Introduction

Alfred North Whitehead (1861–1947) developed one of the most profound expressions of a dynamic and experiential universe in the history of philosophy. Overcoming the inadequacies of “scientific naturalism,” with its mechanism and materialism, his “philosophy of organism” is remarkably inclusive in scope, incorporating not only the best of twentieth-century science but also perennial forms of aesthetic, moral, and religious experience belonging to the cosmological witness of the human condition (Whitehead 1967a). For decades, process philosophers and theologians have mined the insights of Whitehead’s “radical empiricism” (as indebted to William James) with the conviction that his “panexperientialist” metaphysics sheds light not only on mundane experience but also various forms of exceptional experience (Griffin 1998, 2022). In doing so, they have reasserted his conviction that “[t]he rejection of any source of evidence is always treason to that ultimate rationalism which urges forward science and philosophy alike” (Whitehead 1929, 50).

Of particular relevance in this regard is Whitehead’s wilder doctrine of non-sensory perception. Contrary to modern dogmas of sensate empiricism, which equate perception with sense perception, and thereby exclude (or explain away) exceptional knowledge and/or experience by definition, Whitehead argues that the clarity and distinctness of our conscious sense perceptions are a high abstraction from a more fundamental non-conscious and non-sensory perception of a vast wilderness of local and cosmic relations (Whitehead 1985, 1978, chap. VIII). What resides “out there” beyond and below the confines of sense perception? Although Whitehead emphasizes the necessity of non-sensory perception to satisfy commonsense presuppositions of science and philosophy, he remained open to evidence suggesting that insights, elements, or entities of this wilderness, usually hidden within its depths, can rise to the level of consciousness in certain exceptional moments. Indeed, process philosophers and theologians have extended and applied the wild(er)ness of Whitehead’s dual theory of perception to various mystical, parapsychological, and psychedelic states and drawn wide-ranging insights from ancient spiritual wisdom to contemporary neuroscience, where mind and brain are not identical but interact through transmissive or permissive relations. What is more, they have variously discussed the nature of spiritual practice as a means by which we render more transparent the wilderness below waking sense perception.

The purpose of this article is to elucidate and expand upon these points and therefore demonstrate the fruitfulness of Whitehead’s doctrine of perception for exceptional forms of experience. I begin by introducing Whitehead’s work and influence and some of the characteristic ideological transitions associated with his thought. This will help set the context for those unfamiliar with Whitehead’s general philosophical vision. I then draw attention to his methodology as a form of radical empiricism beyond that of James and review some of his central critiques of philosophy and science in light of them. Against the problematic modern assumption that all experience is mediated through the clarity of conscious sense perception, I then move to articulate his wilder doctrine of the primacy of non-sensory perception, of which conscious sense perception is a heightened, albeit narrower, delimitation, showing that this dual theory of perception provides a viable conceptual means of approaching exceptional forms of experience. Turning to recent examples of process philosophers applying Whitehead’s doctrine of perception, I focus on religious or mystical experiences of God, paranormal or parapsychological phenomena (PSI), and psychedelic experiences. Finally, I connect the discussion to recent neuroscience, suggesting that the hemisphere hypothesis of Iain McGilchrist may provide neuroscientific support for Whitehead’s dual theory of perception, including the conviction that the function of the brain with respect to the mind is not to produce the mind as such but to limit its inclusion so that waking consciousness is actually possible. I conclude by briefly commenting on the nature and importance of spiritual practice.

Whitehead’s Work and Influence: Context and Philosophical Transition

Whitehead was born on February 15, 1861, in Ramsgate, Isle of Thanet, in Kent, England. After his adolescent years at Sherborne Boarding School (1875–80), his scholarly life traversed three main periods, each associated with a respective institution. The first was Trinity College at the University of Cambridge in England (1884–1910), where, being first and foremost a mathematician, he focused upon various issues related to mathematics and logic. Of particular note in this period is the beginning of his ten-year collaboration with his student and later colleague Bertrand Russell (1872–1970) on the three volumes of Principia Mathematica (1910, 1912, 1913), which attempted (unsuccessfully) to develop a logical foundation for mathematics. “The ambition of the Principia is to explain how the whole of mathematics can be developed from the concept of classes and correlations alone,” Rémy Lestienne states (2020, 12). According to Victor Lowe (1985, 291), Kurt Gödel’s (1931) famous incompleteness theorem “proved the existence of an undecidable formula in any formal system adequate to number theory, and the impossibility of proving the consistency of such a system within the system.”

The next period was that of University College, London (1910–24), in which Whitehead (1967c, 1–2) expanded his focus to different problems in physics, philosophy of science, and the philosophy of education, arguing that proper education is always a protest against “inert ideas” with the purpose of guarding “against mental dry rot.” Notable texts in this period include An Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Natural Knowledge (1919), The Concept of Nature (1920), and The Principle of Relativity (1922), in which he provides an alternative to Einstein’s theory of relativity, protesting not against relativity as such but against Einstein’s inadequate philosophical assumptions. In Whitehead’s (1964a, x) judgment, Einstein’s assumptions had “cramped the development of his brilliant mathematical method in the narrow bounds of a very doubtful philosophy.”

His final period—and most significant for our purposes—was that of Harvard University, Cambridge, Massachusetts in the United States (1924 onward). It was a dreary day in England when a letter arrived inviting Whitehead to occupy the Chair of Philosophy at Harvard University. He was sixty-three years old and had never taught a course in philosophy, but he always wanted to. Whitehead’s wife Evelyn read the invitation herself before handing it to him (he was sitting fireside). After he read it, she asked: “What do you think of it?” He responded: “I would rather do that than anything in the world” (Price 2001, 7–8). Whitehead and Evelyn would soon board the SS Devonian to Massachusetts and begin what would become the most important and productive period of his scholarly life: the “Harvard Period.” As Russell (2021, 84) would later write: “In England, Whitehead was regarded only as a mathematician, and it was left to America to discover him as a philosopher.”

It was during these Harvard years that Whitehead explored a wide range of themes in the form of lectures and books—from the history and philosophy of science to the growth of civilization, the philosophy of history, the philosophy of education, and most rigorously, a comprehensive vision of reality informed by the best of twentieth-century science, including quantum and relativity theories, developmental biology, psychology, and—lord of all—cosmology. This constellation of topics found expression in a variety of seminal publications that would inspire generations of thinkers—“process philosophers” and “process theologians”—to apply Whitehead’s ideas to a host of issues in philosophy, science, religion, education, ecology, and many other fields.

