Whitehead, Spirit Possession,
and Spirit Communication
Spirit possession is the belief or experience that a person's thoughts, feelings, speech, or actions are influenced—or at times temporarily governed—by a spiritual presence other than their ordinary sense of self. It is closely related to spirit communication, in which a person experiences communication with spirits through visions, dreams, inner voices, inspirations, or messages, but without necessarily becoming a vehicle through which the spirit acts directly. In many traditions the two overlap, with spirit communication sometimes deepening into forms of possession or mediumship. Together they constitute one of the most widespread religious phenomena in human history, appearing in cultures on every inhabited continent. While modern Western culture often associates spirit possession with pathology or evil, many religious traditions understand it very differently.
Indeed, in many parts of the world spirit possession and spirit communication are considered a normal, and sometimes deeply valued, dimension of religious life. Many traditions distinguish among several forms of spiritual influence:
From this broader cross-cultural perspective, the central question is not simply whether a person is influenced by a spiritual presence, but what kind of presence is involved and what its effects are. Does it foster wisdom, compassion, healing, and deeper participation in life? Or does it produce fear, confusion, fragmentation, and harm? Many religious traditions regard positive forms of spirit possession or spiritual influence as gifts that benefit both individuals and the communities to which they belong.
Whitehead's philosophy offers a framework for taking the possibility of spirit possession and spirit communication seriously through three key ideas.
The first is the idea of a porous mind, understood as a living subject that can be influenced—and perhaps at times even inhabited—by unfamiliar others. Here porosity refers to the fact that, for Whitehead, a concrescing subject is composed not only of its subjective responses to the world, but also of the world itself as the objective datum of the subject's own experience. The world consists of many entities in the actual world of the subject. They are part of, not apart from, the subject's experience. They are the subject's world.
The second is the idea of an extensive continuum, a multidimensional field of relatedness within which there may exist actual entities and societies of entities beyond the three-dimensional world ordinarily disclosed by the senses. This extensive continuum is not Newtonian space, but it is a matrix of possible regions in which an actuality may exist. and these regions are by no means limited to objects in three dimensional space. Each region provides a "standpoint" from which an actual entity experiences and responds to its world. "Spirits" of multiple kinds - ancestral, heavenly, demonic - can, in principle, occupy these regions, and the regions, while not three-dimensional, may overlap three dimensional space such that there is inter-regional communication and influence.
The third is Whitehead's understanding of prehension, according to which we can consciously and unconsciously feel the presence and feelings of other actual entities. Particularly important are what Whitehead calls hybrid physical feelings: modes of experience through which one actual entity directly feels the subjective aims or mental states of another, even when that other is not present as a bodily object within ordinary perception.
In Whitehead's philosophy, God is experienced in precisely this way. God is not located within three-dimensional space, yet every moment of experience receives an initial aim from God through a hybrid physical feeling of the divine subjective aim. If God can be felt in this manner, then Whitehead's metaphysics leaves open the possibility that other non-three-dimensional actual entities or societies of actual entities might also be felt, consciously or unconsciously, and under unusual circumstances might profoundly influence human experience and behavior.
None of these ideas proves the reality of spirits or spirit possession and spirit communication. They do, however, remove the materialist assumption, modern and western in tone, that such phenomena are impossible in principle. They invite us to approach reports of spirit possession and communication with openness, critical discernment, and philosophical seriousness rather than dismissing them out of hand.
The reflections that follow were inspired in part by Robert Falconer's The Others Within Us: Internal Family Systems, Porous Mind, and Spirit Possession (Great Mystery Press, 2023). They are also shaped by my own decades of teaching and studying the world's religions. As a professor of world religions, I repeatedly encountered accounts of shamanism, spirit possession, mediumship, visionary experience, ancestral presences, spirit guides, angels, demons, and other forms of spiritual encounter that have been central to the lives of countless people across cultures and throughout history. It troubled me then, and troubles me now, that a few students, shaped a now outdated mechanistic science, would respond with the assumption that, after all, it was all superstious. I say not-outdated because, it seems to me, a more organic understanding of science, which takes lived experience seriously, is on the rise, and it moves beyond such arrogance, recognizing that lived human experience is as illuminative of the universe as are microscopes and telescopes; and Whitehead can help us bridge that gap.
