MYSTICAL EXPERIENCES IN A WHITEHEADIAN UNIVERSE
CONCRESCENT PROCESS AND NONORDINARY STATES
I believe that Whitehead’s metaphysics offers a systematic framework for understanding how nonordinary states—through heightening perceptual depth and sensitivity and by creating novel structures and forms of experience—allow us to penetrate more fully into the nature of the universe and the reality of human experience. Whitehead’s notion of causal efficacy is critical for developing a theory of nonordinary states, for it appears that the majority of methods for accessing nonordinary states directly or indirectly involve enhanced perception of the more primitive elements of experience. While strategies may vary, an underlying aim of these methods seems to be the increase in feeling, vitality, openness, sense of connectedness, and depth of perception that correlate with a heightened awareness of feelings of causal efficacy.
Whitehead’s theory of experience helps to explain why human awareness is blinded ordinarily to most of the reality felt through physical prehensions, and thus why enhancing awareness of feelings from the mode of causal efficacy through nonordinary states can provide experiences and data of an extraordinary nature. According to Whitehead’s analysis of experience: “Consciousness only illuminates the more primitive types of prehension so far as these prehensions are still elements in the products of integration. . . . For example, consciousness only dimly illuminates the prehensions in the mode of causal efficacy, because these prehensions are primitive elements in our experience” (PR 162). Since consciousness arises only in the final phase of concrescence, if at all, the dominating factors in consciousness tend to be the products of the later stages of concrescence, such as perceptions in the mode of presentational immediacy and other clear and distinct ideas. Conscious awareness of feelings in the mode of causal efficacy tends to be vague and indirect, being manifested most clearly during perception of bodily feelings and in short-term memory.
Whitehead’s metaphor of consciousness illuminating elements of the phases of concrescence provides a simple way of visualizing how nonordinary states influence this process: during nonordinary experiences, the range of conscious illumination is extended further into the earlier phases of concrescence, thereby bringing into awareness elements and feelings which are normally relegated to the dark, unconscious depths. Thus nonordinary states modify to some degree what Griffin refers to as “Whitehead's perceptual law” (as spelled out in Process and Reality): “‘that the late derivative elements are more clearly illuminated by consciousness than the primitive elements’” (WIC 64).
This first formulation—that nonordinary states help the illumination of consciousness to reach more deeply into the earlier phases of concrescence—requires some systematic clarification. According to Whitehead's theory, consciousness is the subjective form of intellectual feelings (that is, how intellectual feelings are felt). As intellectual feelings—and consciousness—cannot arise until certain types of processing have been achieved by the earlier phases of concrescence, it is technically inaccurate to visualize conscious awareness accomplishing its penetration of the unconscious depths by literally pushing back into the earlier phases of experience. However, this “illumination” of the unconscious dimensions of experience could be accomplished via a more complete appropriation of certain aspects of the earlier phases by the final conscious integration, thereby enhancing conscious awareness of the more primitive elements of experience. In other words, rather than picturing the light of consciousness being cast further back into the unconscious phases during nonordinary states, I am suggesting that nonordinary states shift the concrescent process in such a way as to allow normally unconscious aspects of experience to flow more easily into the illumination of consciousness. We know from process philosophy’s own account that full consciousness of the entire concrescent process is possible for at least one enduring actuality: namely, God. Thus it is also possible that human beings—by accessing the potential of nonordinary states to shift and enhance consciousness—may (in a comparatively minor way) be capable of a far greater awareness of the structure and content of the concrescent process than has been previously acknowledged by modern Western science and philosophy.
To more fully appreciate the nature of nonordinary states, it may prove useful to broaden Whitehead’s definition of consciousness by distinguishing between the sharp type of consciousness suggested by the affirmation-negation contrast, and the softer kind of open awareness often associated with nonordinary experiences. In this regard, John Cobb describes a receptive awareness that underlies consciousness and that is free from substantial symbolic ordering: “Conscious experience, then, includes both a diffuse receptive element and a significantly organized one” (SCE 27). Moreover, this “receptive awareness” is, according to Cobb, the more fundamental of the two modes of experience—metaphysically and genetically: “The evidence indicates that in the growth of conscious experience mere awareness is prior and primordial” (SCE 27). Thus at the fringe of everyday consciousness lies a domain of experience belonging technically to the unconscious phases of concrescence. Cobb argues that this normally unconscious fringe can be actively attended to, or “cultivated,” thereby bringing data from the margins into direct awareness without imposing normal conscious ordering upon it:
It is possible to cultivate an awareness, even an attentive awareness, of these data that is free from such organization. Husserl’s phenomenological method can be interpreted in these terms as can part of the technique of Zen Buddhism. All of this would be impossible if awareness were limited to what is significantly ordered (SCE 26-27).
I believe, therefore, that we are on the right track in pursuing the possibility that, during nonordinary states, modes of attention develop that facilitate an enhanced awareness of data or feelings from the earlier phases of experience, which usually are obscured by the organizational patterns and symbols of everyday conscious activity.
