Terms

Concrescence: the becoming of prehensions toward satisfaction

Actual Entity: the monads out of which the universe is comprised. So materialism would have at its fundamental monad an atom while in process it is an acutal entity. The actual entity is constituted of feelings and propositions.

Nexus:the system of actual entities that comprise the universe or any concrescence

Prehension: physical components of actual entities

Feelings: primary feelings may be physical, conceptual, or transmuted

What does Christmas prehend?

What does the birth of a tiny baby in a stable prehend? Ir prehends an ultimate reality where all suffering becomes peace and light. The concrescence of the acutal occasion of Christ's birth is the end of the exploitation of people to serve other people because people freely give to each other in a better social organization that values life and love and selflessness. This is because power belongs to the innocent and pure not only the ccorrupt and worldly.

Evil is in part from not being able to allow the concrescence of actual occasions like Christ's birth to achieve satisfaction. Something as narrow as not getting out of bed quickly enough to play with a child so he is forced to watch Sesame Street on TV is an example of this evil. But perhaps this prehends the time when a mother does get out of bed, or a time when he begins to draw creatures at an art table.

Christmas thoughts

If evil is control over others what then because civil society is based on a social contract. the agreement needs to be somehow related to human rights-

Jesus represented the power inherent in a person with no control. Born in a stable to very poor parents Jesus had no social status. Additionally he was born in Judea in the Roman Empire. Judea at that time was very very poor. SO he was a poor child in a poor family in a poor province. What control did he have over his world? None but the control God gave to him. And in some ways God gave him no control. His ministry on earth ended with his death on the cross. Despite the power he had to perform miracles he was clear duringhis ministry that his miracles were a distraction from his true teachings of grace, humility, the love of enemies, forgiveness, meekness, and submission to God.

What Jesus had was not control- but he had power. One of the main criticisms that people made of Jesus was that he had no control or real worldly power. How then could he be the Christ. He was the Messiah, proclaimed as a baby by the light of a single star. How could he be in control.

The goodness of Jesus was not his power or his control over the world. It was his message of forgiveness and meekness and grace in the face of God's love and mercy.
Jesus is often described as great because he was the light of God but he did not take the form of a power figure, a person of worldly influenece, He repeatedly served his disciples, washing their feet. He ate with lepers and tax collectors, people shunned by the majority of society.

There is a lot of serenity in accepting that the goodness in the world is not about power and control, or influence. It is a state of mind and of character. It is a way of being with other people.

Process theoloigy must see the prophetic tradition as a series of examples of actual events as people and actual occasions of people where the choice to follow God's will and to serve God concresces in the glory of God being made more clear to huamnity. The turht of God's will and God's message for what we should do as human beings becomes the new actual occasion where beauty can be experienced in the world.

human rights and ownership

what is the reality of sin and evil in the world? The concept of human society and order. Order is a process thought concept. Increasing order. But what if the order is ugly or too narrow- I keep coming back to the thought that process thought has not enough of a conceept of suffering. Evil is about control? God is good because God is emptying God self- Not controlling but allowing us free will.

So evil would be fascism in a political system, or compulsion in religion- la ikra fii diin. there should be no compulsion in religion.

control as inheritance and privatization. the problem of the state being too in control.

The siutation in Iran is getting out of control and that is a good thing. Leaving the situation in Iraq and Iran in homeostasis would be a set up for a much worse problem later on. So let them have the bomb and change the situation so they have more power. or overthrow the Iranian government and establish a US hegemony. But the control in the system at the moment is the momentum toward the plans of the neoconservatives. That needs to change. The current situation is goo dbecause it is change. It needs to be directed towards human rights.

If evil is control over others what then because civil society is based on a social contract. the agreement needs to be somehow related to human rights-

the current agreement is military control run by the weapons industry. Ok- weapons and military spending controls the global economy. money is the fundamental component of exchange. The fundamental exchange is military in its structure.

A transformed civil society would make the fundamental mode of exchange life not death.

LIFE- Lady Gaga makes you think about this. Her sound is ripped off from Shakira at all?

I see Shakira's music as more erotic and Lady Gaga's music as more pornographic.

The erotic vs the pornographic.

There is a connection between the violence in society, THANATOS and fascism.

OKAY.

