Jared Morningstar: So, where did the idea for Processing Reality come from?

John Buchanan: Well, I think the real provocation for me to start looking into psychology and philosophy and spiritual experience came from psychedelics. In retrospect, some of my earlier experiences with my father's death and trying to deal with the existential issues that raised were lying somewhat dormant. But my early psychedelic experiences were so altering to my notion of what might be real and provided both a broader sense of the universe and also a more complex understanding of my own consciousness and experience. So I started studying psychology and philosophy before I went out to college and then just began exploring whatever seemed like it might offer some clues to addressing these issues.

JM: Yeah, It was interesting hearing your journey through the book of discovering these psychedelic substances and having that deepen these existential reflections you were already interested in and then taking these frameworks that you discovered over time of transpersonal psychology and Whiteheadian process philosophy and finding a lot of resources and depth in that material to then better excavate meaning and insight from these experiences. It can be really hard to know how to grapple with peak and mystical experiences without these kinds of frameworks! 

JB: It's interesting that as I started looking into these things, relatively shortly before that, transpersonal psychology itself emerged—it was in the mid to late sixties that Stan Grof, Anthony Sutich, and Abraham Maslow moved from humanistic psychology into transpersonal psychology. And it was in the early seventies that they started the Center for Process Studies. So as I was beginning to try to grapple with these issues, as you said, the people that I would be working with were just entering into these discussions and were trying to think of how to explore them and expand that process perspective, that transpersonal psychology perspective. So I was very fortunate in a way to have these things appearing just where I was looking for them. 

JM: Turning to this philosophical material, what do you think that process philosophy—these frameworks from Whitehead and others—is able to do with these psychedelic experiences that's somewhat unique versus other philosophies you could bring to the table?

JB: Well, I think that with Whitehead in particular, his understanding of experience is just so revelatory compared to others. The idea that our experience arises out of a deep ocean of feeling and that we're directly connected to or grow out of the larger universe—these ideas are so helpful for taking psychedelic experiences as seriously as possible, as offering real insights and real intuitions of reality, as it were. So a mode of access to the larger universe, for one thing and there’s also Whitehead's idea of all entities having experience, having a subjective grounding. 

More generally speaking, I think there's such a wonderful sense of what the universe is like along with his brief but fascinating theological speculations at the end of Process and Reality, where he describes the various aspects of God and God's interaction with the world, which I think then sets up a notion of how to understand mystical experience. From this we can see that psychedelic experiences could have a genuine access to God's own being—and becoming. 

JM: I'm interested to hear more about what you think this type of framework could do for people who are engaged in psychedelic studies—whether this is people pursuing this in the therapeutic field that's developing, or just psychonauts who are interested in pursuing these experiences for their own edification. What do process frameworks contribute to these sorts of projects? 

JB: Well, I read Stan Grof's book back in the mid seventies when it came out and what was great about that was that it gave me a sense of ‘oh wow other people are having these experiences, there’s this whole range of experiences people are having.’ And so it brought me into a community. But what process thought does, I believe, is gives us a systematic picture of the universe in which these experiences can happen. And it links human experience to scientific inquiry, to religion, to mythology. So I think Whitehead’s philosophy really is a ‘theory of everything’—at least how we can think through everything.

And this is very valuable for scientists. I haven't seen people doing it yet very much, but a few people have incorporated Whitehead's ideas into their scientific theories. But it potentially provides unified way of theorizing about events all the way from the quantum level up through the most complex human experiences, which would—with the way the sciences have tended to become their own little worlds—bring them back to a standpoint where you can think from one to the other directly and have that also be relevant to human experience and consciousness. That’s a huge potential breakthrough for the future. 

JM: I think the increased coherence and ability to deal with both the experiential and the physical in an integrated way is definitely a huge benefit of Whitehead's thought. And just the whole approach of psychedelic studies—it's super neurological. You've got these neurotransmitters and these mechanisms, but that only gets you so far. You have this whole side of subjective experience that's deeply intertwined with the healing potential of these substances and how the experience actually generates insight. So being able to to deal with both of those sides in this integrated, holistic way that Whitehead's theories and other processed thinkers’ schemas can provide seems very helpful for this field that is in many ways shattering some of these typical materialist non-experiential understandings of science.

