Quotes & Sayings


We, and creation itself, actualize the possibilities of the God who sustains the world, towards becoming in the world in a fuller, more deeper way. - R.E. Slater

There is urgency in coming to see the world as a web of interrelated processes of which we are integral parts, so that all of our choices and actions have [consequential effects upon] the world around us. - Process Metaphysician Alfred North Whitehead

Kurt Gödel's Incompleteness Theorem says (i) all closed systems are unprovable within themselves and, that (ii) all open systems are rightly understood as incomplete. - R.E. Slater

The most true thing about you is what God has said to you in Christ, "You are My Beloved." - Tripp Fuller

The God among us is the God who refuses to be God without us, so great is God's Love. - Tripp Fuller

According to some Christian outlooks we were made for another world. Perhaps, rather, we were made for this world to recreate, reclaim, redeem, and renew unto God's future aspiration by the power of His Spirit. - R.E. Slater

Our eschatological ethos is to love. To stand with those who are oppressed. To stand against those who are oppressing. It is that simple. Love is our only calling and Christian Hope. - R.E. Slater

Secularization theory has been massively falsified. We don't live in an age of secularity. We live in an age of explosive, pervasive religiosity... an age of religious pluralism. - Peter L. Berger

Exploring the edge of life and faith in a post-everything world. - Todd Littleton

I don't need another reason to believe, your love is all around for me to see. – Anon

Thou art our need; and in giving us more of thyself thou givest us all. - Khalil Gibran, Prayer XXIII

Be careful what you pretend to be. You become what you pretend to be. - Kurt Vonnegut

Religious beliefs, far from being primary, are often shaped and adjusted by our social goals. - Jim Forest

We become who we are by what we believe and can justify. - R.E. Slater

People, even more than things, need to be restored, renewed, revived, reclaimed, and redeemed; never throw out anyone. – Anon

Certainly, God's love has made fools of us all. - R.E. Slater

An apocalyptic Christian faith doesn't wait for Jesus to come, but for Jesus to become in our midst. - R.E. Slater

Christian belief in God begins with the cross and resurrection of Jesus, not with rational apologetics. - Eberhard Jüngel, Jürgen Moltmann

Our knowledge of God is through the 'I-Thou' encounter, not in finding God at the end of a syllogism or argument. There is a grave danger in any Christian treatment of God as an object. The God of Jesus Christ and Scripture is irreducibly subject and never made as an object, a force, a power, or a principle that can be manipulated. - Emil Brunner

“Ehyeh Asher Ehyeh” means "I will be that who I have yet to become." - God (Ex 3.14) or, conversely, “I AM who I AM Becoming.”

Our job is to love others without stopping to inquire whether or not they are worthy. - Thomas Merton

The church is God's world-changing social experiment of bringing unlikes and differents to the Eucharist/Communion table to share life with one another as a new kind of family. When this happens, we show to the world what love, justice, peace, reconciliation, and life together is designed by God to be. The church is God's show-and-tell for the world to see how God wants us to live as a blended, global, polypluralistic family united with one will, by one Lord, and baptized by one Spirit. – Anon

The cross that is planted at the heart of the history of the world cannot be uprooted. - Jacques Ellul

The Unity in whose loving presence the universe unfolds is inside each person as a call to welcome the stranger, protect animals and the earth, respect the dignity of each person, think new thoughts, and help bring about ecological civilizations. - John Cobb & Farhan A. Shah

If you board the wrong train it is of no use running along the corridors of the train in the other direction. - Dietrich Bonhoeffer

God's justice is restorative rather than punitive; His discipline is merciful rather than punishing; His power is made perfect in weakness; and His grace is sufficient for all. – Anon

Our little [biblical] systems have their day; they have their day and cease to be. They are but broken lights of Thee, and Thou, O God art more than they. - Alfred Lord Tennyson

We can’t control God; God is uncontrollable. God can’t control us; God’s love is uncontrolling! - Thomas Jay Oord