Among these publications are Science and the Modern World (1925), Process and Reality (1929), and Adventures of Ideas (1933). These three books, Whitehead (1967b, vii) states, “are an endeavor to express a way of understanding the nature of things, and to point out how that way of understanding is illustrated by a survey of the mutations of human experience.” These are not the only texts from his Harvard period. There is also Religion in the Making (1926), Symbolism: Its Meaning and Effect (1927), The Function of Reason (1929), The Aims of Education (1929), Modes of Thought (1938), and finally, Essays in Science and Philosophy (1947), published just before his passing in 1947 from a cerebral hemorrhage at the age of eighty-six.

For Whitehead, to speak of “a way of understanding the nature of things” is to speak of the need for a new metaphysics. This was not some personal need for him but a result of the fact that the advance of the sciences (e.g., physics, developmental biology, psychology, physiology) had shown that the dominant form of mechanistic metaphysics associated with what he termed “scientific materialism” was woefully inadequate. “The progress of science has now reached a turning point,” he states. “The old foundations of scientific thought are becoming unintelligible” (Whitehead 1967a, 16). Writing in 1925, he communicates these “old foundations” in the following way:

There persists, however, throughout the whole period the fixed scientific cosmology which presupposes the ultimate fact of an irreducible brute matter, or material spread throughout space in a flux of configurations. In itself such a material is senseless, valueless, purposeless. It just does what it does do, following a fixed routine imposed by external relations which do not spring from the nature of its being. It is this assumption that I call ‘scientific materialism.’ Also it is an assumption which I shall challenge as being entirely unsuited to the scientific situation at which we have now arrived. (Whitehead 1967a, 17)

Indeed, Whitehead saw the fall of “scientific materialism” as an opportunity to develop a new “organic realism” as a part of a wider “philosophy of organism” better suited to what the sciences—especially physics—were revealing. Note his emphasis:

In the language of physical science, the change from materialism to ‘organic realism’—as the new outlook may be termed—is the displacement of the notion of static stuff by the notion of fluent energy. Such energy has the structure of action and flow, and is inconceivable apart from such structure . . . But what has vanished from the field of ultimate scientific conceptions is the notion of vacuous material existence with passive endurance…Some features of the physical world can be expressed in that way. But the concept is useless as an ultimate notion in science and in cosmology. (Whitehead 1978, 309)

This transition from scientific materialism to organic realism can be expressed in the general analogical transition from a mechanistic conception of nature to an organic conception of nature. As R. G. Collingwood (1960, 170) demonstrates, Whitehead represents the modern renewal of the ancient Greek vision of nature as a vast organism: “Thus the cycle of cosmological thought in the modern world, from Descartes and Newton to Whitehead, recapitulates the cycle running from Thales to Aristotle. But that recapitulation is not a mere repetition.”

Although the rise of modern science vanquished this organic conception through the mechanism and materialism of René Descartes and Isaac Newton, science had facilitated its novel return. Collingwood (1960, 166–67) clarifies, “When Whitehead constantly asserts that reality is an organism, he does not mean to reduce all reality to biological terms; he only means that every existing thing resembles a living organism in the fact that its essence depends, not on its components merely, but on the pattern or structure in which they are composed.” Rather than a reduction of reality to that of biological terms, Whitehead (1967a, 103) generalized biology, holding that “[s]cience is taking on a new aspect which is neither purely physical, nor purely biological. It is becoming the study of organisms. Biology is the study of the larger organisms; whereas physics is the study of the smaller organisms.” A fuller thematic expression of the transition from a mechanistic to an organic universe is expressed in Table 1.

This transition is not merely analogical for Whitehead, but ontological. In other words, it also necessitates a deeper transition from substance ontology to process ontology. Collingwood (1960, 167) continues: “Nature, for Whitehead, is not just organism, it is also process. The activities of the organism are not external accidents, they are united into a single complex activity which is the organism itself…This is the basic principle grasped by him with unusual tenacity and clearness, and taught to him, by his own account, by modern physics with its new theory of matter. The process of nature is not a merely cyclic or rhythmical change, it is creative advance.” Table 2 expresses some of the thematic tenants involved in the transition from a substance to a process ontology.

Although elements of process have been a part of the Western philosophical tradition since Heraclitus, the historical trend of philosophy largely took the path of Parmenides and the Atomists. Whitehead (1978, 208, 309), however, stands in the Heraclitean tradition and seeks to reawaken attention to “one chief task of metaphysics,” namely, the elucidation that “all things flow.” “Reality is not static,” he states, “it is a process of becoming. The fluent character of the togetherness of things was already emphasized in Greek philosophy: All things flow, said Heraclitus. Indeed the fact is too obvious to escape notice. But unfortunately, things which are too obvious often escape receiving their due emphasis” (Henning and Petek 2021, 50).

Generally speaking, then, to be a process thinker is to recognize the elements on the right side of the transitional list in Table 2 as primary and those on the left side as secondary. Moreover, it is Whitehead’s unique expression of these transitions, with their various implications, that is at the heart of modern process philosophy and theology and the variety of interdisciplinary concerns extending from them, from ecological thought (Cobb 1972) and environmental ethics (Henning 2024) to philosophy of religion (Griffin, 2001), quantum mechanics (Epperson 2004; Eastman and Keeton 2003), cosmology (Davis et al. 2022; McHenry 2015), theoretical biology (Koutroufinis and Araujo 2023; Cobb 2008), education (De Jonghe 2022), economics (Daly and Cobb 1994), and political philosophy (Dombrowski 2019). As we proceed, we will see how and why Whitehead’s thought has also inspired a variety of contributions engaging exceptional forms of experience. Before we come to this, however, I first need to articulate the central conviction from which his methodology extends, including some of his related critiques of modern philosophy and science.

