-Klotz is also an influence on the play I’m writing, Akashic Follies. His Aramaic interpretations of the sayings of Jesus found in The Hidden Gospel inspired Yeshua’s final soliloquy in Act I Scene 2: Deception — a re-casting of the encounter with the Samaritan woman at the well in John:4. I think the multi-valent poetry of Klotz’s renderings reveal so much more than translations from one conqueror language into another.

Welcome to the class, Chris! We already know each other of course, yet I learned new things about you in your introduction. I know you’ll contribute your usual brilliance to this class, and look forward to hearing more from you.

Greetings, Eric! Your story brings back memories of my own experiences working in the Information Technology sector, documenting database systems as a technical writer at software companies. I’m retired now, and I hope you get there, too. It can be a deeply satisfying experience to savor life for its own sake and follow your bliss.

Welcome, Doug! Your studies in social and pastoral theology can bring real-world insights to process-relational thought, and I look forward to learning more about you.

Welcome, Kathleen! I know you a bit from other cohorts at CI, and it’s helpful to learn a little more about who you are. I think your eclectic studies will bring a lot to this course.

Welcome, Christie! I also find that cultivating a natural sense of wonder (and gratitude!) works … well, wonders for the soul. When I was in my twenties I worked my way through college as a stage magician, and for me, magic was about reminding people of the natural wonders in the world around us, rather than engaging in the one-upsmanship behavior with spectators typical of magicians in our culture. The clown character I co-created with the Faithful Fools Street Ministry, Alfonzo the Conjuring Fool, had similar aims in mind. I’m also jazzed about being in this class with you!

It feels good to know that he’ll have a chance to read it. Thanks, Matt!