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Whitehead’s Metaphysics as a Cosmological Framework for Transpersonal Psychology

A version of this article was previously published in The Humanistic Psychologist, 47(2), 2019. You can access the original here

Introduction

While it is tempting to eschew metaphysics in our postmodern and poststructuralist milieu, one of the reasons given for the founding of transpersonal psychology was a dissatisfaction with existing “person-centered” psychologies that “ignored placing human beings within a cosmic perspective” (Hartelius et al., 2015, p. 44). Even more significantly, Grof (2015) sharply critiques those scientific approaches that take “leading paradigms for an accurate and definitive description of reality” and whose materialistic explanations of reality cannot account for recent observations in consciousness research.

In the past five decades, various avenues of modern consciousness research have revealed a rich array of “anomalous” phenomena—experiences and observations that have undermined some of the generally accepted assertions of modern psychiatry, psychology, and psychotherapy concerning the nature and mechanisms of the human psyche, the origins of emotional and psychosomatic disorders, and effective therapeutic mechanisms. Many of these observations are so radical that they question the basic metaphysical assumptions of materialistic science concerning the nature of reality and of human beings and the relationship between consciousness and matter. (p. 92)

In their essay entitled “Transpersonal Philosophy: The Participatory Turn,” Hartelius and Ferrer (2015) insist that transpersonal psychology must have “one or more effective philosophical frames” so as to be able to take seriously the wisdom of mystical and spiritual traditions and to avoid the default perspective of modern philosophy. In such philosophy, reality is typically seen “as limited to a relationship between objective world and rational mind” and it therefore relegates the “anomalous phenomena” of which Grof (2015) speaks to no more than “distortions of normal consciousness, induced perhaps by biological or chemical imbalances” (p. 187). In other words, in order for us to consider transpersonal experience to be an actual encounter with what Anderson (2015) calls a “Sacred Other” (p. 164), we must be able to understand the metaphysical nature of this “Other” and the metaphysical basis for relationship, interaction, and communication.

One could argue that the very health of both humankind and our common planetary home might depend on adopting a coherent perspective capable of describing both cosmic and psychic reality. The point of this project is to argue that Whitehead’s philosophy of organism is more than adequate to support transpersonal psychology’s challenge to the dominant Western worldview that may very well be the cause of much of the societal, interpersonal, and intrapersonal fragmentation we witness in the West. If, as Hartelius, Rothe, and Roy (2015) argue, transpersonal psychology “is an ambitious effort to redefine ourselves as humans and the world as we know it” and “a project that sets out to understand the cosmos in ways that are not constrained by either the sometimes heavy hand of religious tradition or the objectifying eye of science” (p. 3), then the field may no longer be able to decline to engage in metaphysics.

As a theologian working at the intersection of spirituality, psychology, religion, and philosophy, my research has been focused on the functional resonances between the process thought of Alfred North Whitehead (and its subsequent theological iterations) and the analytical psychology of Carl Gustav Jung. It is this work that led me to speak at the 2017 International Transpersonal Conference in Prague regarding the supportive role Whitehead’s metaphysics could play for transpersonal psychology. Even so, we might ask this question: If physics effectively kicked metaphysics to the curb long ago, what possible purpose could metaphysical arguments serve today? The answer to such a question may depend on whether one believes that having a coherent framework within which to describe all experience is important. As Faber (2008) elucidates, Whitehead’s philosophy of organism—that later came to be known as process philosophy—shows how “all spheres of reality, all levels of experiences, and all modes of cognition” are part of the same “coherent context” even while being “differentiated” and diverse (p. 22). If, as theologian Hosinski (1993) argues, “[t]he goal or ideal of metaphysical reflection is to discover the structure of reality” (p. 43) and to account for “the unity and systematic character of our experience,” our worldview must “[do] justice to its multiple dimensions” (Mattingly, 1968, p. ix).

The Whiteheadian Difference

Compelling themes swirled in the Prague conference in September of 2017 that raise many metaphysical questions: If there is a “transpersonal domain,” how do we explain its existence without invoking the supernatural? How is it possible for the mind to causally affect the body if the materialistic view is correct? If there is no internal relationship between the perceiving subject and the objects perceived, then on what basis can we assert observational knowledge claims? How can “holotropic states of consciousness” and a “holographic record of all events” be explained as universally available to all humans? If mass is a “series of vibrations,” what provides the unity of our experience? If purpose and “in-formation” are built into our world, why are they not coercive or determinative? On what basis can we claim that mysticism is “participatory?” Satisfactory answers to these questions and more can be discovered in Whitehead’s metaphysics. Stated succinctly, Whitehead’s metaphysical philosophy provides a coherent and necessary cosmological frame within which transpersonal thought, practices, and psychologies can be compellingly supported.

In the remainder of this article, I will argue that Whitehead’s thought provides an adequate metaphysical framework for transpersonal psychology because he:

  • Describes all experience—personal and transpersonal, subjective and objective—within one integrated cosmos where experience trumps abstract theory;

  • Replaces dualistic theories of static substances with a unified theory that dynamic events are at the root of everything actual;

  • Unifies mind with a body that is continuous—and in constant relationship—with the natural world;

  • Overturns the subject–object bifurcation by showing how each subject arises from—and is constituted by—its objective past and how there is a transpersonal “other” at the base of experience;

  • Dethrones sensate materialism by illustrating the primacy of nonsensory perception;

  • Explains how we exist within an interconnected web of relationships and are internally related to everything and everyone, including transpersonal reality; and,

  • Grounds our hope for transformation in a participatory cosmos of creativity and freedom where the living immediacy of each moment’s arising is pregnant with possibilities for purpose, novelty, value, and positive change.

Not surprisingly, Whitehead has been a philosopher (albeit posthumously) on the fringes of transpersonal psychology since at least March of 1983, when a conference that placed process thinkers in dialogue with archetypal psychologist James Hillman was hosted by the Center for Process Studies and Claremont Graduate University, resulting in the publication in 1990 of Archetypal Process: Self and Divine in Whitehead, Jung, and Hillman (Griffin, 1990c). In 1996, a conference on Transpersonal and Process Thought was held at the California Institute of Integral Studies during which philosopher and theologian David Ray Griffin argued that Whitehead could be considered a “transpersonal philosopher.” Defining transpersonal philosophy as “one that provides an ontological and epistemological explanation of the possibility of transpersonal experiences, thereby harmonizing transpersonal experiences with all other types of experience,” Griffin (1996) includes those experiences in which one’s sense of identity is extended both “horizontally” and “vertically.” Whitehead, Griffin argues, is a transpersonal philosopher primarily because he: (a) accounts for what might be called “supernormal” human experiences in his philosophy; (b) describes each human experience as a microcosm that includes “the whole universe within itself”; (c) eliminates mind–body dualism; and, (d) articulates the world’s evolution as “divine involution” (p. 2).