CONTROL- what is the opposite of control FREEDOM=

GOOD= Freedom

BAD= CONTROL

Troops out of Iraq

What is the concept that we in the United States can kill people and no one else has that right. Why is it so bad for Iran to have a nuclear bomb? why don't they have the right to have a nuclear bomb? The United States has so many, Israel has the bomb as well. Why can't Iran have the bomb?

I keep thinking about the concept of jamming the machinery. I don't think the two thoughts are seperate. The machinery is grinding up the world for hundreds of years, ever since men owned their women in the Caucus Mountains, the Kurgan theory, the concept that people were property, the concept that one person can dominate and subjugate another person.

For the reorganization of the world there needs to be a paradigm shift away from control and we have to let go of the concept that we can own and dominate the power to kill.

Barack Obama and the Nobel Peace Prize

The concept of jamming the machinery is a common theme conceptually for feminists. Something is wrong with the worldview we are in. Our paradigm needs to change. We need to make a qualitative change in our apprioach to life. I don't think Obama should havee received the Nobel Prize. But is he sending the troops to Afghanistan on a mission to prompt us to pull all our troops out of Iraq and Afghanistan? To get the US public to panic and unaminously work for the complete end to the war in Iraq and Afghanistan. Is he trying to jam up the war machine? How do we help? He keeps calling fo rhte US public to be in school, volunteer etc. is this an attempt to get us to act?

the ban on minarets in Switzerland

bismillah ir rahman ir rahim

Muslims seem to me to be too busy reacting to fundamentalist christianity. The ban on minarets reflects the huge loss of communication between the intellectual islamic tradition and secular enlightenment thought in europe. The Islam that Europeans seem to be reacting to is too busy fighting the christian ideologies that focus on apocalyptic eshcatological visions of the Second Coming and the Rapture. Muslims need to not respond to the Christian claim to the monopoly of salvation by Jesus and his Church and respond more proactively to the forces in the world that are secular and view Christianity as an ignorant backward world view that can be tolerated but not respected other than as a tool of power. Muslims need to focus on issues of human rights, the sanctity of the environment, tolerance and world peace. I am not saying we don't. All sorts of people are talking about peace and the environment. but I think we need to comeu p with a way to separate ourselves as a religion from the violence and ignorance of the Christian Right and its agendas.

It is so upsetting that all the middle of the road Muslims are being marginalized. what is the war on terror from a Muslim perspective? It is an attack on sovreign nation states to protect the life styles of people in the first world dedicated to maintaining a rate of consumption that is destroying the planet. What are Muslims supposed to do? Did Afghanistan or Iraq do anything to provoke the United States? Are Muslims supposed to just roll over and hand over everything to the United States to distribute to Europe and North America? Asking Muslims not to defend themselves is insane. Portraying the global wars for oil as anything else misrepresents the truth.

Muslims need to separate the religious issues involved in the current global conflict from the secular issues. Religious issues include religious freedom, freedom of expression, inetreligious dialogue and the peaceful coexistence of all faiths. Secular issues include the right to self-defense, human rights, international law, nuclear disarmament, the environmental crisis.

Muslims need a religious response to the global crisis that shows leadership to the global community, as well as a response to the War on Terror that provides a peaceful resolution of global conflict.

Legalizing polygamy

Conservatives have now banned gay marraige. Miscegenation, or the marraige between people of different races, was banned at some point as well. People argue that marraige should be reserved for people of opposite sexes, a Christian model that honors heterosexuality, conjugal reproduction through heterosexual sex, and the concept of marraige that traditionally has been maintained in Western Christian society. This model is very white and very European. Polygamy, as well as polyandry, most notably practiced in Tibet, bothj have been standard forms of conjugal union in other societies than White European society. Polyandry, for example, was practiced in Tibet because the husbands were traders and since the salt trade required men to travel out of the Himalayan mountains, one husband would remain at home while the other went off to trade with non-Tibetan people in the lower altitudes. Polygamy, in Islam, was practiced in Muslim society from the start. the Qur'an dictates that a man may hvae four wives as long as he treats them equally. The assumption is that the wives will know each other and cooperate. Prophet Muhammad (Peace be upon him and the blessings of God) had nine wives at one point, many of hwom were widows from the various wars being fought to establish the early Ummah. He also married a divorced woman, a blessing that has preserved the sanctity of divorce over the history of Islam.
Legalizing gay marraige is not enough. Why should there be a limited change, a change that actually creates a parody of legitimacy for an interest group, an imitation of heterosexual unions that are often critiqued and rejected by Queer people already? It actually makes far more sense to legalize unconventional marraiges generally, including polygamy, but also polyandry.
In this current climate of political change, we need to reestablish our basic civil rights to the fullest extent possible. Religious freedom should include the right to marry as we please. The reestablishment of the Bill of Rights would be in every way secured by a new piece of legislation that established polygamy, in particular, as a socially sanctioned form of marraige. Our First Amendment rights should not be infringed upon merely because of Christian standards that do not accomodate cultural conditions of much of the planet, not to mention the United States. Polygamy ought to be legalized, and stand with Gay marraige as a testament to the freedom and human rights that all people cherish.

