​The Cork and the Ocean
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​Ordinary waking consciousness is like a cork floating on a very deep ocean of experience.  Our own experience, moment by moment, is not the cork alone but also the ocean, says Whitehead.  The totality of our experience is the past actual world, indeed the entire universe, as unconsciously present in each moment, beneath the surface of consciousness. 

One way that we make contact with this ocean is through dreams.  It's not the only way, but it's one way.  Another is through art.  And still another is through love.  Always we are on a quest for wholeness, for an integration of our conscious lives with the deeper depths.  Mystics and artists, poets and priests, hills and rivers, trees and stars -- all can be our teachers.  They can help us make contact with what the jazz pianist, Tigran Hamasyan, calls the dreamlike inner world which blends lines between historical and imaginative reality and which can help guide us, if we are open, to lives of love and kindness.  Hamasyan speaks of this dreamlike inner world as a place of divine presence.

The process theologian Sheri Kling agrees.  With help from Whitehead's philosophy, she adds that God is a cosmic lure toward wholeness, inner and outer, and that our response to it can help heal a broken world. ​  In A Process Spirituality: Christian and Transreligious Sources for Transformation, offers practical tips for constructive dream-work and for social transformation aimed aimed at helping build communities that are creative, compassionate, inclusive, diverse, participatory, humane to animals, and good for the earth - with no one left behind.  She helps show that the great compassion, the cosmic lure, the divine presence is within us, outside us, and, if we are open, between us.

- Jay McDaniel

A Dreamlike Inner World

poetry, Christian and pre-Christian Armenian folk stories and legends,  astrology,
geometry, ancient Armenian design, rock carvings and cinematography. for example.
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"The artist lives in a dreamlike inner world which is as realistic as the physical one. The artist lives in the world where the moment of the unconscious creation is the way to feel conscious, from which poems and melodies and stories arise, inspired by the divine mystery.   Unutterable seconds of longing, subliminal realization, and mostly joy fill the body as a work of art, a poem, or a melody is being born into this world for no apparent reason, but only for the humanity to discover what is invisible: the divine mystery."

- Tigran Hamyasan

"From a Jungian perspective, the “Unspeakable” primordial mystery at the base of all life is encounterable through the god-image in the psyche he called the Archetypal Self. And that Self works toward our wholeness as it draws us on a path of individuation in which we are given opportunities to integrate shadow material and novel possibilities by holding the tension between the opposing forces within us until our transcendent function kicks in, offering us something creatively transforming. This can often be experienced as a flow of grace."

​- Sheri Kling

Composed and produced by Tigran Haasyan, his new album The Call Within, is an epic journey into the invisible inner world of the artist who despite having a physical body is living in a dreamlike inner world which is as realistic as the physical one. The artist lives in the world where the moment of the unconscious creation is the way to feel conscious.

​As the artist states, “Unutterable seconds of longing, subliminal realisation, and mostly joy fill the body as a work of art, a poem, or a melody is being born into this world for no apparent reason, but only for the humanity to discover what is invisible: the divine mystery.”

The Call Within also explores Tigran’s inspiration for maps from different time periods in history. He explores poetry, Christian and pre-Christian Armenian folk stories and legends, as well as astrology, geometry, ancient Armenian design, rock carvings and cinematography. The album blends the lines between historic reality and the imaginary world."

-- Tigram Hamasyan Website

Dreamlike Inner World
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Whiteheadianly Understood
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Sheri Kling on Whitehead and Jung
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From a Whiteheadian perspective, we can understand God to be both near to us and actively involved in our wholeness because for each one of us, God is present to us, internal to us, in every moment of our existence, and offers us the creative possibilities that can move us out of our painful pasts into transformed futures. I believe that dream work is one practice we can use to discern those possibilities.

This is true no matter our place of birth, no matter our current or past circumstances, no matter if we believe a certain doctrine or not, no matter our gender, no matter the color of our skin or the content of our bank accounts. It is true for every one of us because this is how the world itself is continuously created. And the possibilities offered by God are always relevant for that moment. God offers us God’s self and God’s vision for our best outcome in every moment. God and God’s possibilities for our wholeness are as near to us as our next breath.

​- Sheri Kling, in Whitehead, Jung, and Psychospiritual Wholeness, author of A Process Spirituality: Christian and Transreligious Resources for Transformation