Reading A Process Model – a 5-week Audio Course

A Process Model is Eugene Gendlin’s great work of philosophy. He created it by applying his “thinking at the edge” process to his own philosophical system. It is about time, space, behavior, feelings, perception, language, and the place of humans in the universe… and that is only the beginning!

A Process Model is notoriously hard to read. The first line is: “Body and environment are one, but of course only in certain respects.” Yet many people study it, in study groups and in partnerships, because once we can penetrate its odd use of concepts and language, it is a truly paradigm-shifting work on a grand scale. Reading A Process Model is not an intellectual experience, but a visceral one. Our whole feeling about what is to be a participatory member of an embedded interactive world can transform into a more hopeful, more integrated experience.

A Process Model is a book that both demonstrates and creates concepts for a whole different kind of thinking, a kind of thinking where there is development and emergence of what was not yet formed into conceptual structure, but at the same time we do not lose the capacity to accurately employ existing conceptual structure. These two ways of thinking are different, and being able to have both, and move between them, gives us much more than either one alone.

Gene Gendlin says: “A Process Model is a new ground, a deeper beginning than the usual internal/external split, which leaves us floating in an unreal space and as mere ‘constructed’ inventions.”

In this five-week course Gene and Ann guided the group in reading and discussing selections from A Process Model. The intention is to support you in reading and thinking from the whole book after the course is over. Included are “Guidelines for Reading Partnerships” to support you in reading with a friend.