Although Griffin makes a brilliant case for why Whitehead could be considered a transpersonal philosopher, he does not go far enough for what is needed now—more than 20 years since he presented those arguments. From where we stand today, it appears that, as noted earlier, without an adequate cosmological foundation, transpersonal experience may only be interpreted as either biological/chemical distortions of normal consciousness and thereby meaningless phenomena that certainly do not reflect a real encounter with a Sacred Other, or as entirely random and “miraculous” experiences that happen only to select individuals who are somehow “special.” In order for transpersonal experience to tell us something meaningful and true, it must point back to a reality that underpins all of human life universally and that makes such transpersonal experience possible for all humans equally. Anything less may not be enough to counter the “metaphysical catastrophe” (Hillman, 1990, p. 215) in which we are living.

Whitehead’s Relevance to Transpersonal Thought

Alfred North Whitehead, an English mathematician and philosopher, is probably best known as the coauthor of Principia Mathematica with Bertrand Russell. His major work, Process and Reality, was written in 1929 during his tenure as a philosophy professor at Harvard University (1924 to 1937). He died in Cambridge, Massachusetts at the end of 1947. Whitehead’s thinking was profoundly affected by the loss of his son in the First World War, and he was influenced by the work of Darwin, Einstein, William James, and the field of quantum mechanics. He breaks from what Pittenger (1976) calls the “older mode of metaphysics” where one begins with “general principles assumed to be true rather than studying concrete phenomena” (pp. 16 –17). In fact, Whitehead considered the “infinite fullness of experience” to be “supreme over thought” (Hosinski, 1993, p. 84).

When postmodernity was still just a twinkle in modernity’s eyes, Whitehead rejected core ideas of the modern worldview, such as

  1. The mechanistic doctrine of nature, according to which natural things are wholly devoid of sentience, experience, or interiority, of any power of self-determination or “final causation,” and of any power to act or be affected at a distance;

  2. Sensate empiricism, according to which all knowledge originates in sensory perception, so that all extrasensory or nonsensory perception is denied;

  3. The denial of any divine presence, especially any present divine influence, in the world (Griffin, 1990b, pp. 4–5).

Despite a lack of widespread awareness, Whitehead’s relevance has only grown with time. His philosophy, sometimes called constructive postmodernism, has been widely applied to educational reform in China and influential in that country’s postmodern development. “In less than a decade,” writes Todd (2008) in an article for the Vancouver Sun, “the Chinese government has encouraged the creation of 18 university-based centers for the study of Whitehead’s philosophy” through the China Project of the Center for Process Studies and its sister organization, the Institute for the Postmodern Development of China (Center for Process Studies, 2017). It is also being applied to many other fields, such as ecological awareness, political thought, economics, ethics, and aesthetics, as was made manifest at the 2015 Whitehead-oriented conference “Seizing an Alternative: Toward an Ecological Civilization,” with its 12 sections, 85 tracks, and over 1,000 presenters from a wide array of disciplines (Pando Populus, 2015). Within transpersonal psychology, Whitehead has been referenced in the work of several individuals. Tarnas (2017) and Tarnas (2006) invoke Whitehead in their explorations of archetypal cosmology, with Tarnas (2006) referring to Whitehead’s philosophy as the “last major metaphysical system of modern philosophy” (p. 25). In Grof’s (2015) plea for scientific paradigms that do not dismiss “anomalous phenomena” witnessed in the science of consciousness, he points to Whitehead’s metaphysical philosophy as an “alternative conceptual framework that can account for many of the baffling properties of transpersonal experiences.” Maxwell (2011) has also compared Whitehead and Jung; and Hilla Johanna Sopanen, another speaker at the Prague conference, incorporates Whitehead into her work.

One Integrated Cosmos

One of the primary reasons that Whitehead’s metaphysical system is valuable for transpersonal psychology is that his worldview coheres for all experience. A coherent worldview must show how we are all part of one interrelated world in which physical, mental, and transpersonal experience are all possible. This is true for process metaphysics wherein there is no “going behind” actual entities for anything that is “more real” and there are no “supernatural” causes that “float into the world from nowhere” (Hosinski, 1993, p. 20). Whitehead achieves this by describing all experience—personal and transpersonal, subjective and objective—within one integrated cosmos where experience always trumps abstract theory. As Faber (2008) explains,

(a) All experience—including religious experience and theological thought—is to be accounted for in its inner integrity; (b) Every experience—one’s personal veneration of God no less than scientific knowledge—is to be coherently comprehensible within the same context as the one unified world; (c) No experience may be understood beyond the mutual transition from matter to mind, subjectivity to objectivity, knowledge to reality; (d) Nothing isolated from experience can be real; in the larger sense, nothing isolated “in and of itself” is to be viewed as real (p. 22; emphasis in original).

In order for a metaphysical system of thought to be considered rational, “There can be no asking ‘behind’ [it] for some transcendent ground that explains the system of the universe itself.” Going behind to establish a “radically transcendent ‘ground’ of the whole system (e.g., God as creator in an absolute sense) is to abandon the rational hope for metaphysical coherence” (Hosinski, 1993, p. 213). Whitehead rejected such a bifurcated world wherein

Either intellect, subjectivity, and personality had to be reduced to material processes—ultimately to the local movements of elementary particles—or knowledge of nature had to recede into an insurmountably remote distance as a projection of human conceptual patterns (the inaccessibility of the “thing in itself”). Whitehead’s thought resisted both alternatives and instead sought to reattain the unity of experience. (Faber, 2008, p. 22)

Whitehead’s observations of, and speculations on, experience led him to develop his philosophy of organism to describe a cosmos that is always in the process of becoming: reality is dynamic, creative, and event-based and one in which momentary events—or subjects—cocreate themselves through their internal, active encounters with both an objective past and future possibilities for actualization. Each moment of what he called concrescence enjoys subjective immediacy and internal relations to the whole, is mentally and physically one, and seeks to attain its own value in the world before it becomes an objective datum for the future. The thrust of the creative advance is toward intensity of experience and a transpersonally envisaged, ever-flowing integration of contrasts that achieves beauty and peace, the point of which, for individuals, is to particularize the whole to enjoy one’s unique perspective. In each moment of experience, “The many become one and are increased by one” (Whitehead, 1979, p. 32). Whitehead’s most basic ontological principle states that “no reason (in a metaphysical explanation) is acceptable unless it can be referred somehow to something actual” and so we “must appeal only to actual things that are experienced” (Hosinski, 1993, p. 22). His cosmology describes one reality that is inherently relational where all things have value and within which God is an actual entity that is immanently encounterable within embodied experience.

