Taking up Whitehead’s Invitation to Explore Our Immediate Experience | Bill Gayner
Event Type:
- Discussion, Presentation
- (Online)
Program:
- Process Explorations
Theme:
- Building Alternative Futures
Featuring:
- Bill Gayner and Greg Walkerden
Organizers:
- Center for Process Studies
Presented by: Bill Gayner
Prepared by: Greg Walkerden and Bill Gayner
Alfred North Whitehead’s fallacy of misplaced concreteness—conflating experience and the terms and theories used to describe it (mistaking the map for the territory)—is a reminder of how vital it is that we are attentive to our own and others’ lived, embodied experiencing. Abstractions serve us when they orient us and catalyze new approaches. But they can also distract us from intricacies and complexities that we live within and experience, but which vastly exceed our conceptual models.
Whitehead makes experientially bold demands on us. He asks us to understand ourselves in unfamiliar ways, because our familiar ways have us as objects in a world, impinged upon and impinging upon, separate and engaged; at its crudest, congealed common sense is Newtonian mechanics combined with Cartesian mind/body dualism. Whitehead asks us to grasp in our being some very different actualities: profound interdependence, the wide and deep roots of everything that occurs, and the processual nature of reality. Simple ordinary phenomena like feeling uncomfortable with something we have written—recognizing it is not saying what we mean—point us towards the felt layer of understanding that underpins our experiencing and enables us to heed the concrete particularity of each of our experiences.
Eugene Gendlin’s explications of this kind of phenomena—which Whitehead had a seminal impact on—help us move past the fallacy of misplaced concreteness. Heeding felt understanding gives us a disciplined resource for creative, adaptive thought and action. We will explore this experientially in a guided contemplation using as a starting point an excerpt from Whitehead’s chapter on philosophic method in Adventures of Ideas. We will then reflect on and discuss the experience including perhaps how these kinds of micropractices can scale up to support professional sensibilities and reflective learning, providing a platform for ongoing adaptation and innovation, and the light this may shed on Whitehead’s own practice.
Featuring
Bill Gayner
Bill Gayner, BSW, MSW, RSW is a social worker/psychotherapist in downtown Toronto, Canada. He is exploring orienting mindfulness to a process relational philosophy of the implicit integrating Alfred North Whitehead and Eugene Gendlin with contemporary emotion theory. Bill developed Emotion-Focused Mindfulness Therapy and Touching the Earth, a community-based mindfulness approach. These integrate transformational experiential and emotion-focused processes into meditation, journaling, and how we can explore and reflect on meditation experience together. Bill led the first randomized controlled trial that indicated possible psychological benefits of mindfulness for people living with HIV. His work has won a couple of awards. He is President of the Board of the International Focusing Institute and founding President of Touching the Earth Mindfulness Ontario, a mindfulness practice community for psychotherapists and counsellors. Bill embraces John Cobb Jr.’s complementary transformative pluralism. To his surprise, over the years, he has discovered himself on a mystical Christian-Buddhist path with ancient Greek Dionysian influences.
Greg Walkerden
Greg Walkerden, PhD is Honorary Senior Research Fellow in the School of Communication, Society and Culture at Macquarie University in Sydney. His disciplinary roots are in philosophy, psychology, and environmental management. He designs practices for environmental managers and for felt sense-centred reflective practice, and he has published extensively on both environmental management and reflective practice, with a particular emphasis on climate change adaptation, professional sensibilities, and reflective practice experiments. He worked for 18 years as an environmental manager, using professional practice as a medium for action research, and has taught felt sense-based decision-making to environmental professionals for over 25 years. His work has won a number of awards. Greg has been a Buddhist practitioner and member of the Uniting Church in Australia for 40 years. Greg is co-editor of Practicing Embodied Thinking in Research and Learning (Routledge 2024, Open Acess) and co-author of Reflection for Learning: A Scholarly Practice Guide for Educators (Advance HE 2020, Open Access). See also his web page at Macquarie University.
RSVP for this Event
Free Online Event
Disclaimer: This event is open to the public and will be recorded. If you choose to enable your camera or participate in any discussions, your voice and likeness will be recorded, and may be posted on the Center for Process Studies websites and social media, or included in CPS materials and/or publications for noncommercial purposes. If you do not want your voice or likeness to be shared in any public venues, please send an email to optout@ctr4process.org.