Empiricism Radicalized: Methodology and Critique

Whitehead was a great admirer of William James, and he stood in his tradition of “radical empiricism” at Harvard University. Whitehead (1967a, 2–3) praised James as an “adorable genius” because he never let go of “irreducible and stubborn facts” of human experience. As Whitehead (1968, 3) states: “His intellectual life was one protest against the dismissal of experience in the interest of system.” Indeed, according to James (1976, 22), “[t]o be radical, an empiricism must neither admit into its constructions any element that is not directly experienced, nor exclude any element that is directly experienced.” With James, Whitehead (1967b, 226) too protests the dismissal of any experience, insisting that the “whole of experience” must be taken into account such that “nothing can be omitted.”

What is it that is so special about human experience for Whitehead? In the first place, the specialness of human experience should not be characterized anthropocentrically or anthropomorphically. Rather, it is rooted to the claim that human experience is an exemplification rather than an exception to the nature and character of this universe and what it is doing. As I argued in a previous article, human experience is an anthropocosmic fact of nature (Davis 2025). “It is a false dichotomy to think of Nature and Man,” Whitehead (1967b, 78) states. “Mankind is that factor in Nature which exhibits in its most intense form the plasticity of nature.” Moreover, he reminds us that “any doctrine which refuses to place human experience outside nature, must find in descriptions of human experience factors” relevant to “less specialized natural occurrences” (Whitehead 1967b, 184–85). Put differently, as long as human experience is part and parcel of nature, then there is a continuum of experience in nature. Experience, in other words, is a mode of revelation for Whitehead (1967a, 18): “To know that our experience, dim and fragmentary as it is, yet sounds the utmost depths of reality.” It is for this reason, for Whitehead (1967b, 226), that “nothing can be omitted” in the philosophical endeavor:

Nothing can be omitted, experience drunk and experience sober, experience sleeping and experience waking, experience drowsy and experience wide-awake, experience self-conscious and experience self-forgetful, experience intellectual and experience physical, experience religious and experience sceptical, experience anxious and experience care-free, experience anticipatory and experience retrospective, experience happy and experience grieving, experience dominated by emotion and experience under self-restraint, experience in the light and experience in the dark, experience normal and experience abnormal.

Process philosophers have extended this radically empirical method to exceptional forms of experience, from religious and mystical forms of experience (Cargas and Lee 1976; Dombrowski 2023) to various modalities of parapsychological experience (Griffin 1997; Kelly et al. 2009; Buchanan and Aanstoos 2020), Jungian forms of spirituality (Kling 2020), and psychedelics (Buchanan 2022; Sjöstedt-Hughes 2021; Hauskeller and Sjöstedt-Hughes 2022).

Given Whitehead’s (1978, 337) commitment to the revelatory nature of human experience, we can already anticipate one of his central critiques of both philosophy and science, namely, evidential narrowness extending from arbitrary limitations in thought:

The chief danger to philosophy is narrowness in the selection of evidence. This narrowness arises from the idiosyncrasies and timidities of particular authors, of particular social groups, of particular schools of thought, of particular epochs in the history of civilization. The evidence relied upon is arbitrarily biased by the temperaments of individuals, by the provincialities of groups, and by the limitations of schemes of thought.

A default materialist, atheist, and sensationist metaphysics, for example, must necessarily exclude (or explain away) a whole range of both mundane and exceptional data that transcends what its limitations permit. As Whitehead (1978, 17) insists, however: “Philosophy destroys its usefulness when it indulges in brilliant feats of explaining away.”

To give one potent example we will come to later, if the mind is completely reducible to brain activity, then the death of the brain requires the concomitant death of the mind, rendering the postulate of continuing postmodern adventures impossible. Nevertheless, various lines of counterevidence abound that challenge the viability of reductive materialism, including evidence of near-death experiences. We will see later that Whitehead was open to this evidence, as are process philosophers and theologians. The point stands for Whitehead (1929, 50): “The rejection of any source of evidence is always treason to that ultimate rationalism, which urges forward science and philosophy alike.” His further statements expand upon these intuitions on behalf of the wider inclusion of countervailing evidence.

It is easy enough to find a theory, logically harmonious and with important applications in the region of fact, provided that you are content to disregard half your evidence. Every age produces people with clear logical intellects, and with the most praiseworthy grasp of the importance of some sphere of human experience, who have elaborated, or inherited, a scheme of thought which exactly fits those experiences which claim their interest. Such people are apt resolutely to ignore, or to explain away, all evidence which confuses their scheme with contradictory instances. What they cannot fit in is for them nonsense. An unflinching determination to take the whole evidence into account is the only method of preservation against the fluctuating extremes of fashionable opinion. This advice seems so easy, and is in fact so difficult to follow. (Whitehead 1967a, 187)

With respect to exceptional experiences, James (1960, 42), who was an active member of the American Society for Psychical Research, shares Whitehead’s convictions: “Science, so far as science denies such exceptional occurrences, lies prostrate in the dust for me; and the most urgent intellectual need which I feel at present is that science be built up again in a form in which such things may have a positive place.” James of course took important steps toward building up science and philosophy in this way, but he also saw that deeper constructive work was required. It is here that process philosophers have pointed to the wider resources of Whitehead’s philosophy. As David Ray Griffin (2022, 41) states, “Although James himself went part of the way to articulating such a position, the philosopher who most fully developed it was Alfred North Whitehead.” This conviction is also shared by Edward Kelly, who leads research at the Division of Perceptual Studies at the University of Virginia: “[Whitehead’s] work in fact represents the most systematic effort to date to elaborate a comprehensive metaphysical system specifically intended to be compatible with both the new basic science and with all available facts of human experience” (Kelly et al. 2009, 633).

While this article is not the place to review the comprehensiveness of Whitehead’s metaphysical vision, it is worthwhile, in view of his doctrine of non-sensory perception, to lay out a few bold points of his event-based ontology of experience and becoming. This ontology is based in:

• The primacy of events. The most fully actual/real entities constituting reality are momentary energetic events, not things (“matter”) that endure through time.

• Irreducible experience. These events are not vacuous, but experiential happenings. Whitehead (1978, 18) calls them “actual entities,” or “occasions of experience,” and they are “the final real things of which the world is made up”—a position now known as “panexperientialism.”

• Relational constitution. Each event is internally constituted by its relations to other events. Nothing exists in isolation; to be is to be related.

• Active becoming. The “happening” of these experiential events is their becoming (or “concrescence”)—their process of coming into being in response to what the past gives and what the future offers.