Whitehead’s God

In order to assess Whitehead’s potential value to transpersonal psychology, we should not allow his use of the term God to be a stumbling block. Pittenger (1979) notes that it seems to just be a “part of the human makeup” to yearn for “a reference beyond self and nature that will make sense of our immediate experience” and to possess “a sense of the transcendent, unexhausted in our immediacies … mysteriously beckoning us toward ultimacies” (p. 15). For millennia, humans have called this transcendent referent God. Whitehead, Pittenger, and other process thinkers understand this transpersonal reality as encounterable within embodied experience but not coercive:

[If] the “energetic activity” in the cosmos is indeed disclosed to us in the “emotional intensity” of lived experience, if the way things go is determined by some agency that does not occasionally interfere but rather “makes things make themselves” … if this is the case, then the reality and value of the secular can be preserved while at the same time the deepest religious insight with respect to the “more,” the “transcendent,” “ultimate concern,” and a “reference beyond oneself” can also be given due recognition. Above all, we may come to understand cosmic “refreshment and companionship”. (Pittenger, 1979, p. 15)

Whitehead’s God is “successful,” according to Lee (1974), because his God “does not fail against the demands of the contemporary mind for a one-world reality; and at the same time God is essential for the real world as we know it” (p. 87). Why does Whitehead describe God as “essential”? Because without “God”—described by Sarkar (1974) as “a process and a possibility” (p. v)—as the initiator of all occasions, there would be no way to understand the “incredible fact—that what cannot be, yet is” (Whitehead, 1979, p. 350). Whitehead argues that God is essential because:

  1. The “‘living’ subjective present” and dynamism for self-creation “cannot originate from the ‘dead’ objective past” (Hosinski, 1993, p. 159); God is the actual entity that provides the living immediacy needed by every forming entity to begin its process of becoming. Whitehead’s God is the entity-in-process that exists as a condition upon which the dynamic process of becoming depends (Sarkar, 1974, p. 78).

  2. Forms that have been actualized in the past are certainly available in the present through those past entities, but if forming occasions were restricted only to what had already been achieved in the world, there would be no way for the truly novel to ever emerge and the world would then only be capable of “mere repetition of the same forms” (Hosinski, 1993, p. 157). Identifying God as the entity that makes novel forms available “is the only way to explain genuine novelty in the world” (Mattingly, 1968, p. 99).

  3. It would hardly be possible for every forming occasion of experience to survey and evaluate the unlimited number of possibilities that the entire universe is capable of manifesting at any time; moreover, “order and value both require some limitation or restriction within totally abstract possibility for their occurrence.” The lack of such limitation or restriction would result in a kind of chaos that we do not witness in actuality. God, therefore, may be considered the “ground of order and value” that “selectively limits” possibilities, grounds their relationships, and allows the experience of value within possibilities by providing its standard (Hosinski, 1993, pp. 159–160).

Whitehead’s God is “transcendent” in the sense of being transpersonal, while not being supernatural. Equally important, Whitehead’s God is not a monistic, deterministic unity that would hold all power and nullify multiplicity and diversity. Within the one world that Whitehead describes, then, there are four principles at work:

  1. The spatiotemporal process of forming and perishing entities;

  2. Eternal objects, or possibilities available to be actualized;

  3. God, the dipolar entity that envisions value, offers relevant possibilities in the form of eternal objects, and receives the actions of the world; and

  4. Creativity (Sarkar, 1974, p. iii), the active principle that answers the question of “why”—“why there is anything at all rather than nothing” (Faber, 2008, p. 76).

Ultimately, Whitehead characterizes reality in three ways: (a) as relational, meaning that “there are no isolated realities, only transitions from multiplicity to unities;” (b) as concrescing, meaning that in every moment of experience a “plural reality” of actualized facts is unified in a “growing together” of “a new unity that integrates all its relationships;” and (c) as creative, meaning that reality as a “moving whole” is always “a process of processes” that emerges, integrates, and perishes, adding to the plurality of actualized facts (Faber, 2008, pp. 23–24).

Prioritizing Experience

Like transpersonal psychologists, Whitehead prioritizes experience over abstract thought. He persuasively argues that the basic way occasions of experience form must be the same whether that occasion is human, animal, vegetable, or mineral, although higher order beings or societies of occasions do experience more complex phases within the same basic process. His metaphysics emerged directly from “an analysis of the common experience of human subjects” (Hosinski, 1993, p. 43); it is not just that the full richness of human experience must always be taken into consideration within any metaphysical system’s explanation of the structure of reality, but that human experience is a lens through which we may view and learn about the entire universe. For Whitehead, theory is always “secondary” to the experience that is, in fact, its “final test” (Griffin, 1990a, p. 248). As Pittenger (1979) writes,

Whitehead was convinced that the only way to make intelligible the meaning or significance which we naturally take for granted in our ordinary moments is to relate our concrete experience as a human being to the mystery of the dynamic evolutionary process that is going on around us and in us. Human existence is indeed distinctive, yet it is not separated from everything else. It has its own qualities and capabilities, but these are not without analogues elsewhere. We belong to the world that has produced us. Hence, anything that deepens self-awareness contributes to our knowledge of that world, and anything that increases our knowledge of the world contributes to our self-understanding. (pp. 10–11)

Matter and Interiority

In recent decades, science has shown that reality is not, in fact, made up of tiny billiard balls of “stuff” being bounced around by external causal forces as has generally been imagined for centuries. Carol Christ notes that both Whitehead and his student Charles Hartshorne did not accept “scientific materialism’s view.” She writes,

They both felt that scientists were right to desire a unified understanding of all reality in which the same principles could be used to understand the behavior of all individuals in the universe. Against the theory that all matter is “dead,” Whitehead and Hartshorne made the (from some perspectives) astonishing proposal that all matter is in some sense “alive.” Whitehead argued that all individuals down to the smallest particle of an atom have the ability to “feel” and to “feel the feelings of others.” In order to avoid the impression that he was attributing humanlike consciousness and feelings to all individuals down to the particles of an atom, Whitehead preferred to use the technical term “prehension” rather than the word “feeling” to describe this activity. (Christ, 2004, p. 55)

