This continues from the previous post, where Shinzen Young’s model of core mindfulness practices was expanded into a system of classifying what a human bodymind can do. Here the model is deepened following the process-relational insights that are at the core of Shinzen’s system as well as of other (especially Mahayana and Vajrayana) Buddhist systems, and of the philosophies of A. N. Whitehead and, in some respects, of C. S. Peirce, Gilles Deleuze, and other process-relational thinkers. This part is followed by a concluding segment, found here.
Working with Shinzen Young‘s system of mindfulness training, which I’ve described here before, and thinking it through in the process-relational logic I’ve been developing on this blog (and elsewhere), is resulting in a certain re-mix of Shinzen’s ideas, and of Buddhism more generally, with Peirce’s, Whitehead’s, Wilber’s, Deleuze’s, and others’. Here’s a crack at where it’s taking me…
I’ve divided this into three parts due to its length. Part 1 builds on Shinzen’s “5 ways to know yourself as a spiritual being,” which presents five core mindfulness practices, to develop a basic classification of ways in which the human bodymind can know itself and the world. Part 2 deepens the model by pushing beyond traditional dualisms through incorporating what Shinzen calls “flow,” which is analogous to the central insight of process-relational philosophies about the fundamentally processual nature of subjectivity or mentality, objectivity or materiality, and the dynamic and interdependent relationship between the two. Part 3 provides some concluding thoughts and caveats.
… by the record water levels in Lake Champlain following this winter’s snows and this spring’s seemingly endless (and sometimes torrential) rains.
There is usually about 40 feet of beach at the spot pictured above, just down the hill from us, all of it now under water. Average water levels in the lake are around 95 feet above sea level. Flood stage is 100 feet. This year they hit 103.3 ft here in Burlington.
Graham Harman’s note reiterating his position that Whitehead, Latour, Deleuze, Bergson, and Simondon (among others) do not make up a coherent philosophical “lump” — “pack” or “tribe” might be more colorful terms here (if philosophers were cats, how herdable would they be?) — makes me want to clarify my own position on these thinkers.
Levi Bryant has a wonderful post up in response to my announcement of Stengers’s book. If mine was “less appealing” to him, as he puts it, this may not be a bad thing, as it seems to have elicited a shimmering cascade of resonating strings in his thinking. (Perhaps appeal has a devilishly indirect manner of working…)
Bonnitta Roy’s article “A Process Model of Integral Theory” (pdf) in the December 2006 issue of Integral Review is a thought-provoking attempt to advance post-metaphysical integral theory further toward process thought and Dzogchen Buddhism (what better combination?). Continue Reading »
Isabelle Stengers’s Thinking With Whitehead arrived in the mail today. The publication of the English translation of this tome, a long nine years after the French original, is a genuine Event in the world of process-relational philosophy (or whatever you’d like to name the “beatnik brotherhood,” as Harman calls it, of philosophers of immanence and becoming — a brother/sisterhood that Harman asserts does not constitute a counter-current to the hegemonic alliance of philosophies of essence, substance, and onto-theological transcendence, but that Deleuzians and others would like to think does).
The artist of sublime faith (of the pantheistic, immanent kind) versus the artist of sublime cynicism. “Earth is heaven (and purgatory)” versus “Earth is evil.” With catastrophe and Kubrick’s 2001 lurking in the background of both…
Working through the last decade or so of Wilberian integral theory (which I’m doing in preparation for the upcoming group reading of Integral Ecology) is no small challenge.
Ken Wilber’s been an incredibly prolific writer, publishing scores of books over the last 15 years in addition to scattered shorter materials of various kinds, including new forewords and revisions of older works (in his eight-volume Collected Works series), summaries, interviews (including auto-interviews), several hundred pages of manuscript materials from work in progress, and much more. Beyond that, there is a virtual industry of commentary, discussion, critical evaluation, application, and revision of his work by followers and detractors alike — most of which, fortunately, is readily found online.
Incidentally, if there’s a single small book I’d recommend on life from this kind of perspective, it’s Daniel Stern’s Diary of a Baby. Stern was a favorite of Felix Guattari’s. That book can be followed up by the more scholarly The Interpersonal World of the Infant; make sure you read the introduction from the 2000 edition, which updates the 1985 original. Stern’s The Present Moment and Forms of Vitality are in the same vein, and very relevant to a process-relational perspective on the human life.
And while I’m at recommending books on infancy, Alison Gopnik’s Philosophical Baby and Meredith Small’s Our Babies Ourselves are the other ones I’ve been consulting, in those rare moments of spare time.