• Receptive and anticipatory feelings. Becoming is based on interior feelings (or “prehensions”) of the settled past as something to be received and conceptual feelings of possible futures as something to be achieved.

• Dipolarity. Every event is “dipolar,” having both a physical pole oriented toward the past and a mental pole oriented toward the future. With the physical pole, the event receives efficient causation; with the mental pole, it introduces final causation.

• Creativity and intrinsic aim toward value. Reality is grounded in an ultimate principle of creative advance whereby “[t]he many become one and are increased by one” (Whitehead 1978, 21). Each event integrates what it inherits and what it envisions in pursuit of intensity, harmony, or value.

What we find here is a basic outline expressing a “transition from space and matter, as the fundamental notions to process conceived, as a complex activity with internal relations between its various factors” (Whitehead 1968, 145). “For the modern view,” Whitehead (1968, 146) states, “process, activity, and change are the matter of fact. At an instant there is nothing. Each instant is only a way of groping matter of fact . . . Thus all interrelations of matters of fact must involve transition in their essence. All realization involves implication in the creative advance.” As we move now to a deeper elucidation of Whitehead’s doctrine of non-sensory perception, we will find these points coming to life in different ways.

Whitehead’s Wilder Doctrine of Non-Sensory Perception: Prehensive Doctrine of Perception

Whitehead’s (1967b, 177–78) criticism of modern epistemology concerns its exclusive attention to sensory perception, namely, the presupposition that “all perception is by the mediation of our bodily sense-organs, such as eyes, palates, noses, ears, and the diffused bodily organization furnishing touches, aches, and other bodily sensations.” Put differently, what Whitehead calls the “sensationalist doctrine” consists in the claim that our experience of the world beyond our minds is only by means of our bodily sensory organs—the immediacy of our five senses (Whitehead 1967b, 163, 178, 224, 279–80). Indeed, this doctrine is based in the dogma that our only mode of perception is what Whitehead (1985, 13) calls “perception in mode of presentational immediacy”—that is, what is immediately presented, with clarity and distinctness, to our senses. He takes aim at Descartes, John Locke, and David Hume in particular:

When Descartes, Locke, and Hume undertake the analysis of experience, they utilize those elements in their own experience which lie clear and distinct, fit for the exactitude of intellectual discourse. It is tacitly assumed . . . that the fundamental factors will ever lend themselves for discrimination with particular clarity. This assumption is here directly challenged. (Whitehead 1967b, 175)

Why should we challenge the sensationalist doctrine of perception in the mode of “presentational immediacy”? For Whitehead and process philosophers more generally, there are at least two points worth emphasizing.

In the first place, a host of scientific and philosophical problems result from the claim that all perception is reducible to the immediacy of perceived sense data (Whitehead 1985). While time forbids exhaustive treatment of these problems, Griffin, in elucidating Whitehead’s thought, has demonstrated at length that reliance on pure sense perception alone cannot justify a host of “hardcore common-sense notions” presupposed by both science and philosophy alike. Among these are:

• the reality of an external world

• the reality of the past (and therefore time)

• the reality of causation and induction

• the reality of mathematical objectivity (platonic realism)

• the reality of logic

• the reality of axiological objectivity (platonic value realism) (Griffin 2000, 2001).

While each of these notions is arguably presupposed by human experience, they cannot find justification in sense data alone. This is a problem Whitehead (1968, 133) refused to take lightly: “My quarrel with modern epistemology concerns it exclusive stress upon sense perception for the provision of data respecting nature. Sense perception does not provide the data in terms of which we interpret it.” He continues, “In fact science conceived as resting on mere sense perception, is bankrupt, so far as concerns its claim to self-sufficiency” (Whitehead 1968, 154). It is “bankrupt” because, while it inevitably presupposes the reality of the aforementioned points, it has attached itself to a narrow epistemology that is unable to account for them.

In addition to creating severe problems for both science and philosophy, the sensationalist doctrine of “presentational immediacy” also ignores evidence to the contrary. Whitehead (1967b, 180) rightly states: “If we discover such instances of non-sensuous perception, then the tacit identification of perception with sense-perception must be a fatal error barring the advance of systematic metaphysics.” Arguably, it will also be a fatal error barring any rational approach to exceptional experiences. A natural question immediately follows: Can we detect any instances of non-sensory perception? Whitehead’s answer is not only yes but also that these “instances” are thoroughly mundane in nature.

The reason this mundanity is important for this discussion is because one might plausibly hold that any affirmation of non-sensory perception is simply (and unjustly) biased toward the justification of exceptional forms of experience. Whitehead held no bias in this way, however. He remained principally concerned with a more adequate epistemology that can justify the commonsense presuppositions of science and philosophy. Yet it just so happens that if we are able to identify “instances” of non-sensory perception on mundane levels, then we can also apply this data to realms of exceptional experience. This is my approach here and in the following section.

What then are some examples Whitehead and process philosophers give for mundane “instances of non-sensuous perception?” The first concerns the non-sensory perception of our bodily functioning. Consider the fact that when you see the beauty of the ocean, for example, you are not seeing your eyes—you are seeing with and through them. When you hear your favorite song, you are not hearing your ears—you are hearing with and through them. Similarly, when you smell your favorite meal, you are not smelling your nose—you are smelling with and through it. Griffin (2001, 62) remarks:

Our awareness of our body’s casual efficacy for our experience is due to our nonsensory perception. This perception is obviously not a form of sensory perception. I do not see my eyes or hear my ears. My capacity to enjoy sights and sounds through my eyes and ears depends upon my more basic perception of my body through which I receive the information these sensory organs have brought in from the world beyond my body. My most direct perception of my body, furthermore, is not my perception of these organs but my perception of my brain.

As Whitehead (1978, 171) states: “Common sense, physical theory, and physiological theory, combine to point out a historic route of inheritance . . . first physically in the external environment, then physiologically—through the eyes in the case of visual data—up the nerves, into the brain.”