Whitehead believed that every entity has some degree of experience, or interiority, though he would not have called that consciousness. Hartshorne went so far as to describe a panpsychic reality, wherein all parts of nature experienced “feeling or sentience” to one degree or another, even if that experience was negligible (Christ, 2004, p. 55). Before dismissing this notion as “a groundless and speculative flight of anthropomorphic fantasy” (Hosinski, 1993, p. 58), we might reflect upon the results of a 2007 study at the University of California at Berkeley on photosynthesis and the behavior of electrons in green sulfur bacteria. Writing in Chemistry World for the United Kingdom’s Royal Society of Chemistry, Philip Ball reports that Graham Fleming and his team proved that the energy of botanical photosynthesis is “smeared out over many electronic states in a quantum superposition, in effect being in many different states at once.” To discover the path of least resistance while in these states, excited electrons “sample” the available routes (Ball, 2007). Lynne McTaggart, a journalist and lecturer who bridges science and spirituality, writes of the same study that in their attempt to understand the “ruthless efficiency” of photosynthesis, Fleming and his associates stumbled upon “a giant chink in the entire edifice of accepted biology.” Not only are the electrons in green sulfur bacteria occupying more than one location at a time, they appear to be exploring and evaluating multiple alternative pathways simultaneously and then choosing which one to pursue. She describes the experiment in this way:

Fleming’s experiment takes a tiny fraction of the time it takes to blink an eyelid. As soon as the pulsed light from the lasers hits the protein, it excites—and thus dislocates—electrons, which then need to find the most direct route along their tiny protein scaffolding “track” to the reaction centers. This is a complex and potentially time-consuming task, according to conventional physics, as there are many possible pathways and endpoints that the electron would have to seek out and eliminate, one by one. … Rather than a single pathway, the electrons reach their target by trying out several routes simultaneously. Only when the final connection is made and the end of the road reached does the electron track its most efficient path retroactively and the energy follow that single path. It appears as if the optimum route were chosen backward in time—after all possibilities had been exhausted. … Fleming’s discovery is a wholly unexpected answer to his line of inquiry: the plant is so efficient because its messenger electrons are able to occupy more than one location at the same time. (McTaggart, 2016)

Dynamic Events Replace Static Substances

Unlike the substance theory that has dominated Western thought for centuries, Whitehead insists that the world “is not composed ultimately of unchanging substances with changing attributes.” Rather than accepting this cornerstone of dualism, he claims “becoming” to be a more basic category of existence than “being” (Hosinski, 1993, p. 22). In his system, dualistic theories of static substances at the base of actualized reality are replaced by a unified theory where at the root of everything actual are dynamic events that are always both physical and mental. Whitehead stands in agreement with modern physics, which also seems to propose that “All the ‘final real facts’ which constitute actuality are not to be thought of as substances but as occasions of experience.” One of the most controversial yet psychologically rich aspects of Whitehead’s metaphysics is his proposal that every actual entity (occasion of actualized existence) has “a subjective character” with a “center of becoming” and “subjective unity” and that it is “active in the process of its self-construction” (Hosinski, 1993, p. 57).

Objective Past

In process thought, every moment of experience arises from an objective past that is its physical inheritance while conceptual possibilities for actualization also influence that forming moment in a persuasive way toward its becoming. Such physical and mental data are not just passively perceived but grasped by the forming entity. To indicate the active nature of such receiving, Whitehead terms it prehension, “from the Latin prehendere, which means to seize or grasp” (Hosinski, 1993, p. 59). Muray (1988) understands the term to prehend as being related to the psychological term to internalize (p. 6). While the past is prehended physically, Whitehead argued that potentials are entertained in the mental pole of each occasion due to the fact that “possibilities and values are not ‘physical’ actual entities.” Therefore, such possibilities are experienced as conceptual prehensions (Hosinski, 1993, pp. 84–85). Yet the forming moment must be grasping something real, some object or datum being perceived as possibility or value; Whitehead referred to these conceptually prehended data as eternal objects.

Photo by Mathieu Stern on Unsplash

Eternal Objects

For Whitehead, the ultimacy of creativity can explain “that things are” but it is eternal objects that explain “what things are” because they are the “infinite hierarchy” of ingredients in every actuality that characterize it (Mattingly, 1968, pp. x, 163). Mattingly (1968) considers the doctrine of eternal objects to be “central” to Whitehead’s metaphysics because it explains the “definite nature” of entities, the “definite relationships among individuals” and the “recurring patterns of a qualified, spatio-temporal world” (pp. vi, 171). Eternal objects are both real potentials and pure potentials (p. 102); they are real in that they can be conceptualized before being actualized, and they are pure because they bear no “necessary reference to any definite actual entity of the temporal world” (Lee, 1974, p. 66). We see this clearly when we think of the color blue or the number 2. “Blueness” or “twoness” can be observed in specific, actual things that display the color or quantity but we can also think of “blueness” or “twoness” in a general way that is not limited to any of the instances in which we observe such qualities.

Eternal objects transcend all individual occasions and are only actualized in individual occasions of experience; at the same time, occasions of experience reflect, embody—and participate in—the eternal by actualizing such potentials. It is critical to remember that in Whitehead’s “one world,” eternal objects are not any kind of ideal “ultimate reality” but are “abstractions within the process and possibilities for that process. They are real solely in events” that embody them (Faber, 2008, p. 86). Eternal objects are “eternal” partly because they are inexhaustible, unable to be “used up in any one spatio-temporal appearance” yet those individual appearances are bound by certain limits (Mattingly, 1968, p. 100). Possibilities are not determined ahead of time by a static God; “each act of becoming is a free act” and relevant possibilities arise with the moment itself “as a result of which the texture of reality is modified” (Lee, 1974, p. 89).

Unified Body and Mind

The independent, atomistic self lauded in the Enlightenment was viewed as a thinking, rational mind that unfortunately was saddled with a body, but those two aspects were split and different in quality. The separation of body and mind that characterizes the philosophical systems derived from Descartes is an “arbitrary disconnection” that Whitehead (1979) thought of as “disastrous,” “incoherent” (pp. 6, 246), and a “tremendous fraud” (Johnson, 1962, p. 76). If body and mind are two different substances that have no internal relationship to each other, then how can Descartes claim any unity between his “I” and his body that is “seated by the fire” or between his bodily “hands and feet” and his mental perception that they are “mine” (Whitehead, 1979, p. 75)? On what basis can we claim the unity with our bodies that is so central to our human experience? While Thomas Aquinas’ Scholastic view describes the mind as informing the body, Whitehead (1979) reminds us that “all the life in the body is the life of the individual cells. … So what needs to be explained is not dissociation of personality but unifying control” or the sense of a “presiding personality” (p. 108). The physical body is a “complex living society” that supports the very existence of the “human person” who is “the strand of ‘presiding’ or directing occasions.” Rather than being distinct, Whitehead saw these as in constant “interplay” (Hosinski, 1993, p. 138). The obvious fact that my body continues to perpetuate itself and the sense of unity I have with my own past suggest that there must be a persistent “route of occasions” that gives me my specific character and individuality.