VARIETIES OF MYSTICAL EXPERIENCES
Whitehead’s metaphysical analysis of concrescence suggests the possibility of organizing nonordinary experiences into at least three basic categories. (A fourth category, concerning heightened levels of insight into ideas, forms, and possibilities, could easily be added to the list of basic categories.) Although the categories overlap somewhat, these distinctions are helpful for understanding why there occurs such a wide range of nonordinary experiences, and how these experiences come about. The three categories are: (1) enhanced awareness of feelings of causal efficacy emerging within the mode of presentational immediacy, (2) heightened awareness of the entities revealed directly through perception in the mode of causal efficacy, and, (3) enhanced intuition of the structure of experience itself.
In the first category of nonordinary experiences, conscious perception of the world becomes enlivened and deepened as feelings of causal efficacy enter into perception in the mode of presentational immediacy in a heightened manner. This heightened awareness of the qualities relating to causal efficacy—such as the intrinsic value, activity, and connectedness of reality—produces a conscious perception of a world that is alive, precious, and, in some way, deeply interrelated or “One.” It is as if one’s perceptions were saturated with a heightened intensity and depth of feeling. In addition, enhanced perceptions of God’s involvement in the formation of every concrescence may be transmuted into an awareness of a world filled by God’s presence. This intuition receives support from heightened feelings of the creative activity of all actual occasions, producing an apprehension of a spiritually vital and vibrant world. Grof speaks of this kind of perception as the immanence of God or spirit in the world. Also belonging to this category would be experiences related to an intuitive sense of a hidden meaning or profound value, which lies behind and informs the phenomenal world.
While category one involves the transformation and deepening of normal sensory perception, the second category is concerned more with the specific data revealed through an alternative mode of perception, that is, perception in the mode of causal efficacy. Instead of a flooding of conscious sense perception with the general feeling tones connected to the earlier phases of concrescence, in category two the individual opens up to a new mode of perceiving the universe that transcends normal sensory perception, although the data revealed may still be funneled through the familiar sensorial mediums. For example, God may “appear” as a visual and auditory hallucination—however, this is a “hallucination” only in the sense that the contiguous chain of physical events which normally mediates our sensory perception is incomplete. The critical point here is this: if the image in question does in fact correlate with a some past entity, then the perception is not a hallucination but rather a more or less accurate rendering of some actuality revealed through a perceptual mode other than sensuous perception. Thus the second category of nonordinary experiences is based upon direct physical prehensions of real entities and feelings that normally are hidden from our conventional modes of sensory perception; in the nonordinary state, data from these physical prehensions come into conscious awareness with greatly enhanced clarity and intensity. Possible examples of this type of phenomena include experiences of the body’s energy fields, telepathy, encounters with spiritual entities, and mystical experiences of God. Grof’s distinction of God as transcendent falls within this category, in that here we are looking at a direct, nonsensuous perception of God, versus the generalized sense of God’s presence flooding our everyday perceptual field, as occurs in category one.
The third category of nonordinary experiences involves enhanced awareness of the structure of experience itself. Category three includes meditational techniques aimed at uncovering the most fundamental dimensions of experience—for example, certain Buddhist methods—and, from a Whiteheadian perspective, should be expected to shed light on the “Category of the Ultimate,” that is, the problem of the One and the Many. In this third category, the central focus of experience is not on any particular mode of perception or type of data, but rather on the nature of the concrescent process in its own unfoldment. By Whitehead’s account, the fundamental unit of the universe is the actual occasion: a burst of experience composed of creatively synthesized feelings of past events. The actual occasion—the primary metaphysical reality of our universe—is the event underlying all human experience. It follows, therefore, that if human awareness can penetrate far enough into the depths of its own formative process, it will encounter structures of experience that transcend the merely personal and enter into the metaphysical. In other words, when subjective experience is stripped down to its essence, the bare bones of metaphysical structure are exposed.
I would next like to turn to some of the more common mystical experiences associated with the metaphysical structure of experience in order to see how a Whiteheadian interpretation can facilitate our understanding of these phenomena. Much of the discussion about mystical and nonordinary states concerns the notion of deeply experiencing the here-and-now. Interest in the here-and-now involves several levels—ranging from the benefits to be derived from focused attention on immediate experience, to the belief that the present moment is all that exists. Whitehead’s notion of the actual entity presents a philosophical basis for interpreting some of these claims. To begin with, the moment of concrescence itself provides a metaphysical exemplification of this “eternal moment”—as that which is out of time and existing in-itself. In its moment of self-creation, the actual entity exists out of time, contains the entire universe (in a sense), and stands as an exemplification of the ultimate unit of reality. I suggest that when nonordinary states generate an enhanced awareness of the structure of the moment of concrescence, these metaphysical factors enter into existential experience, resulting in such claims as: time does not exist, the present contains everything, and the here-and-now is Reality. These insights are quite close to certain aspects of Whitehead’s viewpoint, and might be formulated on the basis of mystical penetrations into the depths of a universe structured along the lines proposed by the philosophy of organism.
