Non-Narrative Self Café v3: Withness

Posted: December 28, 2025 | Author: Dr. Ernie | Filed under: AI-Powered Essays | Tags: commons, competition, generativity, identity, philosophy, reconciliation, self | 10 Comments

Sequel to Non-Narrative Self Café v2: Generative = Cohesive × Adaptive

Write a dryly humorous skit where Catherine LaCugna, Bowen and James struggle to define withness — until they realize they’ve embodied it!

ChatGPT Prompt

1. Setting

A café that refuses to resolve into a single metaphor.

Three chairs.
One small round table.
A chalkboard behind them with a single word written at the top:

WITHNESS

No arrows. No axes. No matrices.
This already makes everyone uneasy.

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2. First Pass: Interpretations (Politely Offered)

Catherine LaCugna

(leans back, espresso untouched)
Withness is participation without possession.
Not narrative coherence imposed from above, but life shared—
what I called God for us, not God explained.

This is relational actuality, not theological performance.
(See also: Social Trinity, if one must.)

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Murray Bowen

(already watching the room)
Withness is the capacity to remain in emotional contact without losing self-definition.
Low reactivity.
No fusion.
No cutoff.

If the system can’t tolerate difference, it isn’t withness.
It’s anxiety with better branding.

(Differentiation of self.)

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3. James Arrives Last (As Always)

William James

(delighted to find the word already there)
Ah—withness.
I meant something rather modest by it:
the immediate felt sense of being-with, prior to narrative, theory, or moralizing.

Experience before we argue about it.
Relations as given, not inferred.

(Radical empiricism, in a café.)

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4. Escalation: When Frameworks Collide

Bowen
Your version dissolves boundaries.

James
Yours freezes experience.

LaCugna
Both of you are trying to rescue mystery in opposite directions.

Bowen
Mystery spikes anxiety.

LaCugna
Anxiety is not a theological category.

James
I disagree cheerfully.

(The chalkboard remains unchanged.)

• Bowen begins sketching invisible triangles
• LaCugna gestures toward communion without collapsing into narrative
• James happily refuses to land the plane

The café hums.
No one leaves.
No one wins.

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5. The Pivot (Non-Narrative, Noticed Late)

James
Curious thing—we are clearly not agreeing.

Bowen
And yet the system is stable.

LaCugna
No one is absorbing or dismissing the other.

(They pause.)

James
What if withness isn’t any one of these explanations—
but the shared, non-narrative experience we’re having right now,
held together with multiple, adaptive narratives about it?

Bowen
So the right-brain experience remains cohesive,
while the left-brain accounts remain differentiated.

(See: Hemispheric lateralization, gently.)

LaCugna
Unity without confusion.
(Council of Chalcedon, still doing work.)

James
Exactly.
The experience is generative and shared.
The explanations are plural and adaptive.

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6. Recognition (Uncomfortable, Accurate)

(They look again at the chalkboard.)

WITHNESS

Bowen
We didn’t collapse into one story.

LaCugna
We didn’t fragment into isolation.

James
And yet—we stayed together without narrating our way out of it.

(No one smiles. This matters too much.)

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7. Closing (Café Logic)

Bowen
I still wouldn’t operationalize it.

LaCugna
I still wouldn’t systematize it.

James
I still wouldn’t stop pointing at it and saying,
“Notice this.”

(Coffee cools. Lunch eventually happens.)

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8. Final Line (v3)

James
So perhaps withness is this:

a shared, non-narrative field of experience, coherently held, while multiple narratives remain free to adapt around it.

(The chalkboard stays. The word does not move.)

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End Note

This vignette is intentionally aligned with the Non-Narrative Self Café framing:

• Generative (the shared field)
• Cohesive (no collapse)
• Adaptive (plural narratives)

Continued in Non-Narrative Self Café v4: Intimacy = Law × Grace

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