Tag Archives: whitehead

Momentum and Reality

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Reality is bound up with the present. This, according to Zen and as re-expressed by Eckhart Tolle – the Power of Now..

The present, now, is the door to reality and focus on the past and future distracts from the intensity of experience.

But…

How does that square with Alfred North Whitehead’s theory of relativity – where reality is a process and certainly not an instant?

It seems to me that the integration of these two concepts through the interpretation of the present – Now – as momentary rather than instantaneous. By this I mean to include the immediate past and the immediate future into a lengthened and extended instant. I think (though I’m never certain when trying to understand Process and Reality) that this is what Whitehead refers to as prehension.

It seems then that consciousness requires some element of time, that which immediately surrounds the instant in which we exist. It is observation that crystallises out the particular reality which we choose. (Bohr, Born, Schrodinger – the Copenhagen interpretation of quantum mechanics). The experience of reality requires the flow of time – to allow the immediate past and future to give context to the instant that is now.

Consciousness can then be described as observation surfing on time, and the fragment of time that surrounds the instant creates the moment in which we exist. Hence – reality as momentum.

Reality as Momentum

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Reality is bound up with the present. This, according to Zen and as re-expressed by Eckhart Tolle – the Power of Now..

The present, now, is the door to reality and focus on the past and future distracts from the intensity of experience.

But…

How does that square with Alfred North Whitehead’s theory of relativity – where reality is a process and certainly not an instant?

It seems to me that the integration of these two concepts through the interpretation of the present – Now – as momentary rather than instantaneous. By this I mean to include the immediate past and the immediate future into a lengthened and extended instant. I think (though I’m never certain when trying to understand Process and Reality) that this is what Whitehead refers to as prehension.

It seems then that consciousness requires some element of time, that which immediately surrounds the instant in which we exist. It is observation that crystallises out the particular reality which we choose. (Bohr, Born, Schrodinger – the Copenhagen interpretation of quantum mechanics). The experience of reality requires the flow of time – to allow the immediate past and future to give context to the instant that is now.

Consciousness can then be described as observation surfing on time, and the fragment of time that surrounds the instant creates the moment in which we exist. Hence – reality as momentum.

Time as a field?

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It appears that the physical world is governed by fields. Mass and energy depend upon them.

Electricity and magnetism, and therefore the cinema, facebook, light, our e-mail traffic and our clean clothes, are underpinned by the electro-magnetic field (James Clerk Maxwell).

Gravity, and therefore mass itself – structure, form, atoms, molecules and things, result from the gravitational field (Newton, Einstein).

Time results in our sense of experience. Without it nothing is. We sense and experience anything and everything NOW (Alfred North Whitehead). It isn’t the past or future – the “late and soon” of Wordsworth’s poem – where we build existence, it is here and now – the present. The experience of NOW is though only possible because of time. I am not a mathematician, but it seems logical to me to think of time as a field which makes possible NOW. In the same way that the gravitational field makes possible MASS, matter.

I am deeply convinced of our joyful and interconnected existence beyond space and time. We are part of “the Word existing beyond time”. I have a sense that we are droplets here, in this material world. We are boundaried as water is within a droplet as opposed to infinitely inter-connected as within an ocean. Boundary brings loneliness (if we let it), but is essential for experience.

Perhaps time is the field within which this transmutation occurs. Gravity has been described as a “field like treacle that sticks down energy as mass”. Is time the equivalent – a field like treacle that allows spirit to be stuck down as experience? As being.

Spirit Levels

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I was in a pub in Edinburgh yesterday. It was packed, shoulder to shoulder. We were all intent on following the British and Irish Lions in their final rugby match against Australia. At the end “we” won via a series of sensational tries.

We were, of course, intent on the television screens around the pub. I was lifted into a space and life shared with that group in that pub as each try was scored and we all cheered. We became something separate – the momentary “we” was new and different from the collection of individuals normally described as we.. I was struck by the sense of one-ness. Looking at the people, rather than the screen – we shared the same rapturous expression – but on each of our individual faces.

This is, I believe, what we are drawn to as the joyful solution to the pain and loneliness of living and dying. We can become something different and shared; living in common and on a different spirit level. As that happens we lose our sense of self, our individuality and our ego, and become something qualitatively different. (See God as emergent property, or epiphenomenon).

Whilst I have, at least to my own satisfaction, proved God. It is a proof that touches my mind rather than my real self. It turns out that rational knowledge of the existence of God is a poor friend with which to confront death and loss. In my 40’s I lived through existential angst, a dark night of the soul. I had been fed since childhood with the comfort of the knowledge of God and my friend and brother, Jesus Christ. I had though been trained as a scientist. Richard Dawkins had been something of a hero (I majored in verebrate evolution at Cambridge) and as we know he preaches that Science somehow disproves God. Who was right – my loving mother or an angry scientist? So, I decided to live in non-belief and confront that question from a premise and experience of an atheist. It turned out for me that atheism is a belief system, with internal logic and no proof beyond the opening statement. I know that now. Atheists open with the axiom – there is no God – and from that premise (and ignoring all awkward facts along the way) go on after some verbal and logical gymnastics to restate it as THERE IS NO GOD. It’s nothing more than a circus trick, and it’s only possible because NO premise can be logically proved or disproved. (Gödel, Heisenberg). Given a premise and some logic rules you can “prove” the premise. Well I can do that from the statement there is God, and to be absolutely frank it’s infinitely more likely. Here…

Let God be that which came before existence.
Time and existence exist.
Therefore God exists.