Life in perspective but always in process... as we are relational beings in process to one another, so life events are in process in relation to each event... as God is to Self, is to world, is to us... like Father, like sons and daughters, like events... life in process yet always in perspective. - R.E. Slater

To promote societal transition to sustainable ways of living and a global society founded on a shared ethical framework which includes respect and care for the community of life, ecological integrity, universal human rights, respect for diversity, economic justice, democracy, and a culture of peace. - The Earth Charter Mission Statement

Christian humanism is the belief that human freedom, individual conscience, and unencumbered rational inquiry are compatible with the practice of Christianity or even intrinsic in its doctrine. It represents a philosophical union of Christian faith and classical humanist principles. - Scott Postma

It is never wise to have a self-appointed religious institution determine a nation's moral code. The opportunities for moral compromise and failure are high; the moral codes and creeds assuredly racist, discriminatory, or subjectively and religiously defined; and the pronouncement of inhumanitarian political objectives quite predictable. - R.E. Slater

God's love must both center and define the Christian faith and all religious or human faiths seeking human and ecological balance in worlds of subtraction, harm, tragedy, and evil. - R.E. Slater

In Whitehead’s process ontology, we can think of the experiential ground of reality as an eternal pulse whereby what is objectively public in one moment becomes subjectively prehended in the next, and whereby the subject that emerges from its feelings then perishes into public expression as an object (or “superject”) aiming for novelty. There is a rhythm of Being between object and subject, not an ontological division. This rhythm powers the creative growth of the universe from one occasion of experience to the next. This is the Whiteheadian mantra: “The many become one and are increased by one.” - Matthew Segall

Without Love there is no Truth. And True Truth is always Loving. There is no dichotomy between these terms but only seamless integration. This is the premier centering focus of a Processual Theology of Love. - R.E. Slater

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Note: Generally I do not respond to commentary. I may read the comments but wish to reserve my time to write (or write from the comments I read). Instead, I'd like to see our community help one another and in the helping encourage and exhort each of us towards Christian love in Christ Jesus our Lord and Savior. - re slater

Tuesday, July 9, 2024

Process Quotes & Sayings



Dr. Matthew Segall: Whitehead and Process
1:21:55

Premiered Sep 11, 2022
Aired on Twitter Spaces 9/10
Co-hosts Christopher Satoor + Elisabeth Schilling
Guest: Dr. Matthew Segall

Matthew D. Segall, PhD, received his doctoral degree in 2016 from the Philosophy, Cosmology, and Consciousness program at CIIS. His dissertation was titled Cosmotheanthropic Imagination in the Post-Kantian Process Philosophy of Schelling and Whitehead. It grapples with the limits to knowledge of reality imposed by Kant's transcendental form of philosophy and argues that Schelling and Whitehead's process-oriented approach (described in his dissertation as a "descendental" form of philosophy) shows the way across the Kantian threshold to renewed experiential contact with reality. He teaches courses on German Idealism and process philosophy for the Philosophy, Cosmology, and Consciousness program at CIIS. He blogs regularly at footnotes2plato.com.

Matt Segall's YT: ‪@Footnotes2Plato‬

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[Process] Quotes & Sayings

I.


In physics, Ilya Prigogine distinguishes between the "physics of being" and the "physics of becoming". Process philosophy covers not just scientific intuitions and experiences, but can be used as a conceptual bridge to facilitate discussions among religion, philosophy, and science."



II.

"It seems sensible to understand "process philosophy" as a doctrine committed to, or at any rate inclined toward, certain basic propositions:

1) Time and change (event) are among the principal categories of metaphysical understanding.

2) Process is a principal category of ontological description.

3) Processes (events) are more fundamental, or at any rate not less fundamental, than things (matter) for the purposes of ontological theory.

4) Several, if not all of the major elements of the ontological repertoire - God, Nature as a whole (the cosmos), persons, material substances (quantum particles and macro objects) - are best understood in process terms.