While the insights from nonordinary states frequently parallel the Buddhist description of the pure here-and-now experience as “perfect,” “timeless,” and “empty,” Whiteheadian analysis suggests that these views are incomplete and that a more complex interpretation is required—one which can incorporate these essential mystical insights, while also making room for those many other experiences from ordinary and nonordinary states that support the pragmatic and metaphysical reality of time and process. Cobb identifies below what is missing from the Buddhist analysis:
the Buddhist formulation, while valid, is one-sided. It is true that the here-now is a coalescence of elements which are themselves here-now. But it is also true that these elements are not simply located here-now. They witness here-now to their occurrence there-then. That is, my remembered past and the star I now see in the night sky are here-now in my present experience, but I feel them here-now as temporally past and spatially distant. For here-now to be Empty is for it to allow these elements their own integrity, which includes their having-been. They are here-now as what-has-been-there-then. It is for this reason that the Buddhist can also say that in knowing oneself one who is enlightened knows all things. But if so, then the past as the having-been of elements of the here-now coalescence is not illusory. Further, the future differs from both the here-now coalescence and the there-then as the not-yet. As claim and hope it is also ingredient in the coalescence with its own distinctive integrity.
More generally, the analysis of the dependent origination of all things does not demand a doctrine of pure immanence alone. What is immanent in this vision is by the same token transcendent, for what coalesces is not the coalescence itself but the elements each with their distinctive contribution to make (BD 115-16).
The Buddhist theory of the here-and-now, like Hume’s, tends to overlook both the objective status of the past causal efficacy that informs the moment of concrescence, and the moment’s necessary anticipation of the future. No matter how creative and egoless the occasion of experience may be, it is still synthesized out of the flood of past feelings, and flows into the universal creative advance.
“Being Here”—attending fully to the present moment of experience—can function also as a gateway to the transpersonal realm. It constitutes a critical shift away from Heidegger’s “thrownness” of Being and towards a reappropriation of one’s essential belonging and connectedness to the universe. Being Here completely—in body, feeling, and presence—is, paradoxically, a key to opening up to the possibility of mystical experiences involving the hidden depths of oneself and the universe, and the metaphysical reality of each moment as well.
One type of mystical opening into the metaphysical dimensions of reality is related to Whitehead’s ‘Category of the Ultimate’ (PR 21). The three components of this category are ‘many,’ ‘one,’ and ‘creativity.’ The ultimate metaphysical reality of each moment, of each here-and-now, is the creative activity whereby the many past entities are creatively synthesized into a new one, and are increased by this one, which then joins the ranks of the many. When this never-ending process of creative activity is directly experienced as the foundation of one’s own existence, it can be a moment of mystical liberation, as described here by R. D. Laing:
The experience of being the actual medium for a continual process of creation takes one past all depression or persecution or vain glory, past, even, chaos or emptiness, into the very mystery of that continual flip of nonbeing into being, and can be the occasion of that great liberation when one makes the transition from being afraid of nothing to the realization that there is nothing to fear (PE 42).
Another type of mystical insight arising out of a heightened awareness of the metaphysical structure of the momentary occasion is the experience that “all is One,” and that my moment of experience is “identical” with this One. From a Whiteheadian perspective, it is true that in each moment of concrescence the entire world exists as your own creation: in a real sense the universe is you. This insight reflects an important facet of the metaphysical structure of reality—each moment of existence is open to all that has come before it and constructs itself as a unified “One” through its response to this “All.” But this is only half of the story: for this universe that is your moment of creative experience is constructed out of entities that have their own existence and determining power, and furthermore, your momentary synthesis of the universe is destined to be superceded by other moments of experience that will include your moment as a part of their universal synthesis. Therefore, to conclude that any actual occasion is identical with, or exhaustively encompassing of, the entire universe ignores a crucial part of the metaphysical picture; there are many “Ones” in the universe, each of which is a limited perspectival integration of the many past moments of experience. We might say that the All is Many Ones. With Whitehead’s metaphysical scheme, it is possible to acknowledge the philosophical and experiential reality of mystical insights into the “oneness” of all things, without eliminating the value and the efficacy of the individual nor negating the reality of the many. (I should point out that this mystical feeling about the “oneness” of all things might arise also out of an enhanced intuition of the integrative activities of God’s consequent nature.)
Being fully present to the here-and-now can also be understood as a way of creating a heightened level of openness to experience, be it a mystical openness to the structure of existence, or an increased openness to the past universe and the entities composing it. This movement into openness entails releasing the space of conscious awareness from its usual concerns so that the feelings lurking below the threshold of consciousness have room to emerge out of the depths and into the light. The notion of openness being developed here closely resembles the Buddhist concept of Sunyata, or “Emptiness”—as it is often translated. Steve Odin argues that Herbert Guenther’s translation of Sunyata as “openness” is of critical import: “Guenther has boldly abandoned all traditional renditions of sunyata, especially those conveying negative purport, for the revolutionary phenomenological concept of “openness,” which emphasizes the experiential positiveness and perceptual expansiveness of the Buddhist term” (PMB 34). John Cobb has articulated a similar alternative understanding of Sunyata that helps to clarify its conventional translation as “Emptiness.” Cobb suggests conceiving of Sunyata as an openness or fullness—that is, as a receptive awareness and openness to things as they are in their full being:
Emptiness is not to be understood as a vacuum carefully shut off from the surrounding plenum. It is just the reverse. The idea of such a vacuum suggests precisely the self-existence which is wholly illusory. To be empty is to lack any boundaries, any determining content of one's own, any filter through which the world is experienced. To be empty is to be perfectly open to what is there, whatever that may be. It is to be completely defenseless and with nothing to defend. One is then perfectly full, for one is constituted by the dependent origination of the whole world. This process is ultimate reality, at once Nirvana and Samsara (BD 90).