Dipolar Events

Because reality is event-based rather than substance-based, and each entity is dipolar, possessing both a mental and a physical pole, Whitehead unifies objective and subjective, body and mind, within one coherent framework. In process thought, no experience can be dismissed as “merely” subjective because that very subjectivity is itself a clue to the nature of the whole of reality. In the philosophy of organism, mind and matter are not two distinct substances and humans are not spiritual beings deposited in an alien biosystem from which they must escape to be “saved.” Subjects and objects are not in opposite corners with only external relations, and Whitehead (1968) jettisons substance metaphysics in one sentence when he writes that “the energetic activity considered in physics is the emotional intensity entertained in life” (p. 232). Pittenger (1979) elaborates on this important sentence:

What did Whitehead intend by these cryptic words? Essentially, that in a world such as ours, with creatures such as we feel ourselves to be in our moments of sensitive awareness, there is an intimate linkage between the thrust of human existence toward the achievement of goals and the creative movement of the cosmic order in its evolutionary drive. In other words, life—and above all humanly experienced life—belongs to and is part of the natural world. Life—and above all human life—cannot be rightly understood apart from that natural world. Neither can the natural world be rightly understood apart from life and above all human life. That life of ours is part of the cosmic process, and the ground of the cosmic process is thereby disclosed in some fashion in what human experience tells us. (p. 9)

In other words, we must not create a “false disjunction” between our emotional and physical selves, or between humans and nature. The world produced us and we belong to this world. We can therefore embrace a “unified world view” that makes possible “a coherent and consistent grasp of life and of nature, of human life and of the world” (Pittenger, 1979, p. 10). Every occasion has its own perspective and experience while being in relation to the whole interconnected matrix of events. My momentary present “ruptures” the extensive continuum from a particular perspective and my historic route of successive perspectives give me my sense of self-identity. As Hosinski (1993) notes, “My life history is my special locus of inheritance within the wider locus of space-time” (p. 65).

Mind, Body, Nature

Yet it is not only our rational or cognitive experience to which we must pay attention, for in every moment, any human subject “is inheriting bodily feelings and his or her immediately past occasions of experience” (Hosinski, 1993, p. 44). For Robert Mesle, “the mind/soul/self/psyche is the flow of the body’s experience or feeling” and “fleeting moments of reasoning” do not make up the bulk of actual experience. In fact, moments of reasoning are relatively rare in the world; the majority of experiencers in the natural world swim mostly in that “great ocean” that is the “flow of felt emotion” on which “the thin layer of rationality precariously floats” (Mesle, 2008, p. 23). As humans, we experience our bodily feelings and past occasions in a way that is unified—as in the way that my brain joins the images it produces to the physical sensations that my eyes and nervous system generate in my capacity for vision.

[W]e, as perceiving subjects, have bodies, and our sense perception is entirely dependent on the prior functioning of our bodies. We are directly aware that we see “with our eyes,” hear “with our ears,” feel “with our hands,” and so on. These are vague feelings, but in them we are directly aware that our sense perception does depend entirely on the prior functioning of the body. Unless I first have the vaguely felt experience of a properly functioning eye, I will experience no visual sense data. Only because I have a properly functioning eye are there visual sense data in my experience. (Hosinski, 1993, p. 51)

The bifurcation of bodily nature and mind is a “fundamental error” because “it views that which appears within thought (causal particles void of relation) as concrete nature” (Faber, 2008, pp. 46–47). Psychologist Robertson (2009) agrees that consciously separating ourselves from the unity of the world so as to study that world is an “artificial distinction,” a “game” that we have been playing since the Renaissance in pretending, for example, that the hands attached to our bodies actually belong to someone else. To be earthly is to be embodied and embedded. Epperly (2006) refers to our cosmos as “psychosomatic” and “panexperiential” because “[m]ind and body interpenetrate one another.” Mind and body, he argues, are not dualistically separate but are “dynamically interconnected” with mind “constantly shap[ing] the body even as the body continuously conditions the mind” (p. 95).

But it is still just a game; your hands remain connected to your arms, which are in turn connected to the trunk of your body. Your body remains a single, unbroken entity despite the fact that you can observe part of it separately. (p. 230)

Even more important, our bodies are not closed systems that stop at our outer skin. Our sense experience reflects the unity of self and body, yet our body “inherits physical conditions from the physical environment according to physical laws” and lies “in the field of nature” in a way that is “distinct from our personal existence” (Whitehead, 1933, p. 189). The body “is part of the external world continuous with it,” argues Whitehead.

In fact, it is just as much a part of nature as anything else there—a river, or a mountain, or a cloud. Also, if we are fussily exact, we cannot define where a body begins and where external nature ends. … And yet our feeling of bodily unity is a primary experience. It is an experience so habitual and so completely a matter of course that we rarely mention it. No one ever says, Here I am and I have brought my body with me. (Whitehead, 1968, pp. 21, 114)

As Hosinski (1993) describes it, “The body is that portion of nature with which each moment of human experience intimately cooperates” (p. 43). “The truth,” Whitehead (1933) elaborates, “is that the brain is continuous with the body, and the body is continuous with the rest of the natural world” (p. 225).

The Transpersonal “Other” at the Base of Experience

For Whitehead, experience does not begin with an inner subject gazing upon outer objects that may or may not actually exist. Instead, the very existence of a subject begins with the objective world of “stubborn fact” entering into a forming moment of actuality whose “living immediacy” arises from the mysterious creativity at the base of existence. The creativity of the cosmos can provide the ground from which things spring—and the fact that they do spring in the first place—but Whitehead shows how entities obtain their specific qualities and what it is that sets limits on those specifications so that there is not completely random chaos at work. He does this through his process of objectification, a “relationship between actual entities in which the development of one is in some sense dependent upon the other” (Mattingly, 1968, p. 59). Within that process, entities are dependent upon other entities in their immediate past as well as upon the transpersonal realm for their formation; God is the initiating factor in every actual occasion of experience.