Falconer approaches these questions from the perspective of psychotherapy and the Internal Family Systems model, whereas my own reflections arise from Whitehead's process philosophy and from the comparative study of religious traditions. The two approaches are quite different, yet they converge in their shared willingness to explore the possibility that the mind is more porous than modern materialism has generally allowed.
Indeed, in many parts of the world spirit possession and spirit communication are considered a normal, and sometimes deeply valued, dimension of religious life. Many traditions distinguish among several forms of spiritual influence:
- Malevolent possession — an unwanted or harmful influence that causes distress or diminishes a person's well-being.
- Benevolent possession — a welcomed relationship with a deity, ancestor, bodhisattva, saint, or other beneficent spiritual presence who offers guidance, healing, or blessing.
- Mediumship — allowing a spiritual presence to communicate through oneself while retaining some degree of awareness and cooperation.
- Divine inspiration or overshadowing — being filled with or moved by a sacred presence without losing one's personal identity or agency.
From this broader cross-cultural perspective, the central question is not simply whether a person is influenced by a spiritual presence, but what kind of presence is involved and what its effects are. Does it foster wisdom, compassion, healing, and deeper participation in life? Or does it produce fear, confusion, fragmentation, and harm? Many religious traditions regard positive forms of spirit possession or spiritual influence as gifts that benefit both individuals and the communities to which they belong.
Whitehead's philosophy offers a framework for taking the possibility of spirit possession and spirit communication seriously through three key ideas.
The first is the idea of a porous mind, understood as a living subject that can be influenced—and perhaps at times even inhabited—by unfamiliar others. Here porosity refers to the fact that, for Whitehead, a concrescing subject is composed not only of its subjective responses to the world, but also of the world itself as the objective datum of the subject's own experience. The world consists of many entities in the actual world of the subject. They are part of, not apart from, the subject's experience. They are the subject's world.
The second is the idea of an extensive continuum, a multidimensional field of relatedness within which there may exist actual entities and societies of entities beyond the three-dimensional world ordinarily disclosed by the senses. This extensive continuum is not Newtonian space, but it is a matrix of possible regions in which an actuality may exist. and these regions are by no means limited to objects in three dimensional space. Each region provides a "standpoint" from which an actual entity experiences and responds to its world. "Spirits" of multiple kinds - ancestral, heavenly, demonic - can, in principle, occupy these regions, and the regions, while not three-dimensional, may overlap three dimensional space such that there is inter-regional communication and influence.
The third is Whitehead's understanding of prehension, according to which we can consciously and unconsciously feel the presence and feelings of other actual entities. Particularly important are what Whitehead calls hybrid physical feelings: modes of experience through which one actual entity directly feels the subjective aims or mental states of another, even when that other is not present as a bodily object within ordinary perception.
In Whitehead's philosophy, God is experienced in precisely this way. God is not located within three-dimensional space, yet every moment of experience receives an initial aim from God through a hybrid physical feeling of the divine subjective aim. If God can be felt in this manner, then Whitehead's metaphysics leaves open the possibility that other non-three-dimensional actual entities or societies of actual entities might also be felt, consciously or unconsciously, and under unusual circumstances might profoundly influence human experience and behavior.
None of these ideas proves the reality of spirits or spirit possession and spirit communication. They do, however, remove the materialist assumption, modern and western in tone, that such phenomena are impossible in principle. They invite us to approach reports of spirit possession and communication with openness, critical discernment, and philosophical seriousness rather than dismissing them out of hand.
The reflections that follow were inspired in part by Robert Falconer's The Others Within Us: Internal Family Systems, Porous Mind, and Spirit Possession (Great Mystery Press, 2023). They are also shaped by my own decades of teaching and studying the world's religions. As a professor of world religions, I repeatedly encountered accounts of shamanism, spirit possession, mediumship, visionary experience, ancestral presences, spirit guides, angels, demons, and other forms of spiritual encounter that have been central to the lives of countless people across cultures and throughout history. It troubled me then, and troubles me now, that a few students, shaped a now outdated mechanistic science, would respond with the assumption that, after all, it was all superstious. I say not-outdated because, it seems to me, a more organic understanding of science, which takes lived experience seriously, is on the rise, and it moves beyond such arrogance, recognizing that lived human experience is as illuminative of the universe as are microscopes and telescopes; and Whitehead can help us bridge that gap.
Falconer approaches these questions from the perspective of psychotherapy and the Internal Family Systems model, whereas my own reflections arise from Whitehead's process philosophy and from the comparative study of religious traditions. The two approaches are quite different, yet they converge in their shared willingness to explore the possibility that the mind is more porous than modern materialism has generally allowed.