Sunyata and Enlightenment are concerned with transforming the structure of experience itself, resulting in a radically new mode of being in the world. In contrast, other types of mystical experience are transformative by means of what is encountered during the experience, for example, some type of sacred or holy dimension of being. From a process perspective, the most general form of sacred intuition involves a subtle perception of a sense of “worth” underlying all experience—one not tied to any particular accomplishment, but an intrinsic sense of value in “existence for its own sake, of existence which is its own justification” (MT 109). Beyond this powerful, but vague, mystical intuition of the importance and meaning inherent in every moment of becoming, Whitehead’s cosmology supports the possibility and validity of mystical encounters revealing God’s direct influence on our lives. For according to process philosophy, God is a being who every moment influences human aims and experience at an unconscious level. And, as an entity in the universe, God must be prehended by every occasion. Thus mystical experiences may involve direct intuitions of some aspect of God’s nature or influence—and I am speaking here of a real perception of an entity co-existing in our universe—varying from a heightened awareness of the ‘initial aim’ provided by God, to a perception or feeling of God’s primordial or consequent nature. (Technically speaking, the initial aim is the actual occasion’s prehension of the relevant aspects of God’s primordial nature. But here I am arguing that mystical experiences involve a more powerful feeling of God’s dual natures, as well as a heightened sense of the meaning and importance of the initial aim.) This type of heightened perception of God’s nature could be conceived of as occurring via especially intense hybrid physical prehensions, that is, prehensions that feel the “mentality” of another entity—in this case, the “mind” of God.
Grof’s cartography of transpersonal experiences includes, at its furthest reaches, mystical encounters with God of just this kind. We next examine from a Whiteheadian perspective a few key categories from this cartography. The interface between Grof’s experimental phenomenology of nonordinary experiences and Whitehead’s metaphysics provides a fascinating example of how philosophy, psychology, and religion can intersect in such a way as to be mutually informative and corrective, providing a potentially deeper and more secure view into the depths of reality.
GROF’S FINDINGS ON THE FURTHEST REACHES OF EXPERIENCE
Through his decades of research, Grof has developed an extensive phenomenological mapping of the general range of transpersonal experiences that arise during nonordinary states of consciousness. Grof’s transpersonal cartography—and especially his data from the following three categories—offers empirical support for two of Whitehead’s more controversial views: that God is a real Entity within our universe, and that human beings have direct access to God’s experience. The hypothesized mode of access to God’s experience would be via hybrid physical prehensions, constituting a special type of telepathic communication: “telepathy” as mystical interaction and communion with God. In David Griffin’s words: “We can therefore take seriously claims for mystical experiences, understood as conscious experiences of a Holy Reality. The experience of God would, like telepathic interaction between humans, be present all the time; the only thing unusual about mystical experiences would be that in them this steady experience of God has risen to consciousness” (PPR 58).
I. Experience of the Demiurg and of Cosmic Creation
Let us turn first to Grof’s description of the Demiurg to see what characteristics relating to God are reported in this category of transpersonal experience:
In this type of experience, the subject has the feeling of encountering the Creator of the universe, or even of full identification with him. This can be accompanied by extraordinary insights into the process of creation, its motives, specific mechanisms, purpose, and problems. On this level, the Creator usually has many personal characteristics, although not necessarily an anthropomorphic form. It is possible to sense the forces that underlie and initiate the process of creation. Various subjects identified them as overabundance of generative energy, irresistible artistic impulse, boundless curiosity, passion for experimentation, thirst for knowledge or self-knowledge, pursuit of experience, immense love that wants to be expressed, or even flight from monotony and boredom. . . .
The Demiurg can be seen as the supreme force of existence, comparable to the concept of God in different religions. However, in some instances, it is one of the creators of many universes, or the creator of many universes (ASD 142-43).
These qualities match quite closely with Whitehead’s speculations about God’s nature, purpose, and motivations. For example, regarding God’s primordial nature, Whitehead writes:
The primordial appetitions which jointly constitute God’s purpose are seeking intensity, and not preservation. . . . His aim for [an occasion] is depth of satisfaction as an intermediate step towards the fulfilment of his own being. His tenderness is directed towards each actual occasion, as it arises.
Thus God’s purpose in the creative advance is the evocation of intensities (PR 105).