JB: If anybody has really played out the full significance of the idea that the human soul is a series of these momentary events that's integrating the activity of the brain and connecting with the wider universe in a subtle way—it’s Whitehead. 

But whenever I see the work of a clinical neurophysiologist like Jason Brown—he’s great—who uses all these examples from clinical neuropsychology to examine where there's problems with the conventional way of thinking, how the brain is influencing experience… even he doesn't quite seem to have the idea that there are these events that are interacting with the brain rather than the events being the same as the brain—and I thought for a while I might try to write something on that, but I think my brain is exhausted… But it just seems like a really rich area—I think there’s a huge potential there to be developed. 

I mean, maybe people would say ‘well, yeah, you're just assuming that there's these things that unify experience.’ But you know, it provides the basis for the unity of the human experience, and for top down causation, and for notions of what consciousness is—the very things that are befuddling philosophy and psychology at the moment. 

JM: So to kind of flip the question here, I'm interested to know what you think dealing with this topic of psychedelic experience could contribute to the field of process studies. What sort of additional insights or qualifications might this line of inquiry bring to process thinking? What does dealing with something like psychedelic experience bring to the field?

JB: Well, there’s one thing that I think I mentioned most in my book which is that it can flesh out the notion of what the spiritual dimensions of an ‘ocean of feeling’ might look like.

Whitehead's spirituality—aside from his ideas of God's dipolar nature—tends to be fairly abstract… you know, moral, aesthetic. And it’s beautiful. But it seems to me that psychedelic experiences tend to reveal dimensions and entities far beyond what we might have imagined a hundred years ago—or 50 years ago even. And I think it could enrich a spiritual cosmology so tremendously once people start to sort out what's going on there. 

I'm doing some work helping Lenny and Elizabeth Gibson working on something called Dreamshadow, which combines breathwork and process thought with the idea being that when Plato was doing philosophy there were the mystery schools which Lenny believes provided a whole spiritual formation alongside the intellectual activity which brought a lived philosophy, a depth of philosophy that wasn't just theoretical. 

And so Lenny’s goal is to bring that back into the university. So then when people are studying philosophy, they're not just sitting around trying to analyze the meaning of sentences like in analytic philosophy or dealing with material that’s very dry but they would actually be having depth experiences that are transformative and expanding their understanding of reality, along with an intellectual grasp of it.

JM: That's quite the project!

JB: Yeah, it’s not happening tomorrow haha. 

JM: Well, for some people it might be! 

JB: I mean actually it is already going on in the background. So you may as well confront it directly. 

JM: Yeah, that seems like something where bringing these two things together—first-hand psychedelic experiences and frameworks from process thought—could really help with moving towards that more existential, meaning-rich approach to philosophy, speculation, and just thinking in general—which we've kind of lost touch with the in our culture.

JB: Of course the really important question is, how do we realign the trajectory of human civilization so as not to destroy or blow up or otherwise end civilization—and taking out nature with us. And, you know, a lot of people hope that psychedelics could do that on their own and I think we're finally beginning to see the results of the people that took psychedelics in their twenties because they're now running businesses and in government. But unfortunately I think a lot of that was lost because people didn't have a way of integrating those experiences in a full way. So I think this process-transpersonal perspective might be valuable for this next generation for more deeply incorporating those experiences and having it transform them and the world that they're seeing.

JM: Definitely. One of the things I worry about, moreso in the cultural psychedelic space, is not having a sufficiently critical or intellectual approach to these experiences. It can be very easy to have these peak spiritual experiences and interpret them in potentially crude ways and fall into what people are calling spiritual bypassing nowadays.

It’s important to not only rely on these deep experiences in and of themselves, but to actually have some real tools to interpret them and play with them and in more dynamic and flexible ways that really allow you to to reap more potential from them compared to if you didn't have those kinds of frameworks. 

JB: Is that at all similar to Ken Wilbur's complaints that people take psychedelics and think they're enlightened but they haven't worked through much of the psychological garbage that's still, you know, clouding their vision of things?

