*Harbert Rice* # Progressive Summary Compares Gendlin's process model (see [[A Process Model]]) with Quaker practice. Gendlin had an experiential concept of the Implicit, and the Quakers organise themselves around the "Light Within". By studying the Quakers, we can understand how to bring the Implicit into a group setting. In turn, Gendlin offers a contemporary language to describe Quaker practices, which often still use 17th century descriptions. Quakers create a "gathering circle" in which change and transformations can take place. # Definitions "birthright" Quaker - someone who was born a Quaker "convinced" Quaker - someone who becomes a Quaker later in life # Chapter Notes ## Quaker Practice Led by George Fox, early Quakers called themselves Friends of the Truth and set out to practice what they called Finding the Light. Gendlin was inspired by sitting in on a meeting for worship at a Friend's meeting at Pendle Hill. He eventually developed this into a process of arriving at a felt sense which he called Focusing. "Focusing arises from within a deep tradition that Quakers preserve for the world." - https://www.friendsjournal.org/2003005/ [Ambler 2013 - The Quaker Way: A Rediscovery](zotero://select/items/1_YV7G8BRC) --- The Quakers try to get to a place beyond words. They seek an opening. And they speak from that space of opening. Their words find resonance with their listeners, who may feel it in their bodies. Then comes a leading which informs them how to move things forward. Clearness Committees are formed to help them test the leading with other members. If no clearness is reached, the member may be asked to give further thought (seasoning) to the proposed actions. Quakers are unique in Western religious groups in not requiring or advocating a set of beliefs. Their practice points to how to get to an experience, not the content of it. They often see words as a hindrance. The Light is the only guide (a seeing more deeply into your life and what ways may lay before you.) What you take away from meetings are testimonies - "the accumulated witnessing of individual Quakers and meetings, an accumulated history of living by example." > The testimonies are not beliefs, but a call to live in harmony with your experience. The four traditional testimonies are - Equality, Simplicity, Honesty and Peace. Equality - To treat each other and all persons the same. - Quakers in England did not doff their hats or bow to nobility. - In the US, they helped abolish slavery. - They were in the vanguard of the 1960s Civil Rights Movement in the south. Simplicity - Attending to your needs in and with a simple lifestyle so that you can attend to the needs of others. Honesty - Speaking the truth at all times. - They refused to take a Bible oath in court proceedings, because they insisted that they spoke the truth at all times. - Quaker merchants set a fair and fixed price. Peace - No inward and outward violence. - They have been against wars since their beginnings in England. > What early Quakers learned and later Quakers have affirmed is that in sitting and waiting, their needs and the needs of the world will be met. > So, what Fox discovered ... is that you can make contact with the deep reality of your life, and that it is responsive to your need and the need of the world. --- "Convinced" Quakers are not familiar with how silent meetings and deep listening work, especially those drawn to become Quakers out of a commitment to social activism. Rex Ambler went back to George Fox's writings to recover the essence of silent meetings. He boiled it down to 4 steps: 1. Mind the Light 2. Open your heart to the Truth 3. Wait in the Light 4. Submit to the Truth He turned these steps into a meditation, which he called an "experiment with light". A psychotherapist friend told him that his meditation was similar to Gendlin's six-step Focusing process. He found that Gendlin's process helped get past the cacophany of thoughts in order to reach a stillness in which they can focus on a single concern, what Quakers call "centering down". He combined his Quaker Light Meditation with Gendlin's 6-step Focusing process into this 6-step Experiment with Light: 1. **Relax the body and mind.** Let yourself become wholly receptive. 2. **Let the real concerns of your life emerge.** Ask yourself, "What is really going on in my life?", but do not try to answer the question. 3. **Focus on one issue that gives unease**, and try to get a felt sense of it as a whole. 4. **Ask "why is it like that?"** and let the answer come to you. 5. When the answer comes through, **welcome it**. Trust in the light. 6. After accepting the truth of this, **notice what shifts inside you**. Accepting truth about your self is like making peace. He first presented this to a General Meeting of Friends in England in 1996. He taught it to 120 members as a guided meditation. The response was overwhelmingly positive, and many found it transformative. He spent the next 3 years traveling in the UK and Europe, teaching the practice and forming Light Groups. The practice took about 40 minutes. Afterwards, members would journal and share their experiences. Light Groups led to a rekindling of the spirit among UK Quaker meetings. There were about 60 Light Groups by 2003. In 2018, there were about 100 Light Groups, most of them in the UK. Sequence of language cues that provide the runway: 1. Relax body and mind. What wants my awareness? 