Comparing Whitehead’s speculations with Grof’s descriptions, it seems plausible that transpersonal intuitions of God’s search for richness of experience through the promotion of intense, novel experiences among its creatures might be consciously perceived by a human subject as the Demiurg’s “boundless curiosity,” “passion for experimentation,” or “pursuit of experience” (ASD 142). Vis-a-vis the Demiurg’s “immense love” and “artistic impulse,” Whitehead’s image of God’s attitude towards the world includes the qualities of tenderness, patience, and wisdom: God “does not create the world, he saves it: or, more accurately, he is the poet of the world, with tender patience leading it by his vision of truth, beauty, and goodness” (PR 346). Even though in Whitehead’s philosophy God is not the sheer creator of all that is, God does exemplify the “aboriginal instance” of creativity, acts as the storehouse of all potential forms, and “is the lure for feeling, the eternal urge of desire” (PR 344); thus, God may be perceived during nonordinary experiences as possessing an “overabundance of generative energy,” or as the “Creator of the universe” (ASD 142).
Before moving to Grof’s other two categories, I want to present an idea that I find useful for understanding the deepest levels of transpersonal experiences. Drawing upon Whitehead’s notion of consciousness “illuminating” the earlier phases of concrescence, mystical encounters with God can be imagined in terms of Illumination: referring to both the objective content and the subjective quality of the experience. This image can be particularly useful for clarifying the basic processes underlying the extraordinary phenomenology associated with mystical encounters with God. To help establish this point, I begin with an example from Grof’s account of a subject’s high dose LSD session, which Grof uses as an example of an encounter with the “Demiurg”:
What followed was a tremendous expansion of consciousness. I was out in interstellar space witnessing galaxies upon galaxies being created right in front of my eyes. I felt that I was moving faster than the speed of light. There were galaxies passing by me one after the other. I was approaching a central explosion of energy from which everything in the universe seemed to originate. It was the very Source of all that was created. As I moved closer and closer to this area, I felt the incandescent heat emanating from it. It was a gigantic furnace, the furnace of the universe.
The sensation of heat was growing to unbelievable proportions, as was the intensity of the light. I recognized that the burning I was experiencing was the burning of the Purifying Fire. As I moved closer, I sensed that my identity was shifting from being the manifestation of this Energy to being the Energy itself. It seemed that I momentarily entered the very core of this Universal Furnace of cosmic creation. The experience was ecstatic and filled me with a sense of Infinite Power (ASD 143).
I believe this account is representative of a tendency for subjects in mystical states of this type to “symbolize” their approach to God’s being in terms of moving towards, and sometimes into, a source of “hypercosmical light.”1 In this example, approaching and entering into God’s experience is symbolized as an encounter with the “Universal Furnace of cosmic creation.”
Another example of this “hypercosmical light,” this time drawn from nonetheless than Timothy Leary’s first LSD experience, may help suggest the power and prevalence of this particular image:
It came sudden and irresistible. An endless deep swamp marsh of some other planet teeming and steaming with energy and life, and in the swamp an enormous tree whose branches were foliated out miles high and miles wide. And then this tree, like a cosmic vacuum cleaner, went ssssuuuck, and every cell in my body was swept into the root, twigs, branches, and leaves of this tree. Tumbling and spinning, down the soft fibrous avenues to some central point which was just light. Just light, but not just light. It was the center of Life. A burning, dazzling, throbbing, radiant core, pure pulsing, exulting light. An endless flame that contained everything—sound, touch, cell, seed, sense, soul, sleep, glory, glorifying, God, the hard eye of God. Merged with this pulsing flame it was possible to look out and see and participate in the entire cosmic drama (HP 246).
Masters and Houston provide another example of illumination, also from an LSD session, in which the subject had, in the authors’ opinion, an authentic mystical experience. In this case, even though the phenomenology is somewhat different from the previous examples, we find again a radiant light or fire accompanying a sense of flowing towards and entering into God’s being. The account is reported in the subject’s own words:
“Although consciousness of self seemed extinguished, I knew that the boundaries of my being now had been dissolved and that all other boundaries also were dissolved. All, including what had been myself, was an ever more rapid molecular whirling that then became something else, a pure and seething energy that was the whole of Being. This energy, neither hot nor cold, was experienced as a white and radiant fire. There seemed no direction to this whirling, only an acceleration of speed, yet one knew that along this dynamic continuum the flux of Being streamed inexorably, unswervingly toward the One.
“At what I can only call the ‘core’ of this flux was God, and I cannot explain how it was that I, who seemed to have no identity at all, yet experienced myself as filled with God, and then as (whatever this may mean) passing through God and into a Oneness wherein it seemed God, Being, and a mysterious unnameable One constituted together what I can only designate the ALL” (VPE 308)
From a Whiteheadian perspective, this variety of illuminative experience originates when hybrid physical prehensions of God suddenly heighten dramatically in intensity and start to dominate the pattern of concrescent formation. This vastly increased flow of primitive, yet highly charged, feeling floods the subject with emotions and intuitions related to God’s being—which is archetypically experienced as a numinous, intense source of light and energy through which aspects of God’s essence and experience are revealed. It is possible that a critical juncture in this process might involve a shift from hybrid to pure physical prehensions of God, resulting in a more forceful and complete reception of God’s feelings into the subject’s occasions of experience. Also, the subject’s sense of inexorably streaming or speeding towards God, or Being, may reflect the psychophysical sensation of prehensions of God pouring into one's concrescent structure with greater and greater intensity and thus “pushing” or “aiming” the subject into an ever-increasing awareness of God’s presence.