What do racism and sexism prehend?

What do racism and sexism prehend? Potentially, they are actual entities that as thoughts prehend the realization of greater width in the lives of people of color and women. In the consciousness of human beings rascism and sexism prehend the people who live lives that collectively constitute the actual entities of inclusive and feminist, diverse and humanist society. The post-modern world, and its emphasis on making globalization and corporate capitalism livable for Third World people and women is a world where racism and sexism are being unraveled. It doesn't make any sense though that suffering and oppression are a necessary part of God's care for the world. The existence of evil and suffering cannot be explained as a necessary prehension of good, and if it is explained that way, it should have a much greater elaboration by process theologians.

When I am drifting

I never feel alone, either moving slow and isolated
my limbs stuck to the ground and my body motionless,
or traveling by thought and dream across the psychic oceans,
across the miles of human experience and emotion.
Even when You have removed Yourself back into the inaccessible realms
of heaven and I am left running from the internal dismebodied hells
Your presence still encompasses everything I know in my experience
holding identity, perspective, action, in Divine Omniscience.
Draw closer to me again so I can speak to you and hold my heart
in a new way. My love for you has become a mist that blows apart.

Forgiveness

In the Lord's prayer the believer asks for God to forgive the believer as the believer forgives. Is this hierarchical? Does this create a ladder of authority where the more forgiving people have less power in the world and more power in the eyes of God? Is there a feminist ethic where there is a consciousness of abundance that grounds an understanding of the universe where as you give you are blessed with increase? Love is like a penny if you give it away you end up having more?

I keep looking at the concept of physics and contrasting it with the concept that God has left creation and removed Godself into a remote place while remaining closer to us than our jugular vein. (Qur'an) This, I think now, does not mean God is located in closer proximity to our aorta. I think it is a reference to a reality of dimensional space where there creation is like a more coarse layer of reality that exists over the heavens like a veil. Within this veil, somehow, several dimensions removed, is God.

From that location, transcending time and three-dimensional space, God can see all things infintely more clearly than we can. In a vast and comprehensive plan for the good and wonderful actualization of creation, God has ordained that we receive mercy by being mercy, that we are cared for by being caring, that we are forgiven to the degree that we forgive, that our absolution from God depends on the degree to which we focus on the perfection of God's wisdom and grace and the limitations of our own and others understanding of life and subsequent limited ability to make perfect choices at all times.

Is that forgiveness that we extend to others a way to increase our closeness to God? Does letting go of anger and resentment somehow make us loosen our grip on the world that we can perceive and move naturally toward whatever reality contains God more fully? Does anger represent an alienation from the realm of God? IS it an emotion that makes us naturally seperate from the heavenly realms and from God? Does forgiveness represent a dimensional state that is higher than anger to the same degree that you cannot sculpt a one-dimensional statue, can we not be as close to God is we feel resentment about anything that we can perceive in this life? Is the act of forgiving a step that we take on faith that moves us closer to God the way gravity pulls on the earth's atmosphere?

Does the economy of forgiveness function in this world? If so, how does it work with racism, sexism, and classism and the work for the transformation of human society?

Fixed and static

So far I have gone from the Christianity to Buddhism to Process Thought to Sufi Poetry. I ought to include the female imaginary.

For thousands of years women were denied education. Women were forced to serve men without any outlet, any life or purpose of their own. There were a few random people who broke off into monasticism and lives of asceticism that were outside the boundaries set by marraige and family and society. Generally, however men's perceptions of the world defined life for most people.

