Holy crap Bonnie! It has taken me over 2 weeks to read and I haven’t even gotten to most of the footnotes! And I sense I will be rereading for years. Speechless except to say Thank you!!
My wife and I have been traveling and I had hoped to arrive here in Key West in time to get on today’s call, but alas that didn’t happen. But now I have finally had time to read this piece, and I too will be reading it again…when I get home.
But in the meantime, here are a few things that come to me now.
The mention of the antecedents being internally related to the descendents, along with the way indigenous people think about their ancestors, brought a couple of things to mind. The first was a PBS show that my wife and I have watched for a couple years called Finding Your Roots. They track down the families of show business types in sometimes astonishing detail. In virtually every case, the subject is brought to tears by a particular story of a 3rd great-grandparent, and the like. You can see that it is visceral to them, much like my second point, which is how I feel my children inside me just as I felt them in the moments after their births. In the very moment of the doctor handing me my first born, I remember thinking “I had no idea how much my parents loved me.” There is a taproot of some kind there that cannot be broken, it seems to me, in both directions.
The “grounding” model of contingencies and the “more fundamental” as well as:
“…we can say that ‘story’ is the representation of temporal process” and also:
“…retrospection illuminates evidence of only the concretized actual occasions, and subtracts the infinite field of potential that conspire to realize them…”:
….all reminded me of the “top down” theory in “On the Origin of Time,” which you refer to. I don’t pretend to understand it all, but it does make much more sense to me to start with the universe that we find ourselves in and work backwards than to start at a supposed beginning point and trying to wade through all of the possible contingencies to try and end up where we are now.
(btw – it says that “space” existed before time…and then there is “imaginary time” too, turned somehow in the math??) I will reread all that I highlighted to try and absorb more of it because it says that how we look back on it changes it. I didn’t really get that when I read it but it felt important.
I like your description of Sabine as a pugilist. Sometimes I think that her first inclination is to disparage everything she reads. She feels cynical, but I do watch her for contrary views because they too are useful.
Yes to “reality is fundamentally grounded in experience...”
I have noticed that as I move through the experiential eddies of motion, that there are obviously, at least to me, “preferences” in the direction that “I” move. Sometimes there is a barely conscious choice - it occurs very fast - to move towards a particular flow, or to avoid one, but at other times the preference is “acted upon” prior to a noticing of options. I refer to both as preferences and they came to mind in your sentence “This means that reality is value-laden, embedded in a continuous flow of values.” Does this line up with how you are using values or were you using “values” in a more traditional sense?
Fantastic comment. If this is your vacation brain, maybe you should be on vacation more!
Yes, that is how I use values. They are just an extension of the more primitive gradient array. Values don't determine behavior, they organize them towards certain directions and not others.
Thanks, that's what I had imagined...myself as a kind of exploring, expanding, diversifying terminus, impacted by all past "preferences" but doing a kind of choosing in the present. The closer I move towards the fundamental, the less there is a of the kind of debris field of past choices/preferences and, I imagine, the more "potency" to use your descriptor, my current choices have.
I actually hopped back on here now because I came across something fascinating in a book that I am reading (Putting Ourselves Back Into the Equation) which I had not heard before.
“[Roger] Penrose comes at the problem of quantum measurement from the opposite direction. Instead of supposing that consciousness causes collapse (of the wave function) he argues that the collapse causes consciousness. He starts by identifying an entirely objective mechanism for collapse – ‘It takes place in the physics, and it’s not because somebody comes and looks at it,’ he told me – and then he mulls what such a mechanism might mean for our mental experience.
The mechanism that he proposes is gravitational. In our current understanding, gravity is produced by a field akin to the electric or magnetic field…”
I’ll stop there but I like this. We’ve got gravity which, at least to my non-physicist’s view, is the least understood force – if it even is one. We have the singularity with its near infinite gravity, which “we” posit may be the seat of consciousness, but certainly of potential, along with last year’s discovery of the Gravitational Wave Background, some of whose oscillations are light years long and all of which are passing through us en masse all the time.
Anyway, I had not heard of this perspective and thought you might like it if you had not.
Thank you for "staying with the trouble" (in a different sort of meaning). The first read I had to take it in sections -- walk away, chew and come back. 20-30 readings seems fit for digestible purpose. I'd like to say prior to those readings "good job B;-)" I remember reading somewhere that it took Rilke 10 years to write the Duino Elegies and that it was an act of "obedience to the spirit."
I was going to put the piece out in smaller snippets, but I think (after you've read through the entire thing quickly) you can begin at any one of the headings and read from there. Read for hits of insight. The thing is, you can read Whitehead or Hartshorne (or any and all those books I referenced at the top) and still be more lost than just sticking with something like this and asking questions.
I appreciate your saying here, "It is through the paying attention to experience ... that we realize that experience is the ontological ground of reality," as well as, "This is the transcendent nature of reality. It is both that which illuminates itself, in the everyday on-goingness of the ten thousand things, as well as that which is luminous in their experience— and both aspects participate in the eternal on-goingneses of the cosmos." I previously noted elsewhere that, "the purpose of formal contemplative practice, regardless of tradition, is to ascertain the goodness inherent in the ongoing immediacy of experience and rest there with trust in its absolute value."
Holy crap Bonnie! It has taken me over 2 weeks to read and I haven’t even gotten to most of the footnotes! And I sense I will be rereading for years. Speechless except to say Thank you!!