In describing “illumination,” I have concentrated on the early phases of concrescence. Nevertheless, I should at least mention that the higher phases of symbolic and intellectual activity undoubtedly play a crucial role in this experience. Also, I want to emphasize that while I refer to this type of experience as symbolic, this term is not intended to impugn in any way the illuminative experience’s capacity to reveal accurate information about the objective nature of the cosmos. For, in Whitehead’s metaphysics, all higher experience is “symbolic.”
By this hypothesis, differing levels of approach and opening to God will tend to reveal different aspects or dimensions of God’s being. (Some of these different aspects are represented by Grof’s categories in this section.) Illumination seems to begin with a powerful sense of expansion and acceleration beyond one’s usual physical and psychological boundaries, and a movement towards and penetration into the deepest dimensions of reality. As one approaches this numinous source, experiences of the Demiurg—that is, God perceived as an independent entity—dominate conscious awareness. Upon passing into this “Light,” or Source of Being, experiences relating to identification with God’s inner nature or experience become the major themes of the mystical state. Grof’s next two categories offer evidence of these deeper penetrations, or openings, into God’s essential Being, and provide support for Whitehead’s analysis of God’s nature into dipolar aspects.
II. Experience of Cosmic Consciousness (or Universal Mind)
According to my Whiteheadian interpretation, Grof’s category of cosmic consciousness, or “Universal Mind,”2 encompasses those mystical states that involve direct intuitions of God’s conscious experience. The phenomenological data from this category supports Whitehead’s theory of a ‘dipolar,’ or dual nature, God. These nonordinary experiences reflect aspects of God’s primordial and consequent natures in their active involvement with the creative advance.
Even though Whitehead’s differentiation between God’s primordial and consequent natures is ultimately an abstraction from the essential unity characterizing all actual entities, the distinctions Whitehead draws between these two aspects of God are very important nonetheless for articulating some variations in emphasis that occur within this totality or wholeness of Becoming. For example, God’s primordial nature, as the graded envisagement of all potentiality, is infinite, “free, complete, primordial, eternal, actually deficient, and unconscious.” The consequent nature “originates with physical experience derived from the temporal world, and then acquires integration with the primordial side. It is determined, incomplete, consequent, ‘everlasting,’ fully actual, and conscious” (PR 345). By “everlasting,” Whitehead means that “there is no loss, no obstruction. The world is felt in a unison of immediacy” (PR 346).
Grof’s exemplar transpersonal experience from this category offers evidence in favor of Whitehead’s theological speculations, and provides an intriguing clue about the character of God’s experience. This excerpt is from the report of a subject who had a deep transpersonal experience under the influence of ketamine, a powerful inducer of nonordinary states.
In my previous psychedelic sessions, I had experienced and accepted philosophically the Hindu image of the universe as lila, or Divine Play. In this kind of cosmic game of hide and seek everything is on some level already known and has already happened. The only task for the individual is to lift the veil of ignorance and catch up. What I was experiencing now was new and very exciting. It seemed that true evolution was a real possibility and that each of us could play an important part in it. This evolution would lead into dimensions that I was not aware of in my everyday life and that I had not discovered in my previous nonordinary states of consciousness.
The movement was becoming faster and faster, until it reached what seemed like some ultimate limit. . . .
When the limit was transcended, the experience shifted dimensions in a way that is difficult to describe. Instead of movement in space, there seemed to be immense extension of consciousness. . . . Here seemed to be all the creative energy and intelligence of the universe as pure consciousness existing beyond time and space. It was entirely abstract, yet containing all the forms and secrets of creation (ASD 147).
Here we have, within a single transpersonal session, two very different impressions of the depth nature of reality: on the one hand, an evolving universe with the prospect of real novelty and adventure; on the other, an eternal envisagement encompassing all forms and possibilities. Intriguingly, these two aspects also characterize Whitehead’s theory of a dipolar God, whose consequent nature actively participates in the evolving universe, while the primordial nature represents God in solitary “contemplation” of the total order of potential forms.
From a Whiteheadian perspective, this subject’s experience represents a mystical penetration into God’s being, such that, initially, an intuition of the evolutionary impetus and world participation of God’s nature is revealed—this being followed by an even deeper revelation concerning God’s primordial envisagement of the realm of eternal objects. The subjective form of this realm, however, according to this subject’s experience, is not unconscious, although it is “entirely abstract.” This seems to suggest that God’s full nature—as embodied within God’s consequent synthesis—includes within itself a conscious vision of the primordial envisagement; this would serve to enrich God’s final satisfaction through the depth and intensity provided by this ultimate contrast between sheer possibility and accomplished fact.