It is apparent that these statements by Griffin and Whitehead are a contradiction of the modern Cartesian dogma that the mind experiences but the body does not. To the contrary, Whitehead (1968, 21) would remind us that our bodies are essentially geography—as natural as “a river, or a mountain, or a cloud.” Our bodies are the most intimate part of the world that we know—and they are thoroughly experiential in nature. In every moment, our bodies receive incomprehensible amounts of data from the surrounding local and cosmic world. In truth, the whole universe begets us moment by moment, but we are not conscious—at least most of the time—of the impress of this cosmological gestalt. If we suddenly were, one can imagine this might be akin to a kind of psychedelic experience. We will revisit this later.

One way Whitehead speaks of the experiential nature of the body is through the “withness of the body” in experience. This “withness,” he states, assumes that “the predominant basis of perception is [non-sensory] perception of the various bodily organs, as passing on their experience by channels of transmission and enhancement” (Whitehead 1978, 312, 119). Our body in this regard is a “complex amplifier” that raises and, through its complex channels of transmission, filters out our non-sensory, cosmo-primal prehensions into the clarified volume of our conscious sense perceptions (Whitehead 1978, 119). We are not consciously aware of this “miraculous” coordination performed by our body, but this coordination is such as to “pour its inheritance into various regions within the brain,” thereby making conscious sense perception possible (Whitehead 1967b, 189). We will come to the function of the brain later, but the incredible role of the body and its coordinated organs is the receptive funneling of the sheer cosmological width of our non-sensory relatedness to the universe into the narrowness of our waking sense perception of our immediate environment. The prehensive functioning of our bodily sense organs does not depend upon our consciousness; however, our consciousness does depend upon the miracle of this world-to-body-to-brain complex. The data offered by the world is initially incredibly wide; it is narrowed by its entrance into the body and narrowed still further by its entrance into the brain, which facilitates the clarity and distinctness of conscious sense perception.

A second example of non-sensory perception concerns our immediate past, namely, the immediately preceding moment, as efficaciously related to our current moment of experience. This direct influence of the past upon the present is not mediated by the senses. Whitehead (1967b, 181–82) elaborates this example as the “palmary instance of non-sensuous perception:”

In human experience, the most compelling example of non-sensuous perception is our knowledge of our own immediate past. I am not referring to our memories of a day past, or of an hour past, or of a minute past . . . But our immediate past is constituted by that occasion, or by that group of fused occasions, which enters into experience devoid of any perceptible [sensory] medium intervening between it and the present immediate fact. Roughly speaking, it is that portion of our past lying between a tenth of a second and half a second ago. It is gone, and yet it is here . . . The immediate past as surviving to be again lived through in the present is the palmary instance of non-sensuous perception.

Through what sensory means are we causally related to our previous moment of experience? It is not through our eyes or ears. In fact, there is no sensory mediation that accounts for the continuity (or unity) of one moment with another; rather, this causal continuity is based in our non-sensory prehension of the previous moment as efficaciously informing the present. “This is an instance of direct intuitive observation which is incapable of reduction to the sensationalist formula,” Whitehead (1967b, 182–83) states. “Such observations have not the clear sharp-cut precision of sense-perception. But surely there can be no doubt about them.” In contrast to “perception in the mode of presentational immediacy,” Whitehead (1978, 120–21) calls the efficacy of this non-sensory causality “perception in the mode of causal efficacy.” “It is evident that ‘perception in the mode of causal efficacy’ is not that sort of perception which has received chief attention in the philosophical tradition,” he states. “Philosophers have disdained the information about the universe obtained through their visceral feelings, and have concentrated on visual feelings” (Whitehead 1978, 121).

What we see here then is Whitehead’s essentially dual theory of perception concerning “presentational immediacy” on the one hand and “causal efficacy” on the other. It should be noted, however, that most of our waking consciousness consists in a mixed mode that he terms “symbolic reference” (Whitehead 1985, 1978, chap. VIII). “The synthetic activity whereby these two modes of perception are fused into one perception is what I have called ‘symbolic reference,’” Whitehead (1985, 18–19) states. “By symbolic reference the various actualities disclosed respectively by the two modes are either identified, or at least correlated together as interrelated elements of our environment. Thus the result of symbolic reference is what the actual world is for us, as that datum in our experience, productive of feelings, emotions, satisfactions, actions, and finally as the topic for conscious recognition when our mentality intervenes with conceptual analysis.” As John Buchanan (2022, 86) summarizes: “Our vague, feeling-laden direct perception of past reality (causal-efficacy) is synthesized with the clarity of simplified conscious sense perceptions (presentational immediacy) to create a meaningful encounter with the world (symbolic reference).” Consider now a comparative characterization of the “two modes” that are meaningfully synthesized in waking experience.

The wild(er)ness of Whitehead’s theory extends from his conviction that “causal efficacy” is more fundamental than “presentational immediacy” (see Table 3). In holding to this, he has flipped modern epistemology on its head by affirming that the clarity and distinctness of waking sense perception is a secondary curation from a wilder and more fundamental non-sensory mode of relatedness to the vast universe as a whole. This epistemological inversion is captured in Russell’s (2021, 33) recollection of Whitehead: “It was Whitehead who was the serpent in this paradise of Mediterranean clarity. He said to me once: ‘You think the world is what it looks like in fine weather at noon day [presentational immediacy]; I think it is what it seems like in the early morning when one first wakes from deep sleep [causal efficacy]’. I thought his remark horrid, but could not see how to prove that my bias was any better than his.”

As seen, however, Whitehead’s “bias” is hardly that. To repeat: it is not only that dogmas as to the primacy of “noon day” perception face serious scientific and philosophical problems but also that there is thoroughly mundane evidence of non-sensory, “early morning” perception. We are all familiar with the amorphous feeling of emerging out of the fogginess of “deep sleep”—on a beach, say—where sights, sounds, and other sense perceptions are not clearly discernable to waking consciousness. For Whitehead, the clarity of “noon day” emerges from the primal efficacious depths below waking perception. Consider the iceberg shown in Figure 1 as one way of picturing this dual theory of perception.

Figure 1: The iceberg of perception according to Whitehead’s dual theory.

Adapted from Romolo Tavani, iStock, Getty Images.

The tip of the iceberg, above the water, represents perception in the mode of “presentational immediacy.” It is our waking consciousness of the “fine weather at noon day”—a clear perceptual forecast of sights, sounds, and feelings, from the gentle breeze in our hair to the warmth of the sun on our skin. When you dip below the ocean, however, you find that deep below waking perception is the wild(er)ness of causal efficacy that always informs—but most of the time escapes—conscious awareness.