“…There are other times [like this morning reading this piece], I thought I was mainlining the secret truth to the universe.”
My wife and I have been traveling and I had hoped to arrive here in Key West in time to get on today’s call, but alas that didn’t happen. But now I have finally had time to read this piece, and I too will be reading it again…when I get home.
But in the meantime, here are a few things that come to me now.
The mention of the antecedents being internally related to the descendents, along with the way indigenous people think about their ancestors, brought a couple of things to mind. The first was a PBS show that my wife and I have watched for a couple years called Finding Your Roots. They track down the families of show business types in sometimes astonishing detail. In virtually every case, the subject is brought to tears by a particular story of a 3rd great-grandparent, and the like. You can see that it is visceral to them, much like my second point, which is how I feel my children inside me just as I felt them in the moments after their births. In the very moment of the doctor handing me my first born, I remember thinking “I had no idea how much my parents loved me.” There is a taproot of some kind there that cannot be broken, it seems to me, in both directions.
The “grounding” model of contingencies and the “more fundamental” as well as:
“…we can say that ‘story’ is the representation of temporal process” and also:
“…retrospection illuminates evidence of only the concretized actual occasions, and subtracts the infinite field of potential that conspire to realize them…”:
….all reminded me of the “top down” theory in “On the Origin of Time,” which you refer to. I don’t pretend to understand it all, but it does make much more sense to me to start with the universe that we find ourselves in and work backwards than to start at a supposed beginning point and trying to wade through all of the possible contingencies to try and end up where we are now.
(btw – it says that “space” existed before time…and then there is “imaginary time” too, turned somehow in the math??) I will reread all that I highlighted to try and absorb more of it because it says that how we look back on it changes it. I didn’t really get that when I read it but it felt important.
I like your description of Sabine as a pugilist. Sometimes I think that her first inclination is to disparage everything she reads. She feels cynical, but I do watch her for contrary views because they too are useful.
Yes to “reality is fundamentally grounded in experience...”
I have noticed that as I move through the experiential eddies of motion, that there are obviously, at least to me, “preferences” in the direction that “I” move. Sometimes there is a barely conscious choice - it occurs very fast - to move towards a particular flow, or to avoid one, but at other times the preference is “acted upon” prior to a noticing of options. I refer to both as preferences and they came to mind in your sentence “This means that reality is value-laden, embedded in a continuous flow of values.” Does this line up with how you are using values or were you using “values” in a more traditional sense?
Vacation brain…I’m done for now.
Thanks
Fantastic comment. If this is your vacation brain, maybe you should be on vacation more!
Yes, that is how I use values. They are just an extension of the more primitive gradient array. Values don't determine behavior, they organize them towards certain directions and not others.
Thanks, that's what I had imagined...myself as a kind of exploring, expanding, diversifying terminus, impacted by all past "preferences" but doing a kind of choosing in the present. The closer I move towards the fundamental, the less there is a of the kind of debris field of past choices/preferences and, I imagine, the more "potency" to use your descriptor, my current choices have.
I actually hopped back on here now because I came across something fascinating in a book that I am reading (Putting Ourselves Back Into the Equation) which I had not heard before.
“[Roger] Penrose comes at the problem of quantum measurement from the opposite direction. Instead of supposing that consciousness causes collapse (of the wave function) he argues that the collapse causes consciousness. He starts by identifying an entirely objective mechanism for collapse – ‘It takes place in the physics, and it’s not because somebody comes and looks at it,’ he told me – and then he mulls what such a mechanism might mean for our mental experience.
The mechanism that he proposes is gravitational. In our current understanding, gravity is produced by a field akin to the electric or magnetic field…”
I’ll stop there but I like this. We’ve got gravity which, at least to my non-physicist’s view, is the least understood force – if it even is one. We have the singularity with its near infinite gravity, which “we” posit may be the seat of consciousness, but certainly of potential, along with last year’s discovery of the Gravitational Wave Background, some of whose oscillations are light years long and all of which are passing through us en masse all the time.
Anyway, I had not heard of this perspective and thought you might like it if you had not.
This demands a few reads (for my peanut brain). In the meantime 🤯!
We can talk about it at the campfire today if you're coming and want to.
Well, it took 4 months to write (after years of reading this stuff).
If that can be compressed into 20 or 30 readings, then I'd say I've done a good job.
:-)
Thank you for "staying with the trouble" (in a different sort of meaning). The first read I had to take it in sections -- walk away, chew and come back. 20-30 readings seems fit for digestible purpose. I'd like to say prior to those readings "good job B;-)" I remember reading somewhere that it took Rilke 10 years to write the Duino Elegies and that it was an act of "obedience to the spirit."
I was going to put the piece out in smaller snippets, but I think (after you've read through the entire thing quickly) you can begin at any one of the headings and read from there. Read for hits of insight. The thing is, you can read Whitehead or Hartshorne (or any and all those books I referenced at the top) and still be more lost than just sticking with something like this and asking questions.
That's what the new "Oracle" section is for.
I appreciate your saying here, "It is through the paying attention to experience ... that we realize that experience is the ontological ground of reality," as well as, "This is the transcendent nature of reality. It is both that which illuminates itself, in the everyday on-goingness of the ten thousand things, as well as that which is luminous in their experience— and both aspects participate in the eternal on-goingneses of the cosmos." I previously noted elsewhere that, "the purpose of formal contemplative practice, regardless of tradition, is to ascertain the goodness inherent in the ongoing immediacy of experience and rest there with trust in its absolute value."