III. The Supracosmic and Metacosmic Void
At the further reaches of mystical penetration into God’s nature, experiences occur which Grof describes in terms of the supracosmic and metacosmic Void. The data from this category points to the possibility that these experiences are the result of transpersonal encounters with the primordial nature of God and its primordial embodiment of creativity. In the following quotation, Grof summarizes the nature of these ultimate transpersonal experiences:
The experience of the Void is the most enigmatic and paradoxical of all the transpersonal experiences. It is experiential identification with the primordial Emptiness, Nothingness, and Silence, which seem to be the ultimate cradle of all existence. While it is the source of everything, it cannot be derived from anything else; it is the uncreated and ineffable Supreme. The terms supracosmic and metacosmic used by sophisticated subjects to describe this experience refer to the fact that this Void seems to be both supraordinated to and underlying the phenomenal cosmos as we know it.
The Void is beyond space and time, beyond form of any kind, and beyond polarities, such as light and darkness, good and evil, stability and motion, and ecstasy or agony. While nothing concrete exists in this state, nothing that is part of existence seems to be missing there either. This emptiness is thus, in a sense, pregnant with all of existence, since it contains everything in a potential form (ASD 147).
There exist numerous points of commonality between Grof’s characterization of the metacosmic Void and Whitehead’s explication of God’s primordial nature. For example, God’s primordial nature is devoid of consciousness—the Void is experienced as primordially empty and silent; the Void is “beyond polarities”—the primordial nature is “all-embracing, unbounded by contradiction” (PR 348); God’s primordial nature is ‘atemporal’ or ‘eternal,’ and “deflected neither by love, nor by hatred, for what in fact comes to pass” (PR 344)—the Void is beyond space and time, and beyond good and evil. There are further correlations between these two notions: God’s primordial nature is the “unlimited conceptual realization of the absolute wealth of potentiality,” but is deficiently actual (PR 343)—the Void is “pregnant with all of existence, since it contains everything in potential form.” And while the primordial nature transcends the actual universe, it also ingresses into every occasion, just as the Void is “supraordinated to and underlying the phenomenal cosmos.” With these considerations in mind, it seems reasonable to venture the hypothesis that certain nonordinary experiences involving the “Void” are actually transpersonal encounters with the primordial nature of God as illuminated through heightened hybrid physical prehensions, facilitated by a peculiar level of openness and effective contrast in the higher phases of concrescence.
Whitehead’s notion of creativity represents another point of similarity. Regarding the fundamental relationship between creativity and God, Whitehead writes: “The primordial nature of God is the acquirement by creativity of a primordial character” (PR 344). Transpersonal illumination of this primordial character of creativity might generate experiences such as those described by Grof in relation to the Void: experiences of the “primordial Emptiness, Nothingness, and Silence, which seem to be the ultimate cradle of all existence. While it is the source of everything, it cannot be derived from anything else; it is the uncreated and ineffable Supreme” (ASD 147). Even though creativity as a thing-in-itself is an abstraction (PR 7, 222), it nonetheless represents the fundamental metaphysical activity of the universe: it is the “universal of universals” (PR 21). Consequently, transpersonal perception of this Ultimate universal as revealed through its primordial embodiment may inspire a mystical sense of connection to the “cradle of existence” and to the “uncreated and ineffable Supreme.” Direct intuition of the creativity embodied within God’s primordial nature could be experienced also as a kind of emptiness—for creativity, in Whitehead’s system, constitutes the “formless ground of all existence” and is thus equivalent to “‘emptiness’ in Buddhist language” (PTB 232).
And finally, according to Grof, the Void is “the ultimate source of existence,” and the Universal Mind is its first manifestation or formulation (CG 6). Furthermore, “the Void and the Universal Mind are perceived as identical and freely interchangeable; they are two different aspects of the same phenomenon” (RHU 205). This rather paradoxical situation can be resolved by Whitehead’s notion of a dipolar God whose primordial nature is the storehouse of all possibility and the primordial embodiment of Creativity, and whose consequent nature is the conscious realization and transformation of the primordial nature’s influence on the world process. And, of course, the primordial and consequent natures really are “two different aspects of the same phenomena”: God.
CONCLUSION
The broader context for this essay is found in my conviction that Whitehead’s philosophy can offer a major contribution towards a new cosmology for the twenty-first century, especially when enriched by transpersonal psychology’s contributions regarding the depth dimensions and psycho-spiritual elements of our universe. Transpersonal psychology contains ideas, clues, and information vital to this new cosmology, for it represents aspects of experience and dimensions of the universe that were lost or suppressed during the rise of science and the modern era. These missing elements are crucial to any reapproachment with nature and for nurturing a spiritual orientation towards the universe, each other, and ourselves. Nonordinary experiences represent an alternative mode of perception into the depths of the universe and ourselves that is vital to human fulfillment and survival.