Whitehead has various ways of characterizing this oceanic wild(er)ness below consciousness. He calls it a “[a] transcendent universe of other things,” with “characters mysteriously moulding our own natures,” “controlling presences,” “sources of power,” and a depth that is “the root of the pathos which haunts the world” (Whithead 1967b, 180; 1985, 44, 47, 57). In view of rationalizing exceptional experiences, we can now ask the following questions: What dwells in the oceanic wilderness below waking sense perception? God? Other spiritual beings, entities, or dimensions? Infinitudes of platonic-like rational, moral, and aesthetic truths? Vast paranormal relations? Perhaps other domains that escape the limited grasp of waking sense perception? Fundamental to Whitehead’s theory is that we are—most of the time—simply unaware of the vast influences extending from our deeper ontological relatedness to the cosmos. Notice the descriptive ways in which he distinguishes “presentational immediacy” from “causal efficacy”:

One part of our experience is handy, and definite in our consciousness; also it is easy to reproduce at will. The other type of experience . . . is vague, haunting, unmanageable. The former type, for all its decorative sense experience, is barren. It displays a world concealed under an adventitious show, the show of our own bodily production. The latter type is heavy with the contact of the things gone by, which lay their grip on our immediate selves. This latter type, the mode of causal efficacy, is the experience dominating the primitive living organisms…It is heavy, primitive experience. The former type, the presentational immediacy is the superficial product of complexity, of subtlety; it halts at the present, and indulges in a manageable self-enjoyment derived from the immediacy of the show of things. (Whitehead 1985, 43–44)

In saying that “causal efficacy” is the “experience dominating the primitive organisms,” Whitehead is extending experience far below what is expressed in the conscious experience belonging to human and other complex animals. Against the wider backdrop of nature, consciousness—and surely meta-consciousness—seems unique and rare, but experience as such is not. Whitehead’s “panexperientialism” is distinguished from common renderings of “panpsychism” in that experience goes all the way down, but consciousness does not. Experiential prehension, in other words, is deeper than conscious apprehension.

An electron is an example of a “primitive living organism” in Whitehead’s universe. While it lacks conscious apprehension, it is fundamentally constituted by means of its prehensions as a non-conscious but thoroughly experiential mode of receptive feeling of its environment. “But mankind has gained a richness of experiential content denied to electrons,” Whitehead (1985, 28) states. Indeed, consciousness emerges much later (and higher) along the achievements of evolutionary complexity. It emerges not from vacuous, dead matter but from primitive forms of experience that are never wholly absent from nature. As Whitehead (1978, 267, 162) states, “Consciousness is the crown of experience, only occasionally attained, not its necessary base” and it “can only arise in a late derivative phase of complex integrations [of experience].”

When the clarity of consciousness does arise in ourselves and other animals, we are—most of the time—only aware of a tiny fraction of what there truly is in the universe. As Whitehead stresses, presentational immediacy, while “handy” and “definite,” is also “barren”—the “superficial product” of a complex route of compounding layers of experience. The result of their compoundation (not just “combination”) is the blooming of conscious sense perception as clear and distinct, but also a definite limitation to the universe’s wider causal efficacy upon us in ways “vague, haunting, unimaginable.” As Whitehead (1968, 43–44) communicates, the emergence of consciousness in animals and humans is uniquely based in what it omits from awareness for sake of coherent emphasis:

The rise of animal, and then human, consciousness is the triumph of specialization. It is closely connected with the evolution of clear and distinct sensory experience. There is abstraction from the vague mass of primary feelings, and concentration upon the comparative clarity of a few qualitative details. Unless the physical and physiological sciences are fables, the qualitative experiences which are the sensations such as sight, hearing etc., are involved in an intricate flux of reactions within and without the animal body. These are all hidden below consciousness . . . This feeling is massive and vague.

As Whitehead signals here, the “vague mass of primary feelings” is hidden below the iceberg of conscious sense perception. The paradox of consciousness consists in the fact that the clarity it achieves is based upon what it hides from itself. Nevertheless, in certain exceptional moments, what is hidden can become manifest.

Process Philosophers on Exceptional Experiences: Extension and Application

With the foregoing philosophical ground now laid, we turn to how Whitehead’s dual theory of perception might shed light on key examples of exceptional experience. As already mentioned, process philosophers and theologians have made profitable use of Whitehead’s doctrine with respect to a variety of exceptional experiences. These include mystical, near-death, psychedelic, and various experiences associated with parapsychological or PSI, from telepathy to clairvoyance and beyond. For our purposes, I will focus briefly on religious or mystical experiences of God, telepathy and life after death, and psychedelic experiences.

Religious or Mystical Experience of God

Whitehead advocated a unique from of what is generally referred to as panentheism (Gr. all-in-God). As a position, panentheism distinguishes itself from the dualism of mutual independence between God and the world found in classical forms of theism and the monistic inseparability characteristic of many forms of pantheism. Panentheism, by contrast, is based in the independence, but also the inseparability, of God and the world. For Whitehead, God is always and everywhere involved in the world, just as the world is always and everywhere involved in God. God is not identified (or identifiable) with the world, and the world is not identified (or identifiable) with God. Both retain their integrity, but never at cost to their intimacy.

This article is not the place to review and defend in detail why Whitehead admits “God” into his metaphysical vision.¹ For now, it should only be emphasized that God was not an arbitrary add-on to his mature philosophical vision but was “required” and “belonged” for descriptive completeness both rationally and empirically, but not supernaturally (Hocking 1963, 16; Johnson 1983, 4). Indeed, it is a major contribution of process theology to defend the claim that a naturalistic worldview need not presuppose atheism.² In any case, the sheer negation involved in atheism is hardly unproblematic metaphysically. At a rational level, Whitehead’s “naturalistic theism” affirms God as the proper solvent to various metaphysical riddles of possibility, order, novelty, and value that really confront a universe of process. At an empirical level, he recognizes that exceptional religious and mystical kinds of experience are a pervasive historical fact, as are more mundane intuitions of values, holiness, or the sacred. Both find metaphysical justification in what Whitehead terms “God.” Consider Griffin’s (2014, 157–58) analogy between Whitehead’s affirmation of non-sensory perception in relation to his panentheism and our relation to the neuronal cells of our brain:

According to Whitehead’s prehensive doctrine of perception, which both supports and presupposes panexperientialism, we directly perceive other actual entities, all of which are occasions of experience. We most directly perceive them not through our sensory organs . . . Rather, we directly prehend them in a nonsensory manner, as when I directly prehend my brain cells and my past occasion of experience . . . According to the panentheistic view of reality, we are related to God somewhat like our brain cells are related to us. We are, therefore, directly prehending God all the time, just as our brain cells are directly prehending us.