QED.

(By the way – who wrote those penetrating words in the Anglican service which define God as.. existing beyond time, both source and final purpose. Was that really written in the 16th century?)

So, it has has been a surprise and a relief to see through the ill-logic, one might say intellectual conceit, of materialists; and to move from the lonely existentialism of Sartres to the connected existentialism of Martin Buber. To perceive Whitehead’s rationale of our life in process at the ever moving edge of spiritual present as we crystalise the past out of the future.

But understanding is not the trick. It is in the moments of loss-of-self into the commonwealth of spirit in which there is intimation of immortality. The loss of our-self into the crowd in the pub, the shared smile, the surge of love for wife/mother/brother/friend/child, the rapture of connection with the countryside. Those are tangible glimpses of the next spirit level.

I have recently conceived of the moment of dying as a “fading to joy”, losing one’s identity into God. I now see that a better expression would be “surprised by joy”. Has that been used before?

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Thank you for your response. ✨

The Problem of Evil

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What constitutes evil? In fact does it exist, or is it an absence. The result of separation from common connection? In any case if you believe as I do that unconditional love underlies the world of material and spirit, then evil is a problem. A riddle, wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma (Churchill on Russia).

I have a statement of the problem, but I don’t have an answer. Perhaps one doesn’t exist and this is simply a paradox, something unknowable by definition like the liar paradox (All Cretans are liars, Parmenides), Gödel’s mathematica proof that all things cannot be known or Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle, again all things cannot be known.

So stated, then;

All things are potential until observed. Observation (I would restate this as – witness) crystallises out actual from potential. This is the most tested scientific fact in history, though the implications have not been commonly absorbed. In addition all material is at the same time quantum -bits of matter (when thus crystallised) and wave – continuous. Light can be characterised for instance as photons – discrete particles, and wave with particular amplitude and wavelength. Consider the implication of the famous equation e=mc2. Simply energy and mass are the same thing (except mass is hugely dense form of energy because of the multiplier of the speed of light squared). All matter is energy in wave form.

Einstein linked space and time as spacetime. Whitehead linked matter and time, characterising existence as a process rather than an event. (He arrived at theory of relativity independently of Einstein). In his explanation the past is concrete, the future is potential and it is at the boundary of both – the present – the we experience existence. We, as observers, actively work in experience/existence to form the strand of reality in time from the potential, but working with the memory of the past. In other words – material is always in the past, the present – existence – is immaterial.

This, for me anyway provides the link between spirit and material. We exist as observation engines with the purpose of creating reality in time. The sum of our choices together forms the path that existence takes as it builds.

But to what end? There is a direction of travel and there is travel itself – evolution. We are together creating the future by crystallising it out via our choices. To what end evolution? The start of what we can know appears to be the Big Bang – 14 billion years ago or so. Material has evolved since that point – first through a set of physical states ( from nothing to plasma to atoms) then chemical states (atoms to molecules of increasing complexity) then through biological states (sets of molecules with cell boundaries through plants and animals of increasing complexity) then through social states (organisms living in community of increasing complexity) and now through idea or thought states (ideas of increasing complexity interacting). Pierre Teilhard de Chardin characterised this as a continuous growth of consciousness, and the driving force being love. I buy that, especially since…

the discovery of quantum entanglement ( matter is entangled at it’s deepest structure) shows that there is a deep connection underlying all things. All things are one and we are all connected in a evolutionary journey toward increasing awareness or consciousness. In fact there is intense comfort in the knowledge that the self or ego is in fact a construct of the material world, the past. Somehow we have to be separate to weave existence from potential, but this is only a story – a mirage. We take form via our boundaries, like droplets of water – but our nature is that of water and the boundaries disappear when we fall back to the ocean.

So – for me anyway – all is well, good. Love powers the universe. Everything is connected. The ego in this life is simply a chimera, a construct or story. God is the Word existing beyond time, and we are one with that Word. With death will come reconnection and the loss of loneliness as boundary falls away.

BUT,

what then about Evil. Why evil, why separation if unconditional love underlies all?

That’s my problem….

Materialism reimagined as Spirit

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Michelangelo’s unfinished statues “the prisoners” show human form partly finished and emerging from the original blocks of stone. Apparantly they are unfinished, though what a metaphor… the human form was always there within the raw block of stone. Materialists would see the rock and tell us there was nothing more. But in the imagination of a Michelangelo the form was within. Does that make his David any less real than the stone from which it was carved and from which it emerged?

 

The philosophic tradition from Descartes through Spinoza and Leibniz to Alfred North Whitehead describes the duality of all – material and spirit as different aspects of reality. (To be honest I’m wrestling to understand Whitehead so any help here – a synopsis maybe – would be very welcome).

 

This is as described by Pierre Teilhard de Chardin in his “Phenomenon of Man”. The evolution of material and consciousness hand in hand from the big bang, physical evolution, chemical evolution, biological evolution through to ideas evolution (the noosphere, and yes Dawkins he was first and you simply clothe his ideas in the poverty of the “meme”).

 

And scientific discovery is pointing increasingly to this understanding of existence. Of course materialists have possession of the current paradigm and are managing to suppress these discoveries from the popular media. But paradigms shift, and they do so to reveal a new truth. When that happens will we truly emerge into a common consciousness? Is the emergence of Jung’s collective unconscious to the light of shared understanding what de Chardin means by the “Omega Point”?