5) Contingency, emergence, novelty and creativity are among the fundamental categories of metaphysical understanding.

A process philosopher, then, is someone for whom temporality, activity, and change - of alteration, striving, passage, novelty-emergence - are the cardinal factors for our understanding of the real.

Ultimately, it is a question of priority - of viewing the time-bound aspects of the real as constituting its most characteristic and significant features.

For the process philosopher, process has priority over product - both ontologically and epistemically."

- Nicholas Rescher, Process Philosophy, 1928, p 6.


III.

"The cycles that can ground us through our busy lives are: breath, rhythms of the day, weekly rhythms like Sabbath rest, waxing and waning lunar cycles, seasons of the year, seasons of a lifetime, ancestral time, and cosmic time.

Each cycle encourages us to mindfully consider the time that passes as quickly as each breath and as slowly as the passing of generations."

- Christine Valters Paintner, Sacred Time, 2021


IV.

"Philosophers can never hope finally to formulate these metaphysical first principles. Weakness of insight and deficiencies of language stand in the way inexorably. Words and phrases must be stretched towards a generality foreign to their ordinary usage; and however such elements of language be stabilized as technicalities, they remain metaphors mutely appealing for an imaginative leap."

- Whitehead, Process and Reality, 1928, p. 4

"Language often stands in the way of expressing processual beingness. However, the felt experiences of passing events tumble through the barriers of psychic language bringing meaning, regeneration, thrival, and hope to the felt processual language of beingness." - RE Slater

V.

"Process philosophy, a 20th-century school of Western philosophy that emphasizes the elements of becoming, change, and novelty in experienced reality; opposes the traditional Western philosophical stress on being, permanence, and uniformity. Reality - including both the natural world and the human sphere - is essentially historical in this view, emerging from (and bearing) a past and advancing into a novel future. Hence, reality cannot be grasped by the static spatial concepts of the old views, which ignore the temporal and novel aspects of the universe given in man’s experience."

- Encyclopedia Britannica, 2021


VI.

"Mind transforms the continuance of physical spacetime into moments (the absolute Now) and blends these moments into an apparent continuity through an overlapping of unfolding capsules. The flow of psychological time is an illusion based on the rapid replacement of these capsules. Each mind computes the measure of time passing and duration from the decay of the surface present (the event) in relation to a core of past events. As each new surface (event) is generated, that surface, the rim of the immediate past, recedes in the wake of rising contents. This recession, an uncovering of phases latent in the original traversal, exposes layers in the past forming the content of the immediate past moment. The surge of the microgeny to a surface that dissolves the instant it appears, the priority of the Self in the unfolding sequence, the feeling of agency, create a Self in a state of becoming, a Self that travels in time like the crest of a wave, always in pursuit of a future just beyond the grasp of the present."

- Jason W. Brown, Psychology of Time Awareness, 1990

"Our felt experience and recognition of passing time carries forward from past eventful experiences to future eventing experiences." - RE Slater


VII.

"The Huayan developed the doctrine of "interpenetration" or "coalescence" (Wylie: zung-'jug; Sanskrit: yuganaddha),[23][24] based on the Avatamsaka Sūtra, a Mahāyāna scripture. It holds that all phenomena (Sanskrit: dharmas) are intimately connected (and mutually arising). Two images are used to convey this idea. The first is known as Indra's net. The net is set with jewels which have the extraordinary property that they reflect all of the other jewels. The second image is that of the world text. This image portrays the world as consisting of an enormous text which is as large as the universe itself. The words of the text are composed of the phenomena that make up the world. However, every atom of the world contains the whole text within it. It is the work of a Buddha to let out the text so that beings can be liberated from suffering. The doctrine of interpenetration influenced the Japanese monk Kūkai, who founded the Shingon school of Buddhism. Interpenetration and essence-function are mutually informing in the East Asian Buddhist traditions, especially the Korean Buddhist tradition."


