The philosopher Alfred North Whitehead said that reality arises through a series of moments which feel into the past moment as they feel for(ward) the next moment. For Whitehead, the action in-between was nothing at all like the tight wire between the physicists’ cause and effect. Rather, Whitehead thought of this feeling-process—which he called “prehension” – as incredibly sensitive, provocative, and loving; and he construed it as the long, long moment of possibility, freedom and choice, in the timeless space of becoming, before the actual occasion is concretized into being. If you situated yourself imaginatively inside Whitehead’s process reality, you would experience yourself as a living center of transformational process. Without a sense of separate self, nevertheless you would feel the act of cause-creating-effect-creating cause… and in the a-temporal pulsations between cause and effect (actual and potential) you would discover vast promise and freedom. The more you prehended your neighbors and relations, the more extensive you would become, until you felt the in-becoming of one body through the simultaneous presence of many bodies. The more stabilized your prehension, over the long slow moment of feeling, the more expansive you would become, until you realized the in-becoming of one novel moment through the simultaneous presencing of many moments.This requires a whole new mind – one which allows the range and diversity of our (humans’) ontological narratives to continuously compose and decompose ourselves as participants in a persistent plurality of novel relations. This demands a whole new view – one which becomes increasingly aware of the metaphysical necessity of plurality, diversity and asymmetry in any cosmology that is authentic to the apperception of a shared unbounded wholeness. The dualistically-constructed dialectical mind cannot achieve this scope where incommensurability of beliefs is a sign of novelty, and novelty is a sign of a unified generative process of shared becoming. ~ Bonnitta Roy, from this excellent reflection:
Posted on: Fri, 07 Jun 2013 17:49:34 +0000
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