As noted earlier, Whitehead imagined every occasion to be dipolar in nature; entities have a physical pole through which they experience other actual entities from their immediate past in an objective way along with a mental pole, through which they experience conceptual possibilities for the future as well as information containing qualitative or aesthetic value (Hosinski, 1993, p. 84). “Determinateness” enters each forming entity physically (Whitehead, 1979, p. 108) and “indeterminateness” enters with conceptual possibilities and values through “the basic operations of mentality” (Whitehead, 1979, p. 33). Unlike the bifurcation of the mental and the physical in Cartesian dualism, Whitehead’s dipolar aspects are like the opposite poles of a battery or magnet; they are necessarily together.

Initial Aim

What initiates the formation of an entity or moment of experience is that entity’s initial aim—its thrust at being, its urge to make of itself something actual, its living dynamism of creativity that kick starts it into existence. The concrescing subject does not initiate that aim—God does—but it has the freedom to claim that initial aim as its own subjective aim (or not), using it to fuel its own self-creation. Its urge to make some possibility actual is what Whitehead called the occasion’s subjective aim at satisfaction. According to Hosinski (1993), “This can be understood most simply as the existence of a ‘drive’ in each occasion to make something of and for itself” (p. 84). In any moment, the initial aim is the best and most relevant possibility for the conditions that exist, but even though that highest possibility is envisioned by God as the entity arises, it is not determined by God, because, ultimately, each entity chooses what it will become. Whitehead (1979) notes the potentially tragic consequences: “The initial aim is best for that impasse. But if the best be bad, then the ruthlessness of God can be personified as Ate, the goddess of mischief. The chaff is burnt” (p. 244).

In the initial phase of concrescence, forming entities do not experience a context-free vision for possibility; they are bound and limited by the actual facts of their immediate past. Those factual realities are experienced objectively. In his cosmology, Whitehead “[brings] human experience into continuity with the occasions of the natural world” and shows how “experience flows from the objective world of the past to the experiencing subject of the present.” The initial phase of an occasion of experience is most reflective of the statement that “the present is the child of the past,” because it is in this phase where the past is given as an “inheritance” or as “objective fact” and also actively internalized by the moment that is forming. Here, “something is passing from the past to the present” (Hosinski, 1993, pp. 67, 73).

Prehending Horizontally and Vertically

The very beginning of the process of concrescence—the formation of actual entities—is marked by the internal appropriation or prehension of both the objective past—the entire actual world—and of the living immediacy of the present moment that ingresses as what Whitehead calls God’s initial subjective aim. Both enter physically and unconsciously into the new occasion. Whitehead’s use of the term prehension is important, as it implies internal relations between the subject and its world (Kraus, 1979, p. 18). Every occasion, then, is both subjective and objective—subjective as it is concrescing, but then perishing into objective fact and becoming a superjective datum for the next concrescing moment. This is the inexorable flow of process. Raising again the requirement of a transpersonal realm, Hosinski (1993) asks:

If subjectivity “perishes” in “decision,” then how does the living immediacy of subjective experience begin? The “living” subjective present cannot originate from the “dead”’ objective past. The past objective world, though necessary as the ground upon which present subjectivity “stands,” offers no reason for the living immediacy of the present moment. Nor can that living immediacy simply appear “out of the blue”. (p. 159)

“Living immediacy” arises when the subject “grasps its subjectivity for itself by prehending God,” by “feeling God’s conceptual feelings,” by encountering God—the transpersonal realm—directly within itself (Hosinski, 1993, p. 174). In this process, both God and the objective past are encountered at the base (or depths) of all experience as “Other.”

A visual representation of Whitehead’s notion of concrescence. Diagram by Matthew Segall.

Nonsensory Perception and Internal Relations

Our understanding of perception arises from our epistemology, or theory of knowledge, and key to our theory of knowledge is our explanation of how the knower is related to what is known. Hosinski (1993) captures the fundamental problem when he writes that:

If we hold that all knowledge must be based in experience (as the main stream of modern epistemology has held), then the resolution of this problem must begin with an understanding of experience. … Modern epistemology, since Hume and Kant, has had a great deal of difficulty in showing that there is any relationship between the knower and the known … [if] a philosophy cannot tell us how it is possible for us to know, then obviously there must be a major flaw somewhere in its approach. (pp. 118–119)

Internal Relations

Now the question must be raised: How is this “Other” at the base of experience perceived? Certainly not through our senses, as sense-data offers us nothing but the present moment. When Descartes concluded that “I think, therefore I am,” and Locke pressed for a “mechanical philosophy” in which “nature was to be understood as devoid of all properties except those quantitative features necessary for mechanistic interactions,” all aesthetic or purposive qualities were then located in the human soul and only projected onto the natural world (Griffin, 1990a, p. 240). More recently, logical positivists jettisoned purpose, value and creativity from both nature and human, because, as Robertson (2009) argues, they “confined all questions about the ultimate nature of reality to the dust heap of non-sense: literally not sensible, since they did not refer directly or indirectly to sensory perception” (p. 33). If any area of Whitehead’s thought is most potentially fruitful for transpersonal exploration, it is his theory of perception and his thorough invalidation of sensate materialism. Not only does he consider nonsensory perception to be primary over sensory perception, he insists that it is nonsensory perception that internally relates each event to every other. Moreover, Whitehead’s theory of perception can offer a coherent explanation of how transpersonal experience—both vertical and horizontal—is even possible.

Within the past century, the mechanistic view of nature and classical Newtonian physics have very nearly collapsed entirely. Pittenger (1979) points to “quantum physics, the principle of indeterminacy, relativity theory, and the like” as being “instrumental in bringing about this change” (p. 35). Yet our cultural worldview has yet to catch up to more recent scientific insights. As already discussed, rather than the objectivity in the world arising from our subjectivity, in an event-based world our subjectivity emerges from the immediate past of the objective world. Therefore, to understand the order, novelty, and “perpetual perishing” at work in the world, we must understand the relationship between subjects and objects. As Mattingly (1968) notes, how can there be any “solidarity of the universe” if observing subjects and observed objects “form exclusive sets of entities” that are unrelated (p. 58)?