2. What is going on in my life? Sense what comes. 3. Focus on one concern. What is the feeling quality of the felt sense? 4. Why is it like that? Go back and forth between the quality word and the felt sense. Is that right? 5. Welcome the truth. What does it need? What does it want me to know? 6. Consider how you need to act. Welcome what comes next. Quaker idea of opening is about getting beyond words. In Gendlin's terms, it is a new sense of the whole of our life. (Perhaps one way to understand this is that it's like Plum Village's touching the ultimate, and not in the historic dimension.) Gendlin's Direct Referent is similar to a leading. It's a sense of a direction, a right one. It doesn't have a description yet. It is still implicit and unfolded. ### Holding and Letting Summary of how Quaker practice and Focusing works: > We can change our lives when we hold a situation and let a felt sense form in a new space, a new opening. Holding and letting is our interacting with our implying. Once a felt sense has formed, we can "work out" what to say or do to further carry our lives forward. Holding and letting is one activity, one process. We hold our situation, and let change come as a felt sense forms. We get beyond the words that we have used that failed to carry us forward. [This seems very much like a process of allowing the right hemisphere to once again govern and steer.] Holding means not trying to move forward by speaking words, or acting or even feeling the way we think we "should" act and feel. > Once a felt sense has formed we can speak and act in a new way. All the contexts in our lives have *crossed*, and we have a new reference, a new center. The felt sense is a focused way forward, a new way because we now have a reference "outside" our old situation. ^6f8ae2 > Life itself is our teacher! When we form a felt sense out of our on-going implying, we touch life itself. This felt experiencing does not come from our "wandering mind", rather it comes in and from the "heart". Our living is an embodied process. [Rice 2008 - Language Process Notes](zotero://select/items/1_ZTKXRV2U) ## 4. Underlying Social Process Quakers view all members of a meeting as priests. That's why they sit in a circle. They reject the idea of a single priest standing in front of a congregation. They understood that we need others to mirror back how they see us and affirm us. Gendlin's symbol space - the human environment that we create with our use of language. Symbol space embeds an earlier space called "behaviour space" that we share with animals. [Compare Jon Young's 1st creation, 2nd creation, etc] Symbolic acts such as absentee voting allow us to make changes in our life situation without being physically present. [Can Bergson's ideas of memory and time give some insight into what is meant by "implying"? Implying is the background to the words we use, just as Bergson's experience of time is the background to clock time.] When we express ourselves, we interact with our environment. In a meeting, we interact with everyone in our circle. In Quaker meetings, some members arrive early and enter into a deep and accepting silence. This helps those arriving to "center down". Thomas Kelly calls this process "kindling": > There must be some kindled hearts when the meeting begins. In them, and from them, begins the work of worship. The silent devotion of a few persons, silently deep in active adoration, is needed to kindle the rest, to help those who enter the service with tangled, harried, distraught thoughts to be melted, quieted and released and made pliant, ready for the work of God. After the first 15 to 20 minutes, the quality of the silence deepens. The silence offers a sense of flow. > Quakers value plain speaking. Such speaking often is humble, brief, and sincere and does not contain rhetorical flourishes. When two or three speakers continue with a theme, their speaking may carry the meeting to a climax until the meeting is ended. Often, the flow of a meeting encounters a check, or series of checks, when speakers change the course of speaking by raising different concerns, or some may lack depth in their speaking. > Members treat one another with equality and honesty, affirming and respecting who they are and what they contribute to meeting. This means they value the contribution of the person who gets the mail, or looks after the library as much as they value the person who clerks the meeting. Members who are seen to have gifts in spiritual discernment are known as "weighty Friends". ## 5. Writing a Minute ### Quaker approach to decision-making Here's how Edward Burrough described the Quaker approach to decision-making in a 1662 pamphlet: >... Being orderly come together, not to spend time with needless, unnecessary and fruitless discourses, but to proceed in the wisdom of God… to hear and consider… not in the way of the world, as a worldly assembly of men, by hot contest, by seeking to outspeak and over-reach one another in discourse, as if it were controversy between party and party of men, or two sides violently striving for dominion, in the way of carrying some worldly interest for self-advantage; not deciding affairs by the greater vote, or the number of men, as the world, who have not the wisdom and power of God… But in the wisdom, love and fellowship of God, in gravity, patience, meekness, in unity and concord, submitting one to another in lowliness of heart, and in the holy spirit of truth and righteousness, all things to be carried on; by hearing and determining every matter coming before you in love, coolness, gentleness and dear unity. I say, as only one party, all for the truth of Christ… to determine of things by mutual accord, in assenting together as the one man in the spirit of truth and equity, and by the authority thereof. Edward Burrough ### Sense of a meeting > … a process of reasoning in which people search for a satisfactory decision… Through consensus we decide it; through a sense of the meeting we turn it over, allowing it to be decided. ‘Reaching a consensus is a secular process’, says a Friend. ‘In a sense of the meeting, God gets a voice.’ > Members bring the same attitude and openness that they bring to a meeting for worship. This reminds me of Jon Young's Keeper and the notion of Surrender. How can we let go of our ego and make room for something else to decide. ### Kindling > Many meetings hold their monthly business meeting in the afternoon after a meeting for worship in the morning. As in the morning meeting a few members will come early and begin the process of settling the silence, “kindling” the meeting in Kelly’s phrase. As others follow, the meeting will take 15 or 20 minutes to “center down” before the clerk sets out the agenda. ### Prepare minds, not opinions > The same discipline that guides the morning meeting makes the afternoon meeting for business practicable. The standing advice is to prepare minds not opinions. Members are asked to pause in silence between contributions, to listen attentively, to speak to the meeting as a whole, to speak briefly and to the point, and to avoid speaking in a way that attempts to manipulate others. Further, since the meeting is under the guidance of the Clerk, members are asked to defer to the Clerk and to keep silent while the clerk writes a minute. ### Season > Finally members are asked to unite on the minute – not on a vote. If the meeting cannot unite on the minute, then members are asked to defer (“season”) the issue to another meeting. ### Role of the Clerk Douglas Steere, a Quaker writer, describes the qualities of a clerk: > He or she is a good listener, has a clear mind that can handle issues, has the gift of preparing a written minute that can succinctly sum up the sense of the meeting, and is one who has faith in the presuppositions: … faith in the presence of a Guide; faith in the deep revelatory genius of such a meeting to arrive at a decision that may break new ground and may in fresh ways be in keeping with the Society of Friends’ deepest testimonies; and faith in each of those present being potentially the vehicle of the fresh resolving insight. With all of this, a good clerk is a person who refuses to be hurried and can weary out dissension with a patience borne of the confidence that there is a way through, although the group may have to return again and again to the issue before clearness comes and a proper decision is reached. The clerk must use judgment to get a sense of the meeting. Michael Sheeran, a Jesuit scholar, studied Quaker decision-making in the 1960s. He describes what happened at a business meeting of the American Friends Service Committee (AFSC): > In 1948, there were 750,000 refugees on the Gaza Strip; the new state of Israel had just been established. The UN asked AFSC to take responsibility for feeding, housing, etc. At the meeting of the AFSC Board of Directors, all speakers said the work needed doing, but all agreed it was just too big for the Service Committee. They counseled that we should say no, with regrets. Then the chairman called for a period of silence, prayer, and meditation. Ten or fifteen minutes went by in which no one spoke. The chairman opened the discussion once again. The view around the table completely changed: ‘Of course, we have to do it.’ There was complete unity. ## 10 - The Future of Quaker Practice > Inherent in Gendlin’s work on the Implicit is an evolution of our human awareness of our own living process. If we look at Gendlin’s successive environments (spaces), we see that behavioral space is embedded in symbol space (the environment that we create with our use of language), and symbol space is embedded in implicit space, the environment that we create when we interact with our implying. Traversing this succession of spaces leads us to ever more intricate patterns of living and ever more awareness of our own living process. As Gendlin suggests, letting a felt sense form in implicit space is a natural process. The difference for us now is that we knowingly seek to let a felt sense form, and seek to live, however fleetingly in implicit space. In effect, we return again to Quaker roots – as “seekers of the truth”. Seekers now with a further modern understanding that the truth we seek is the change in our implying that will carry our living forward and help to carry our fellow seekers forward. > Quaker terms largely have remained fixed. Gendlin’s terms, as he tirelessly pointed out, are open. They can be thought about further, and extended or changed. They are not fixed. At some point in time someone will extend or find better terms and concepts to describe our living process. # References [Ambler 2014 - What is Experiment with Light?](zotero://select/items/1_ICW4ID6P)