News on March 27, 2019 from | Psychedelics Today

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In this special interview, Joe and Kyle sit down with Theologian, John B. Cobb Jr., referred to as the Godfather of American Theology. They recorded with John at the conference they all attended in California, on how exceptional experience can help save the world. They cover a range of topics inspired from Alfred Whitehead’s teachings and the promising applications of Whitehead’s thoughts in the area of ecological civilization and environmental ethics pioneered by John Cobb Jr.

3 Key Points:

1. Process thinking argues that reality consists of processes rather than material objects, and that thinking this way is similar to the teachings of a psychedelic experience. It is hoped for and believed that exceptional experiences can help save the world.


2. Whitehead’s process philosophy argues that there is urgency in coming to see the world as a web of interrelated processes of which we are integral parts, so that all of our choices and actions have consequences for the world around us.


3. Certain curriculum, education systems and Universities are not helping us to see the value of our world. A full systems change is needed and hopefully psychedelics, exceptional experiences and process thinking can help with that.

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Show Notes Process Thought

• Alfred North Whitehead


• The senses heighten connection, but we shouldn’t rely only senses for our experiences


• The label that can we give to the ‘most fundamental relationship’ is any ‘happening’


• What’s happening when we listen to music?
  
  
  
  • We aren’t hearing one tone after another tone, we are hearing the music as a whole piece
  
  
  
  


• Whitehead calls the fundamental relationship of inclusion, a ‘prehension’
  
  
  
  • How one moment leads into another moment
  
  
  • If the world is made up of prehensions, then in any given moment, what is prehended?
  
  
  • The boundary between conscious and unconscious experience is fuzzy.
  
  
  
  


• Whitehead calls the relatedness to the past, physical prehensions. But we also prehend, potentialities. It is being experienced as a potential not as actual.
  
  
  
  • Whitehead thinks this is present in very elementary matters.
  
  
  • Whitehead says that waves of vibration are a very large part of the world we live in
  
  
  
  


• Whitehead believes that without some type of variation from moment to moment, that nothing really happens


• He wrote a lot on relativity, and very little about quantum


• David Bohm
  
  
  
  • He was very process oriented
  
  
  • He wanted to change our language into using words that mean something is ‘happening’ versus using nouns that say that something ‘is’
  
  
  
  


• “If you only have potentiality and too little grounded in actuality, you better be careful. If you don’t have the potentiality, then you live in a deterministic universe” – John

“Does Whitehead relate the potentialities to his ideas about intuition?”

• Intuition can be of both pure potentials and about other people


• A lot of paranormal experiences are not supernatural


• Just because someone has seen something or done something, it doesn’t mean that it’s true. There is plenty of illusion.

Complex Societies

• An important feature of Whitehead is to distinguish complex society


• Panexperientialism is ‘the view that if evolution of humans goes all the way down to subatomic particles, then human ‘experience’ by deduction must have originated at the subatomic level, which implies that not just humans but individual cells, individual molecules, individual atoms, and even individual subatomic particles, such as photons or electrons, incorporate a capacity for ‘feeling’ or degree of subjective inferiority.’


• There might be in-deterministic qualities in individual entities


• From a Whiteheadian point of view, contemporary physics would be almost universally valid if the entire world were made up entirely of physical feelings, feelings of actual occasions, ‘what is’.

“What would be opposed to physical feelings?”

• Conceptual feelings, feelings of potentials


• He thinks there are feelings of potential in every actual occasion


• “The attempt to make standard physics apply to the quantum world are a total failure.” -John


• “The attempt to make standard physics apply to the human experience is the task of the Neuroscientists. They think that the subjective experience has a causal role to play in the world.” -John


• It’s more committed to metaphysics than it is to empirical study

“Do you think what’s going on in the mind, say neurotransmitters or electrical activity firing, that is creating this reality, or the experience, is having an influence on the neurochemistry?”

• John says that the psyche plays a role


• Scientists who are busy engineering genetic change, tell us purpose plays no role in genetic change

“What do you mean by no purpose in genetic change?”

• Purpose cannot have a causal effect in the Cartesian world
  
  
  
  • They say ‘I know that my purposes are completely the result of mechanical relations between my neurons’
  
  
  
  

“Could you elaborate on the definition of actual occasions?”

• The psyche is a consistent series of actual occasions
  
  
  
  • Its what kinds of things are in and of themselves, ‘actual’
  
  
  
  


• It’s in the distinction of things that can be divided up into other entities
  
  
  
  • An actual occasion cannot be divisible into other actual occasions
  
  
  • Like an atom, it is divisible, but dividing it does not keep it from actually existing
  
  
  
  


• For Whitehead, an actual occasion, is the basic unit of actuality
  
  
  
  • Its an alternative to a ‘substance’ way of viewing
  
  
  • When we look at other living beings, animals with brains and such, we assume they have a psychic life
  
  
  • John thinks that plants have some kind of unified experience
  
  
  • Some people have a feeling about a tree, that it’s not just a bunch of cells interacting
  
  
  • “It’s hard for me to think that a stone is an experiencing entity, I think the molecules though are.” – John
  
  
  • “I’m sure that cells are influenced by the emotions of people” -John
  
  
  
  


• Having a particular conceptuality does not define how things are going to map out

“This world view seems very psychedelic.”

• Among quantum physicists, Whitehead’s name is known and appreciated.
  
  
  
  • It may mean that physics as a whole might adopt an organic model than just mechanistic one
  
  
  
  


• The common sense in this is that our knowledge of each other is not just in visual and auditory clues, but people have been told so long that it is

“What else would it be informed by if its not by visual and auditory cues?”

• Just by our immediate experience of each other


• If you go into a room, there is an immediate climate there. You can tell when you walk into a room full of angry people.


• Ivan Illich’s Book on Deschooling Society (Open Forum S)

“What woul