The Porous Mind in a
Multidimensional Universe
The Ever-Renewing Now
From a process perspective, our minds are not sealed containers enclosed within our skulls. We are subjects of our own lives, to be sure, but our subjectivity is an ever-renewing Now. Bergson would call it a durée—a living duration in which the past flows into the present and the present opens toward the future.
This durée, this ever-renewing Now, unfolds as a succession of moments. If you are thirty-six years old, for example, your present moment carries within it the inheritances of countless earlier moments, including those when you were six, sixteen, and twenty-six. Those earlier moments have passed away, but something of them lives on in the present as memories, habits, bodily dispositions, emotional patterns, hopes, fears, aspirations, and countless subconscious influences.
Each of those earlier moments, when it was present, possessed its own subjective immediacy, spontaneous self-creativity, and value for itself. Although those moments have perished, they continue to shape the present through what they have become. Our Nowness is never sealed within itself. We are always inheriting influences from our own past. Personal identity is therefore not the persistence of an unchanging self but the continuous transmission and creative transformation of experience from one moment to the next. Memory and the felt passage of time give coherence to this ongoing stream of becoming.
The Porous Mind
But this is only part of the story. We are more than our personal histories. Moment by moment we also inherit influences from the countless other subjects that constitute our world. We receive influences from family members, friends, strangers, other animals, plants, and the wider community of life. Many of these influences operate beneath conscious awareness. Some are biological, some social and cultural, some ecological, and some interpersonal.
Whitehead's philosophy thus suggests that the mind is fundamentally porous rather than self-enclosed. We are not isolated minds looking out upon an external world but living centers of experience continuously shaped by, and responding to, other centers of experience. Like a living cell, each of us is lived from the inside. We are each one, but we are also many. The world is continually flowing into us, even as we contribute ourselves to the world.
Spiritual Presences
Within this process framework, it is possible to ask whether some of the influences entering experience originate not simply in our own localized history but in transpersonal dimensions of the past actual world. If every concrescing subject inherits aspects of the wider universe, might some inheritances include patterns of feeling, intention, or agency that originate beyond one's personal biography?
Many religious traditions, indigenous cultures, and spiritual practices answer this question affirmatively. They speak of ancestors, spirits, angels, demons, bodhisattvas, animal powers, guides, and other presences that can influence human life for good or ill. Such realities are often experienced not merely as thoughts or projections but as intentional presences possessing their own voices, purposes, and forms of agency.
Falconer and Internal Family Systems
This possibility has recently been explored in psychotherapy by Robert Falconer in The Others Within Us: Internal Family Systems, Porous Mind, and Spirit Possession (Great Mystery Press, 2023). Drawing upon many years of clinical experience within Internal Family Systems (IFS), Falconer argues that some clients encounter what he calls "unattached burdens"—presences that appear not to be parts of the individual's own psyche but rather influences that seem to possess their own agency. His book presents numerous clinical case studies, surveys how analogous phenomena have been understood across cultures and religions, and proposes therapeutic practices for engaging these experiences in ways that reduce suffering.
Therapy and Discernment
From this perspective, the porous mind invites a more open and receptive attitude toward reports of both spirit possession and spirit guides.
Many people, in many cultures and religious traditions, describe experiences of harmful presences that seem to intrude upon their lives, as well as benevolent presences that offer guidance, protection, encouragement, healing, or wisdom. Whether these experiences are understood as psychological, symbolic, relational, spiritual, or some combination of these depends in part upon one's worldview and cultural setting.
A process perspective does not require us to dismiss such experiences as mere superstition, nor does it require us to accept every interpretation uncritically. Rather, it encourages careful listening, thoughtful discernment, and openness to multiple possibilities.
Good therapy begins by meeting people where they are. It takes seriously the reality of their experience and seeks to work with the language, symbols, and practices that are meaningful within their own lives and communities. For some people, the language of trauma, dissociation, and psychological parts is most helpful. For others, the language of ancestors, spirits, guides, blessings, or possession provides a more adequate way of naming their lived experience. What matters first is not imposing a single explanatory framework but accompanying people toward healing, integration, freedom, and greater participation in life.
Whitehead's philosophy provides a hospitable metaphysical setting for such openness. If every concrescing subject is constituted through its felt relationships with a world richer than ordinary perception reveals, then experiences interpreted as encounters with spiritual presences need not be ruled out in advance. They become possibilities to be explored with humility, discernment, compassion, and respect for both the diversity of human experience and the many ways different cultures have learned to understand it.