This panentheistic analogy is not without imaginative scientific and philosophical precedent. Recent studies have expressed a “tantalizing degree of similarity” between the neurological connections of our brain cells and the galactic interconnections constituting the “cosmic web” (Vazza and Feletti 2020; Kurz and Baranes 2025; Gott 2018). Figure 2 is worthy of meditation in this regard.

Figure 2: A comparison between the neuronal network of the cerebellum and cortex and the cosmic web at ×4, ×10m and ×40 magnifications. Source: Vazza and Feletti 2020, open access.

Such a “tantalizing” comparison raises the imaginative possibility that we are internal cellular components constituting something of the cosmo-neurological synapses of the divine mind. Griffin (2014, 159) extends the analogy further, saying: “Our prehensions of God, like our prehension of our brain cells, are prehensions in the mode of causal efficacy, and hence are ordinarily not illuminated by consciousness. In certain extraordinary moments, however, our prehensions of God can rise to the level of consciousness. After such moments, we say that we had a ‘religious’ experience, an ‘experience of God,’ or an ‘experience of the holy.’” The nature of this extraordinariness is not based in an “experience of God,” since, on Whitehead’s panentheistic model, we are experiencing God constantly. Rather, what is extraordinary is that this experience, extending from far below the iceberg of conscious perception, has actually risen to the clarity of “noon day.” For Griffin (2014, 159), moreover, this approach carries a certain explanatory power in that it can account for the pervasiveness of religious or mystical experiences throughout history:

What was extraordinary about those moments, however, was not that we perceived God; we are doing that all the time. What was extraordinary was only that this perception, with its subjective form of holiness, rose to the level of consciousness.

On this basis, we can see that theistic religious experience can involve a direct experience of a Holy Actuality, in whom we live, move, and have our being. And on this basis, in turn, we can understand why human beings always and everywhere give testimony to a distinctive type of experience that we call religious experience.³

Naturally, much more needs to be added to this discussion. However, my point is merely to demonstrate the way in which Griffin has extended and applied Whitehead’s wilder doctrine of perception in conjunction with panentheism to shed light on mystical or religious experiences of God.

Neuroscience and the Mind–Brain Relation: Connection and Praxis

McGilchirst’s (2021) recent expansion of his hemisphere hypothesis is a remarkable boon for both scientific and philosophical thought. His contributions are vast, and his aim to advance philosophical discourse by drawing attention to the manifest trustworthiness of the right hemisphere, and the expanded worldview (weltanschauung) it supports, is succeeding. “But if we (a) know which hemisphere is more trustworthy, and (b) can recognise the lexical signature, the ‘fingerprints’, of either hemisphere, we are already at an advantage. If I am right, this is a genuine advance in philosophy,” he states (McGilchirst 2021, 47).

Indeed, McGilchrist has argued that the left and right hemispheres of the brain have fundamentally different ways of attending to the world. This is not based in the (largely) false left/right brain dichotomies prevalent in the pop psychology and self-help literature of the 1970s and 1980s. Rather, it is based in his and others extensive scientific documentation of the kinds of orientations these hemispheres reveal based upon injuries sustained to a respective hemisphere. Consider Table 4, which captures the general orientations of the left and right hemispheres according to McGilchrist.

McGilchrist stresses that although both the left and the right hemisphere are always interacting in normal human experience, there is a fundamental asymmetry between them in that the right hemisphere is overwhelming more reliable as a guide toward reality. At the heart of his thought is the warning that when these respective orientations are not understood in their proper asymmetrical proportion, with the right hemisphere as “the Master” and the left hemisphere as the “Emissary,” civilization is showing signs of decay (McGilchrist 2009). For example, the mechanistic metaphysics of reductive materialism that undergirds modern Western civilization is precisely the kind fragmentary, atomistic, and purposeless vision the left hemisphere grasps, but it is only an abstraction from the wholistic, relational, and value-laden gestalt of the right. For McGilchirst, therefore, pointing out the many ways in which our current disciplines are captured by the left hemisphere, and pleading for our interdisciplinary recovery of the right, is not merely a matter of truth but also a matter of avoiding societal collapse.

Remarkably, hemispheric duality extends back millions of years into mammalian history. But why does it arise? Why is the brain divided? McGilchrist’s (2021, 20–21) answer points to an evolutionary necessity of balancing two fundamentally different ways of attending to the world:

Every animal, in order to survive, has to solve a conundrum: how to eat without being eaten . . . the need to sustain two incompatible ‘takes’ on the world simultaneously explains, I believe (and there is no significant competing theory), the extraordinary fact that the brain is so deeply divided . . . since the two halves have different roles, it makes sense that they are not mirror images of one another. Every single creature’s nervous system that we have studied is asymmetrical in nature, and where there is an identifiable brain it has this bipartite structure.

No doubt McGilchrist is right in his evolutionary assessment. This discussion, however, must raise the speculative question as to whether a deeper metaphysical theory, as found in Whitehead’s dual theory of perception, might itself undergird the emergence of the duality of the brain in terms of the left and right hemispheres. Put differently, is the duality of the brain a physical manifestation of the duality of perception as expressed in Whitehead’s theory? While there is little room to develop this inquiry here, McGilchrist’s work might be seen as a potentially fruitful neuroscientific elucidation of an as-yet-undetermined meta-theory of hemispheric division.