To talk about racism, and the economic models of patriarchy where women in general were possessions of men, and belonged to men not to themselves, or to talk about God, for example the concepts we use for sin where a godly life is like a video game where we gather treasure and kill monsters to gain access to higher levels where we can save the world or free the princess, we use a mind state and a patriarchal language system. Language automatically accomodates the linear progress model where we dominate and own and then put behind us our gains and advances.

Process thought has the possibility of helping us access a model of seeing the world that is less linear because it is less a theory of substance and essence and more a theory based on the constant shifting dialectic between different actual entities. Concepts like race, gender, and time all have a relationship where there is movement and a lack of fixed and static existence.

Love for the sake of Allah

Your presence in this life reminds me of the Mercy and Love of the Ruler of the next life.
The nature of our light is an image of that Light.
Joy, happiness, peace, and victory all become more real to me as you live.

process terminology

"Appetition is at once the conceptual valuation of an immediate physical feeling combined with the urge toward realization of the datum conceptually prehended." (Whitehead) I have noticed that when my son needs to eat if I eat he will often just pick at his food or entirely ignore it. This noticing is the appetition of his current distress with the vagueness of my love for him and the suffering he will experience as this concresces in his experience of his life later as he matures as well as the desire in me for his health and well being and for harmony and peace in his everyday life.

It is the actual event of suffering in the world that I keep returning to in my relationship to people's thinking. As I said before, Whitehead's philsophy of organism does not adequately address suffering for me. It has a natural positive tendency that does not transform or alchemize the oppression of life.

Eating and appetition have nothing directly to do with eachother. That is not just a problem limited to the philosophy of organism or the language of process thought, but a confusion that extends out into every form of thought. Like the difference between limbs that evolve in a direct descent or in disconnected ways- "The wing is a classic example of convergent evolution in action" (Wikipedia)- for example, in birds and bats.

Historical Consciousness

Whitehead says, "The thinker is the final end whereby there is the thought." In other words, as Karl Marx states, "Consciousness does not determine life but life consciousness." Being able to articulate the historical circumstances of being a white woman in relationship to the racial karma and consciousness of white people over the course of history is a day to day process where life and action determine the thoughts and experiences that determine the person. You can't think your way into better thinking but you can live your way into better thinking. The person then is the actions that create the thoughts that constitute the person. The way each person thinks about issues like race class and gender is a result of how they think about their life.

The evil of unpaid labor

Does the philosophy of organism have a way to conceptualize and articulate the evil of the enslavement of black africans on the North American continent? "The novel fact may throw back inhibit and delay. But the advance, when it does arrive, will be richer in content, more fully conditioned, and more stable." (Process and Reality, 223) Is the evil of the unrelenting suffering of slavery an actual occasion which is a prehension of the enlightenment of the universe? Is human experience itself as it has progressed from Neanderthal Man to now a series of actual occasions that will concresce and lead to the Age of Aquarius and the Amihtaba Buddha? You have to think that the deliberate breeding out of all white people would be God's plan- the tender care that God has for all creation would result in the transcendence of the evil of slavery, or the subjugation of women, with an all black society of Amazons.

Whitehead's philsophy seems to lack an adequate emphasis on suffering. His concepts do not encompass evil, sin, and human suffering much. The fact that he is a white man and at the top of the human food chain shapes his entire conceptual structure. For Whitehead's philosopy to work for me as a feminist I need to work out a theory of suffering more clearly that uses process thought.

This became clear following a look at Process and Reality to see how the horror of four hundred years of unpaid labor could be thought of in process terms.

Potentially, the answer is that the actual event of slavery is a negative prehension of the human freedom the will conscresce from the appetition for harmony. (Assuming God's nature really is tender care and patience.)

after the wandering in the desert

During the exile in the desert the Israelites clothes and shoes never wore out. Pentateuch. I just sold my religion library and that was one of the last things I read. Jungian theory describes how synchronicity can explain every apparent coincidence. Some people say you can find scientific explanations like the fact that the manna in the desert could be explained by bugs that emit a bread like substance that live on rocks in the desert of the Sinai peninsula. Rocks actually can be hit with sticks to this day there and gush water. What happens to the people who are stealing and lying and grabbing everything for themselves. Do they actually get ahead of the rest of the people who don't? God's existence contradicts the injustice of the world that we see. Hell (Dhammapada) could provide a solution to the fact that evil exists. Or you could say this all exists for no reason, and so people are all blessed just by the fact that we exist. Does God just indiscriminately take care of everyone?