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.