Process philosophy can help to ground, explicate, and unify the diverse transpersonal theories and phenomena, while transpersonal psychology helps to critique, fill in, and expand the Whiteheadian cosmology; together, they offer a vision of reality that incorporates the realms of philosophy, science, and religion. This type of unification, in Whitehead’s view, is the primary goal of philosophy: “Philosophy frees itself from the taint of ineffectiveness by its close relations with religion and with science, natural and sociological. It attains its chief importance by fusing the two, namely, religion and science, into one rational scheme of thought” (PR 15). By connecting religious intuitions to higher levels of meaning and value, philosophy safeguards these intuitions and feelings from misinterpretation and social exploitation. Whitehead might be speaking about certain religious and spiritual movements of today, when he writes:
Direct religious intuitions, even those of the purest origin, are in danger of allying themselves with lower practices and emotions which in fact pervade existing society. Religion lends a driving force to philosophy. But in its turn, Speculative philosophy guards our higher intuitions from base alliances by its suggestions of ultimate meanings, disengaged from the facts of current modes of behavior (AI 25).
Philosophy needs the power and depth of the transpersonal dimension, and transpersonal psychology requires the rational discipline and socially unifying influence of philosophy. In Corbin’s words: “A philosophy that does not culminate in a metaphysic of ecstasy is vain speculation; a mystical experience that is not grounded on a sound philosophical education is in danger of degenerating and going astray” (CI 20). I believe this fusion of Whiteheadian and transpersonal theories could make an important contribution towards a new cosmology for our world, one that could offer cultural orientation and direction through the experiential power and rational clarity of its spiritual vision.
NOTES
1. The term hypercosmical light is borrowed from Olaf Stapledon, who so brilliantly describes “illuminative” encounters with God in his visionary novel, Star Maker:
For now it seemed to me . . . that I suddenly outgrew the three-dimensional vision proper to all creatures, and that I saw with physical sight the Star Maker. I saw, though nowhere in cosmical space, the blazing source of the hypercosmical light, as though it were an overwhelmingly brilliant point, a star, a sun more powerful than all suns together. . . . And in that moment I knew that I had indeed seen the very source of all cosmical light and life and mind; and of how much else besides I had as yet no knowledge (SM 218-19).
2. In his essay, “LSD and the Cosmic Game,” Grof uses these terms interchangeably, while in Realms of the Human Unconscious, this category is called “Consciousness of the Universal Mind” (RHU 203).
REFERENCES
AI Alfred North Whitehead, Adventures of Ideas (1933). New York: The Free Press, 1967.
ASD Stanislav Grof, The Adventure of Self-Discovery: Dimensions of Consciousness and New Perspectives in Psychotherapy and Inner Exploration. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1988.
BD John B. Cobb, Jr, Beyond Dialogue: Toward a Mutual Transformation of Christianity and Buddhism. Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1982.
CG Stanislav Grof, “LSD and the Cosmic Game: Outline of Psychedelic Cosmology and Ontology.” Revised and expanded version of a paper published in the Journal for the Study of Consciousness 5, no. 165 (1972-73).
CI Henry Corbin, Creative Imagination in the Sufism of Ibn 'Arabi.(1969). Trans. by Ralph Manheim. Princeton: Princeton/Bollingen Paperback printing, 1981.
HP Timothy Leary, High Priest. Cleveland: World Publishing Company, 1968.
MT Alfred North Whitehead, Modes of Thought (1938). New York: The Free Press, 1968.
PE R. D. Laing, The Politics of Experience. New York: Ballantine Books, 1968.
PMB Steve Odin, Process Metaphysics and Hua-yen Buddhism: A Critical Study of Cumulative Penetration vs. Interpenetration. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1982.
PPR David Ray Griffin, “Parapsychology, Philosophy, and Religion: A Whiteheadian Postmodern Perspective” (original version). A revised version of this essay has been published in The Journal of the American Society for Psychical Research 87, no. 3 (July 1993), 217-88, as “Parapsychology and Philosophy: A Whiteheadian Postmodern Perspective.”
PR Alfred North Whitehead, Process and Reality; An Essay in Cosmology (1929). Corrected edition: edited by David Ray Griffin and Donald W. Sherburne. New York: The Free Press, 1978
PTB William A. Beardslee, “Process Thought on the Borders Between Hermeneutics and Theology.” Process Studies 19, no. 4 (Winter 1990), 230-34.
RHU Stanislav Grof, Realms of the Human Unconscious: Observations from LSD Research. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1976
SCE John B. Cobb, Jr, The Structure of Christian Existence (1967). New York: Seabury paperback edition, 1979.
SM Olaf Stapledon, Star Maker (1937). Los Angeles: Jeremy P. Tarcher, 1987.
VPE R. E. L. Masters and Jean Houston, The Varieties of Psychedelic Experience. New York: Dell Publishing Co, 1966.
WIC David Ray Griffin, “What Is Consciousness and Why Is It So Problematic?,” Cultivating Consciousness: Enhancing Human Potential, Wellness, and Healing, edited by K. Ramakrishna Rao. Westport, CT: Praeger Publishers, 1993.