We know that we are conditioned by our relations with others. Nothing that exists, exists in isolation. Yet, we may consider ourselves to be part of an interconnected and participatory cosmos only if “every prehended object is also a prehending subject and every prehending subject is also a prehended object.” Mattingly (1968) continues,

The problem is to understand how a subject, an entity with its own intrinsic nature, a being “in itself,” can be an object for another subject, can be “for others.” How must we revise our traditional concepts to explain how an actual entity enters into the very constitution of another so as to condition its identity without thereby losing its own identity? (p. 59)

One of Whitehead’s (1968) primary concerns was to explain the way in which actual things outside of ourselves can be part of our own experience (pp. 53, 57). In his system, the very basis for knowledge lies both in the fact that elements of experience are genuinely related (Hosinski, 1993, p. 119) and in the ability for subjects to internalize and appropriate for themselves other entities that are, in fact, distinct from themselves. Our common sense experience tells us that any moment of experience begins with an objective world that is given, yet theorists like Kant and Hume contradict our actual experience by insisting that “subjective experience at its most basic level begins with an instance of sense perception” (Hosinski, 1993, p. 119). Whitehead’s empirical move was to abandon the “traditional interpretation of perception as a grasp of the properties of ‘things’ and moving toward a view of its being an apprehension of relations: of things in their relations and as related” (Kraus, 1979, p. 4).

Presentational Immediacy and Causal Efficacy

We live as a culmination of inheritances both of our past physical conditions and of our past personal history; as previously noted, Whitehead argues that our sense of unity with our bodily conditions and our immediate past are instances of nonsensuous perception (Hosinski, 1993, p. 66). He agreed with Hume that our sense perceptions and the things themselves are not one and the same, but proposes that our ordinary experience insists that there must be two modes of perception: presentational immediacy and causal efficacy. What we typically think of as “sense perception” is what Whitehead calls presentational immediacy, because this mode of perception “appears to present to us the contemporary world in its relations to our standpoint.” Yet, in actual fact, what our brains interpret as contemporary is actually the state of the world “a few split seconds ago” (Hosinski, 1993, p. 49). What is being perceived in the present is actually our “’feeling the body as functioning.’ This is a feeling of the world in the past; it is the feeling of derived feelings” (Whitehead, 1979, p. 81). “Sense perception,” Loomer (1987) reminds us, “is an abstract version of physical experience” (p. 24).

The physical, nonsensory perception of the past world that Whitehead referred to as perception in the mode of causal efficacy is the mode of perception that is being utilized when forming entities prehend or internalize objective data. In other words, our ability to perceive what enters our experience through our senses depends entirely “on the prior functioning of the body. … What we call our sensations, in other words, are the feelings we inherit from the interconnected chains of bodily experiences, transmitted to the present experiencing occasion in our brain that we call ourselves …” (Hosinski, 1993, pp. 51–52). This is a “more primitive mode of perception,” and it is a “direct grasping of another thing as causally efficacious for oneself.” It is in this mode of perception that value is transferred, and it is in this mode that we “directly perceive real things and the relations, or transitions, between them” (Griffin, 1990a, p. 241). Our experience is made up of physical occasions that are spatial in nature—the functioning of the body—and mental occasions that are nonspatial—our conscious acknowledgment of what is being perceived and its meaning for us—and those two are essentially related or correspondent to each other (Whitehead, 1927, pp. 90, 102). In fact, it is not just that the physical object of the blue chair has some correlation to the blue chair in my mind, but that “blueness” and “chairness” are also related to each other within the chair itself. It is because of this relation that I can understand a blue chair to not only be a color that I can continue to see in the future, but is also a piece of furniture that I can sit upon (Mattingly, 1968, p. 55).

Sensory images in and of themselves, Griffin notes, “give us no information about other actual things, about causal efficacy, about aim, about intrinsic value (self-enjoyment), or about the communication of values …” (Griffin, 1990a, p. 242), yet those are all real aspects of our experience. The activity of relating the data given in the mode of presentational immediacy to data given in the mode of causal efficacy is what Whitehead called symbolic reference. Whitehead’s theory of perception shows that I am directly related to the world of my experience, that the world of my experience carries its own value, and that human experience, at its deepest level, is nonsensuous and nonrational. As explained by Whitehead, causation is a relationship contained in the data themselves and those relationships are directly perceived aesthetically. As Hosinski (1993) instructs, “Causation, most primitively, is not a notion of a relationship of past to present produced by the subject reflecting upon the data of sense, but is directly perceived in the data of causal efficacy. It is, in short, experienced before it is reflected upon” (p. 70). Whitehead’s theory invites us into a world where “feeling, emotion, [and] aim” are primary; a world in which “the human soul [is] fully a part of nature” (Griffin, 1990a, p. 244). It is therefore because we internalize both God—the transpersonal realm—and our actual world at the commencement of every moment that we can embody both vertical and horizontal transpersonal experience.

A Participatory Cosmos of Creativity and Freedom

Heraclitus famously noted that “one cannot step into the same stream twice.” Likewise, in Whitehead’s philosophy of organism, the empirical truth that there is no such thing as a static river becomes the basis of his cosmology. At the core of both cosmic and psychic reality is an adventure where dynamic creativity is always at work, spontaneously forming momentary unities that then perish and become “efficacious influences” (Faber, 2008, p. 76) on the next momentary unity that is forming. Within the process framework, notes Christ (2004), “the whole universe is alive and changing, continually co-creating new possibilities of life. … For process philosophy, change, freedom or creativity, and embodiment are interconnected. Everything in the world is in process. Change most definitely is” (p. 45). The facts of the past are indeed “stubborn” (Whitehead, 1979, p. xiv), but the salvific news is that relevant possibilities for novel futures are always given, and it is this aspect of Whitehead’s metaphysics that grounds our hope for transformation and self-expansion.

A Participatory Cosmos

Process thinkers describe the universe as “intersubjective”(Bracken, 2001, p. 4) or an “inter-locked community” (Lee, 1974, p. 62), a “universal web of interconnected events” (Loomer, 1987, p. 41), and “an ever-renewing relational process” (Mesle, 2008, p. 3). This web is understood as “generally enduring”(Loomer, 1987, p. 41) or “reasonably together” with “patterns of assemblage” (Lee, 1974, p. 62), yet Loomer notes that while our world appears to be “self-sufficient,” that appearance “enshrouds the unfathomable or inexhaustible mystery inherent within the factuality of the world” (Loomer, 1987, p. 25). Faber (2008) states that it is an even more “provocative” aspect of Whitehead’s philosophy that “subjectivity and objectivity, mind and matter, cognition and being must be viewed as being essentially the same” (p. 22). Although this sets up the possibility for subjectivity and objectivity to simply be collapsed into monism, Whitehead avoids this by describing reality as a “dynamic rhythm of transition” that moves from object to subject to object in an “ecological unity” that is both “unitextural” and “irreducibly pluralistic” in its differentiation; this “moving whole” is in “perpetual creative transition from multiplicity to unity” (Faber, 2008, p. 23). “We are dependent,” writes Pittenger (1979). “We do not explain ourselves, we cannot keep ourselves in existence, we require that which is not ourselves in order to become ourselves.” Of course, we each depend on food, family, shelter, and other “proximate realities” that we interact with daily; but on the deepest level, we depend “always and everywhere upon the creative and sustaining power of the basic reality working in and through the whole creation. … To pretend that we are independent,” he continues, “is stupid; it is also vainglorious nonsense” (pp. 143–144). 

