Process in the Symbolic Re-Creation of the World
How ritual symbolically remakes the world — process thought applied to practice.
A 1992 academic paper arguing that two very different systems are describing the same thing. On one side, the Tibetan developing phase — bskyed-rim, the symbolic re-creation of the world — as presented by H. V. Guenther, an iterative feedback process between inner and outer world. On the other, Whitehead's philosophy of organism, in which an actual entity concresces by growing itself together out of the feelings it harvests from its world. Sam's thesis is that the developing phase is concrescence, and the fulfilling phase is its satisfaction.
He works the correspondence in detail. How an entity becomes is derived from the system taken as a whole; what it becomes is set by the world-context it arises in and by the eternal objects it draws from the infinite potential in that whole. The Tibetan distinction between inner world and outer maps onto the harmony and intensity of feeling in an entity's satisfaction and the felt solidarity of the world within that concrescence. The key term he identifies is lha, deiform energy, which he reads as a kind of eternal object prehended in a particular way — quoting sGam-po-pa on restoring radiance to mentation through the felt image of it as deiform energy, and Klong-chen rab-'byams-pa on any deiform energy being one's own mentation, both of which he takes as isomorphic to Whitehead's account.
Sam is clear about why the mapping is worth doing: each system supplies what the other lacks. Whitehead offers a public language for process, rational and potentially adequate — but says only that transformative experience should occur, with no method for putting the experiencer at the centre of it. The Tibetan version is embedded in a technique for undergoing the process rather than merely thinking about it. As a working magician he notes that this reading validates something he has observed in practice: after building a deity form in the mind with real intensity and then dismissing it, magicians typically experience a burst of synchronicity, phenomena harmonious with the invoked form arriving in vivid attention. He gives the example of invoking Jupiter under a Qabalistic rubric associating it with the number four, and then finding fours everywhere — and finds in Guenther's account of appreciative discernment as the system's resonance with itself an explanation of why that happens.
The second half traces the recursive triadic structure through an actual visualisation. He aligns the three in-depth appraisals with the three phases of concrescence — the perishing of the previous entity and conceptual origination, the physical origination in which the entity prehends its whole world, and the integration into satisfaction — and then shows the same triad nesting at every level: preparation, tuning-in, and remaining tuned-in on emergence; and within the visualisation itself, the terracing of the fundamental forces up from a dark blue triangle, the erection of the palace and throne, and the activation of the deiform energy. Each stage transmutes some aspect of ordinary separateness into interconnection: the elements as a complete minimum set reflecting Being's wholism, the palace symbolising the whole of social and worldly activity under the Dharma-way, the throne recapitulating how the being-to-become comes into being. He notes in passing that these three phases are also van Gennep's separation, transition and reincorporation. What the Tibetans have built, he concludes, is a technique for bringing the entire experienced world into efficacious relationship with the invoked form — a key whose effect depends on which deity is invoked, but whose process is independent of that choice.
Originally published at samwebstermage.com →