For example, in arguing that “Whitehead’s process philosophy has the potential to serve as an adequate metatheory for today’s rapidly expanding field of neuroscience,” David E. Roy (2017, 128) has recently demonstrated the strong resonances between the orientations of the left and right hemispheres as describe by McGilchrist’s and Whitehead’s description of two modes of sensory (presentational immediacy) and non-sensory (causal efficacy) perception. “[T]here is indeed a high degree of correlation between Whitehead’s theory of perception (a part of his overall theory) and the differing ways in which the hemispheres in the human brain function,” he states (Roy 2017, 149). While differences are also apparent, the correlations are worth further exploration, as Roy (2017, 149) suggests:

I find that the details that make up the complex picture neuroscience has painstakingly created bring [Whitehead’s] concepts unexpectedly and delightfully alive. The effect of the two streams being joined together is to provide unparalleled insight into the process that constitutes our fundamental nature.

As this information is shared within neuroscience, my hope is that there are those in that field who will come to recognize the capacity of Whitehead’s process philosophy to provide an illuminating and heuristic metatheory for this field of science that is becoming central to much in psychology and beyond.

To be sure, McGilchrist (2021, chap. 28) has recognized the capacity of Whitehead’s philosophy to inform much in his expansive hemispheric worldview, including his panentheism as consistent with the wisdom of the right hemisphere. Although he is not without critique of Whitehead’s theory of perception, as well as Roy’s treatment of his hemisphere hypothesis (personal correspondence), a deeper exploration of Whitehead’s wilder doctrine of perception might provide metaphysical support for his evolutionary explanation of brain lateralization.

Notwithstanding these possibilities for deeper research, the resonant approaches to the mind–brain problem by McGilchrist and process philosophers must also be emphasized. When it comes to consciousness specifically and its relation to the brain, McGilchrist (2021, 1038) outlines three approaches characteristic of current debates:

1. Emission: The brain emits consciousness like a steam engine emits smoke.

2. Transmission: The brain transmits conscious like a radio signal tuning into a specific frequency.

3. Permission: The brain permits consciousness though a filtering or limiting function.

That the brain simply emits consciousness like a steam engine emits smoke is the standard materialist reduction roundly critiqued by both McGilchrist and process philosophers. By contrast, they tend to argue for either transmission or permission, with different nuances at play. For example, note the different ways McGilchrist, Griffin, and Buchanan converge and diverge in their suggestions with respect to the question.

I suggest that the function of the brain is to create by means of permission, in other words by acting as a kind of filter. This includes the idea of transmission but adds a further element. Consciousness is sculpted: by saying “no” to something it enables others to stand forward into being, as Michelangelo’s hand caused his David to come into being by a process of discarding stone from the formless block and allowing other stone to remain. (McGilchrist 2021, 1085)

I suggest that the function of the brain, with regard to perception, is to give us rather clear and distinct sensory perceptions with sufficient intensity to rise to consciousness, so that we can be conscious of certain dominant aspects of the physical world around us. A side-effect of this function is that most nonsensory perceptions . . . are blocked out. (Griffin 1997, 143)

[F]rom a Whiteheadian perspective, the technology of the radio may be a more apt metaphor for the psyche than the workings of a computer, given how the body/mind acts as a receiver, amplifier, and transmitter of wave-pulses of feeling-information . . . For process philosophy, the entire past universe can broadly be conceived as the depth unconscious of each new occasion of experience . . . the human body/brain functions as a amplifier for selected “bandwidths” of past feeling, thereby making certain sense-related data a “dominant-channel” for the events of the psyche—complementing the psyche’s default setting to receive feelings from its own past events. (Buchanan 2022, 94, 96)

The data of exceptional experience is hardly irrelevant to the suggestion that the brain transmits or permits consciousnesses. It is noteworthy that some psychedelic studies have suggested that when brain activity reduces, experience or consciousness expands (Carhart-Harris et al. 2012; Kastrup 2014). This evidence of an inverse correlation, provided it is trustworthy, strongly suggests that the function of the brain is to enact definite limitations upon our much wider—and wilder—experiential relatedness to the universe so that something cohesive and manageable is available for consciousness. As suggested earlier, we are not conscious of the whole universe pressing upon us; psychedelic medicines, however, might weaken or render the standard limitations of brain functioning permeable, so that we are in fact more conscious of these ever-present, but usually hidden, relations.

With respect to near-death experience, there are any number of extraordinary testimonies where no conscious experience should be possible (Holden et al. 2009; Kelly et al. 2009). If the brain simply produces (emits) the mind, one would expect that where brain activity is negligible or entirely absent, consciousness ceases. Nevertheless, patients return having experienced something they often express as more real than waking sense perception. Again, this evidence, provided it is trustworthy, strongly suggests a transmitting or permitting function of the brain with respect to conscious experience. Moreover, these avenues of exceptional experience might be seen as instances of what spiritual and religious traditions have pointed to for millennia. In prescribing a whole host of spiritual practices, these traditions are eminently aware of their ability to induce experiences, suggesting—and perhaps confirming—that we are more than simply our brain, and our brain is far less than who or what we are. To conclude, let me gesture a few brief remarks on the nature of spiritual practice in light of Whitehead’s wilder doctrine of non-sensory perception.

Given the foregoing discussion, what is spiritual practice? No doubt this topic merits its own substantive treatment beyond simply this article. For now, however, we might conclude by suggesting that spiritual practices are deliberate practices that allow us to tune in to deeper channels of the cosmic wild(er)ness we inhabit. They are disciplines that have the effect of rendering more transparent the depths below our waking perception. Put differently still, they are methods by which we intuit and access sacramental realms of guidance, wisdom, and compassion, extending from the panentheistic tangle of divine and worldly things.

There is no one spiritual practice fitted to Whitehead’s philosophical vision. To the contrary, process philosophers and theologians have identified many (Griffin 1988, 1990; Kling 2020; Faber 2021; Cobb et al. 2022). In doing so, they have followed Whitehead (1996, 102; 1967a, viii) in holding that there are “various relationships within the real physical and spiritual worlds” and that the “spiritual precedes the material.” “Physical wandering is still important,” Whitehead (1967a, 207) states, “but greater still is the power of man’s spiritual adventures—adventures of thought, adventures of passionate feeling, adventures of aesthetic experience.” One can read into this statement Whitehead’s own sense of the importance of the spiritual undercurrents of human and cosmic life. The distinction between the physical and the spiritual is yet another expression of the ways in which his universe is dual: “The universe shows us two aspects: on the one side it is physically wasting, on the other side it is spiritually ascending” (Whitehead 1996, 160).

Competing Interests

The author declares that they have no competing interests.