Though we are interdependent and internally related to everything else in the cosmos, for Whitehead, each entity seeks to manifest something of value and to experience enjoyment and zest. Because every moment of experience has subjective unity and freedom within relevant possibilities, it is also an actuality that has inherent value. Nothing that exists is of instrumental value only for others; each thing has value and purpose for itself. Moreover, in the formation of every moment, true novelty is possible. While it may be supposed that novelty is truly actualized only by more complex societies of occasions, such as in living beings, nonliving entities do respond to their world, even when they can do little else than repeat their immediate past. Living entities, on the other hand, are offered a self-transcending vision in every moment for what is possible. If this is, in fact, the nature of the cosmos, then transformation is very real, and is available to every being within their specific context. Such a metaphysical vision aligns well with a field that assumes that “transpersonal phenomena involve a fundamental transformation of normal egoic existence to some ultimately more satisfying or valuable condition” and to a psychology that has a “normative, soteriological or salvific agenda” (Daniels, 2015, p. 23).

Purpose and Value

If we pause to examine our everyday, human experience, what do we know to be true? As a human, I experience myself as an individual who has a history, who makes decisions, who envisions a future with various options, who reacts and responds to innumerable stimuli that I encounter in my world—both physically encountered elements and mentally encountered thoughts and images—who connects with other human and nonhuman beings on a daily basis, and who can sometimes make changes in my behavior when presented with persuasive alternatives. In each moment, I experience myself as a subject in the present, but, as noted earlier, “the present is the child of the past” (Hosinski, 1993, pp. 73–74). As Hosinski notes, there is a “ground of connectedness and continuity in our experience. Experience flows from the objective world of the past to the experiencing subject of the present.” Yet while there is a definite “givenness” of the past, we also know that each of us is a unique individual with goals and purposes.

We are each unique centers of feeling, needing, desiring, willing, hoping and dreaming. … We experience drives toward freshness and novelty of experience. We act with purposes and intentions born in the privacy of our hearts, minds, and wills. … We cherish and cultivate what we value; we despise and resist what we detest; and we accept, endure, or ignore the rest with varying intensities of feeling. In short, our experience as subjects is not only what we receive from the world, it is also something new that arises within us—something, at least partially, of our own creation. (Hosinski, 1993, p. 74)

If, as subjects, we actually do experience value, then such a reality requires that present subjects have “entertained the values inherent in the actual situation from which we began; that we have also entertained the values in possible alternatives, unrealized potentialities, or ideals; and that we have compared or contrasted these latter values with those present in the actual situation from which we began” (Hosinski, 1993, p. 75). In other words, the dynamic structure of human experience rests upon four presuppositions: (a) that there truly are various possibilities, real alternatives, open to us in every moment; (b) that we experience those alternatives as having or not having value to us in the present; (c) that we select from the alternatives before us based on that value; and (d) that individual subjects actually possess the freedom to choose from among real alternatives (Hosinski, 1993, pp. 75–76). “The conduct of human affairs,” notes Whitehead (1958), “is entirely dominated by our recognition of foresight determining purpose, and purpose issuing in conduct” (p. 13). “Purposes,” argues Hosinski (1993), “aim at the realization or enhancement of some value” (p. 76).

When Ferrer (2001) writes of a “participatory vision of human spirituality,” he describes “spiritual knowing” using such terms as “participatory,” “connected,” “co-creative,” “communion,” and as being more than just a “cognitive” exercise (pp. 15–16). Arguing that “genuine knowledge” must be a “multidimensional process that involves all levels of the person,” he states that he believes “that we are in direct contact with an always dynamic and indeterminate Mystery through our most vital energy” (p. 23). What has been shown here is that Whitehead’s metaphysical philosophy explains how this might be true. When Daniels’ (2015) argues (p. 36) that a truly “integral perspective” must “recognize and incorporate” ascending, descending, and extending soteriological vectors, we can respond affirmatively with Whitehead’s accomplishments in describing a cosmos in which all entities and God (transpersonal reality) are in relationship and through which self-expansive possibilities are presented in each moment.

Conclusion

As noted earlier, Grof (2015) has called for a metaphysical foundation that accounts for transpersonal experience. Specifically, Hartelius and Ferrer (2015, p. 187) have argued that it is “critical” to the success of transpersonal psychology that “one or more effective philosophical frames” be adopted in the field. Whitehead’s thought provides such an effective metaphysical framework for transpersonal psychology because he integrates subjective, objective, and transpersonal experience within one integrated cosmos; shows how existence at its base is made up of dynamic events that are both mental and physical; unifies body and mind in relationship with all of nature and transpersonal reality; overturns the subject–object bifurcation by showing how each subject arises from—and is constituted by—its objective past; explains how there can be a transpersonal “Sacred Other” at the base of all experience that is both objectively contextual and conceptually personal; restores nonsensory perception to a place of honor while showing how such perception is primordially relational; explains how the world is interconnected, interrelated, and participatory; and grounds our soteriological hope for transformation in a cosmos of creativity and freedom where the living immediacy of each moment’s arising is pregnant with possibilities for purpose, novelty, value, and positive change. It is for all of these reasons that Whitehead’s philosophy of organism provides an effective cosmological framework for transpersonal psychology.

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Dr. Sheri D. Kling is director of Process & Faith and interim minister of Redeemer Lutheran Church in Bradenton, FL. Sheri earned her Ph.D. in Religion: Process Studies from Claremont School of Theology. She is a theologian, teacher, songwriter and spiritual mentor who draws from wisdom and mystical traditions, relational worldviews, depth psychology, and the intersection of spirituality and science to help people find meaning, belonging, and transformation. Sheri is a faculty member of the Haden Institute, adjunct faculty with Claremont School of Theology, and the author of A Process Spirituality: Christian and Transreligious Resources for Transformation. She regularly delivers dynamic “Music & Message” presentations to groups, and offers courses, concerts, and spiritual retreats. She may be found online at sherikling.com.