"Beingness both draws from and, experiences, all of the cosmos' beingness corporately, as well as some of the cosmos' beingness in uniquely creative experiences individually. Life draws from the life of the cosmos as well as it's own personal experience while continually making adjustments to it's corporate and constitutionally personalized paths." - RE Slater


VIII.
  • "Reality is a process: nothing ever stays the same.
  • The process of reality is creative, emergent, evolutionary, and social.
  • There is a profound relationship between creativity, beauty, and life.
  • All life deserves respect; nothing in nature stands alone; everything is connected.
  • Thinking and feeling are connected; mind and body are not separate entities; aesthetic wisdom and rational inquiry are complementary.
  • Human experience begins by feeling the presence of the world and being affected by it.
  • Human happiness involves sharing experience with others and responding in harmony to these relationships."


IX.

"This sense of reality as a dynamic breath-force tissue is reflected in the Chinese language itself, and so operates as an unnoticed assumption in ancient Chinese consciousness. There is no distinction between noun and verb in classical Chinese. Virtually all words can function as either. Hence, the sense of reality as verbal: a tissue alive and in the process. This includes all individual elements of reality, such as mountains or people, and contrasts with our language's sense that reality is nominal, an assemblage of static things. A noun in fact only refers to a temporal slice through the ongoing verbal process that any thing actually is."

- David Hinton, China Root, 2020, p. 35


X.

Some Principles of Whitehead's Thinking

1. Question the assumptions of your community, your society, your religion, your science, your educational institutions, especially those that are rarely mentioned.

2. Question the dominant media, asking who controls it and what they want you to think.

3. Recognize that a serious answer to any important question brings into view lots of other questions [as well as a new language to the soul].

4. When people appeal to mystery, consider that it may be mystification. Push critical thought as far as you can.

5. Recognize that the wider range of influences on an event or person that you consider, the better you understand that event or person.

6. Recognize that the broader you consideration of the context and of the likely consequences of your actions, the better chances you will make towards the right choice.

7. Realize that all your ideas and values are influenced by your particular situation, but refuse to conclude that for this reason they can be dismissed as merely "relative."

8. Recognize that there may be no actions that are completely harmless, but do not let that prevent you from acting decisively.

9. Understand that compassion is the most basic aspect of our experience, and seek to liberate and extend your compassion to all with which you come in contact.

10. Deepen you commitments to your own immediate communities, but always remember that other communities make similar demands on their members. Let you ultimate commitment be all-inclusive."

- By John B. Cobb, Jr., What would Whitehead Think?


XI.

“They both listened silently to the water, which to them was not just water, but the voice of life, the voice of Being, the voice of perpetual Becoming.”

- Hermann Hesse, Siddhartha


XII.

The Core Doctrines of Process Philosophy for Circa 2020 CE

"1. The integration of moral, aesthetic, and religious intuitions with the most general doctrines of the sciences into a self-consistent worldview as one of the central tasks of philosophy in our time.

2. Hard-core commonsense notions as the ultimate test of the adequacy of a philosophical position.

3. Whitehead's nonsensationist doctrine of perception, according to which sensory perception is a secondary mode of perception, being derivative from a more fundamental, nonsensory "prehension."

4. Panexperientalism with organizational duality, according to which all true individuals - as distinct from aggregational societies - have at least some iota of experience and spontaneity (self-determination).

5. The doctrine that all enduring individuals are serially ordered societies of momentary "occasions of experience."

6. The doctrine that all actual entities have internal as well as external relations.

7. The Whiteheadian version of naturalistic theism, according to which a Divine Actuality acts variably but never supernaturally in the world.

8. Doubly Dipolar Deism.

9. The provision of cosmological support for the ideals needed by contemporary civilization as one of the chief purposes of philosophy in our time.

10. A distinction between verbal statements (sentences) and propositions and between both of these and propositional feelings."

- David Ray Griffin, Reenchantment Without Supernaturalism, 2001, p.1-12, summary excerpts.



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