JM: Yeah, absolutely. It's that, but also it’s easy to get some spiritual ego, to believe yourself to be enlightened after a deep experience like this. But then, when the rubber hits the road back in sober life, can you actually actualize that lived wisdom and translate that into good moral action in your life? Or do you just kind of withdraw into this spiritualism—this almost Gnostic perspective of ‘Oh, everything's already harmonious. People who are having bad experiences just don't understand that’? That can be very, very pathological. 

JB: Do you remember in my book where I mentioned being at that seminar over in Switzerland and this guy—I think he had taken some LSD—was sitting here going ‘All is One, it’s all One’? So I kept pressing him, ‘What do you mean by that? What does that mean exactly?’ I mean, that's interesting, but obviously on one hand, that can't be right. On the other hand it probably is right. 

That's another place I think Whitehead is so wonderful: his antinomies. ‘It is as true to say that the World is immanent in God, as that God is immanent in the World’ (PR, 348). And the same with the One in the many. So I think his ideas can inform these spiritual insights and experiences in such a helpful and intellectually rigorous way.

JM: Definitely so. Yeah, ‘All is One’—quite the classic phrase, eh? A lot of people have been thinking that for a long time. But if you don't have some of the resources for having a more dynamic understanding of what that might mean from someone like Plotinus, someone like Spinoza, someone like Whitehead—well, it can easily end up as a very world-renouncing kind of perspective. What of all this individuality and multiplicity we do experience every day in our empirical encounter with reality?

JB: Yeah, one idea I didn’t address in the book is the perspective of ‘as above, so below’, which for some reason or other has always rubbed me the wrong way. But with Whitehead's idea that all entities, all events are of the same essential structure of the many becoming one—then it makes sense from that perspective at least.

JM: Yes, and it adds a nice dynamism to that with the becoming aspect. Unity isn't something merely pre-existing that you tune back into, but something constructive and aspirational as well, which I think is better suited to a world where we obviously start with experiencing multiplicity. And oneness, unity, harmony—these things are certainly wonderful goals and aspirations but you approach it in a very different way coming from this more constructive process perspective than some of these other monistic or unitive metaphysical philosophies we've had through history where the the One is pre-existing and so pure and opposed to multiplicity and it’s presented that you need to get away from this world of appearances and return to this pure unity—something like that.

JB: In William James’ last book, A Pluralistic Universe he gets into transpersonal psychology and provides a fascinating critique of Hegel—though I'm sure a Hegelian would tell you he is wrong. But there’s this one point where he's critiquing the idea of the Absolute because he wants human-level experience to not just be absorbed into this Absolute and be considered as unreal because it's really only the Absolute that's real. So James is saying that—and he really comes upon Whitehead's solution—God can't just be everything. Instead, God would be receiving and would be feeling us after we have our experience. But then he goes on to say that he's got to give up that logic more generally because he thinks it’s illogical for one unit of consciousness to have its own reality and then be part of another—but right beforehand he just explained how that could work! But this was shortly before he died, so I think if he'd been around a few more years… Who knows, he might have become even more influential for Whitehead. Or maybe Whitehead read that chapter and said ‘Well you idiot! You have the answer right here!’ 

JM: To close out, what do you hope the impact of Processing Reality will be?

JB: The best thing that could happen would be if some super wealthy person read it, was fascinated and wanted to give money to the process movement. That would be the best one. Other than that, I would just hope that other people—in particular who are doing psychedelics—would find having a process framework really helpful to them for getting a larger coherent framework for understanding their experiences. And I sort of hoped that some people who are working in the field of consciousness studies or in neuroscience might take some of these ideas and run with them in the way I was talking about earlier—in reframing neuroscience in more of a process mode. 

JM: All sounds like really worthwhile impacts to me! Hopefully some of that can actualize down the line. 

JB: I hope so. I would feel good about that. Otherwise, I just did what I did where I could.

JM: Well, it's certainly a very interesting book, both in the theoretical stuff you do and in these wonderful anecdotes and experience reports that you present throughout, so I would definitely recommend it to anyone in either of these spaces—either psychedelics or process thought. 

JB: Thanks Jared. I appreciate you talking with me!