Falconer is careful to note that reports of such presences are not confined to psychotherapy. Similar experiences have been described throughout the world's religious traditions, in shamanic practices, in accounts of spirit possession and exorcism, and in contemporary reports of psychedelic experiences involving substances such as ayahuasca, psilocybin, and DMT. While interpretations differ considerably, many participants describe encounters with apparently autonomous beings, some experienced as benevolent guides and others as destructive or parasitic influences.
Beyond the Familiar World
Whitehead's philosophy also opens another possibility. He conceives the universe as unfolding within what he calls the extensive continuum—a field of potential relatedness that underlies, but is not identical with, the familiar three-dimensional world disclosed by our senses.
The extensive continuum is the metaphysical matrix from which spatial and temporal relations emerge. While our ordinary experience is organized within the three dimensions of everyday space, Whitehead explicitly allows that the extensive continuum may include dimensions of relatedness that are inaccessible to ordinary perception. Our senses disclose only a small portion of a much richer universe.
If this is so, then the universe may contain entities and societies of entities that are not located within the three-dimensional world ordinarily available to our senses and yet are nonetheless real. Some of these societies might be analogous to what we call persons: enduring streams of experience, ordered through time, each with its own durée, its own ongoing life of feeling, memory, decision, and becoming.
If such beings exist, they would not be supernatural in the sense of existing outside nature. They would instead belong to dimensions of the actual world that ordinarily lie beyond human awareness. Like us, they would participate in the creative advance of the universe, inheriting from the past, responding to the present, and helping to shape the future. It is at least conceivable that some of these beings are intelligent, capable of entering into relationships with human beings, even if only under unusual circumstances. Whitehead's philosophy does not require belief in such beings, but neither does it rule them out. It offers a metaphysical framework in which their possibility can be taken seriously.
On this interpretation, the porous mind is not simply open to memories, bodily inheritances, and social relationships. It is also open, at least in principle, to influences arising from dimensions of the actual world that exceed ordinary sensory awareness. Because every concrescing subject prehends the past actual world rather than merely nearby physical events, Whitehead's philosophy leaves open the possibility that some experiences interpreted as encounters with spiritual presences involve genuine relations with personally ordered societies existing in dimensions beyond ordinary space-time.
The Brain and the Porous Mind
This way of thinking also invites us to reconsider the role of the brain. Modern neuroscience often assumes that the brain produces consciousness, as though subjective experience were generated entirely by neural activity.
A Whiteheadian perspective suggests a different possibility. The lived experience of the ever-renewing Now is primary and the brain is in service to it. The brain does not manufacture experience. Rather, the brain it is more like a sense organ: an extraordinarily complex living society whose activity mediates the world to our mental experience. It receives, filters, organizes, amplifies, and integrates influences from the wider actual world, making some available to conscious awareness while excluding or transforming others.
Our ordinary experience is therefore neither a complete picture of reality nor a mere illusion. It is a selective participation in a world that always exceeds what we consciously perceive.
This understanding leaves open possibilities such as those noted above. If the actual world includes dimensions of experience beyond those ordinarily disclosed through the senses, then changes in the functioning of the brain—whether through meditation, contemplative prayer, dreams, trauma, ritual, psychedelics, or other altered states of consciousness—may sometimes alter the range of influences that become available to awareness. This does not prove that every unusual experience corresponds to an independent spiritual reality. Yet neither does it require us to dismiss such experiences as nothing more than neural misfirings. Instead, the brain can be understood as a living mediator between the concrescing subject - the duree in its ever-renewing Now - and a richly layered world whose full dimensions may only occasionally become manifest.
On this interpretation, reports of encounters with spirit guides, ancestors, angels, or other spiritual presences need not be viewed as impossible simply because they do not fit the assumptions of materialism. They become experiences to be approached with humility, careful discernment, and openness, recognizing that the brain may sometimes reveal, and sometimes conceal, dimensions of reality that ordinarily remain beyond conscious awareness.
Hybrid Prehensions
Whitehead offers another idea that can help illuminate reports of spirit possession and spirit guides: what he calls hybrid physical prehensions. The idea is admittedly speculative, but it provides a conceptual framework for understanding how one experiencing subject might directly influence another.
Ordinarily, Whitehead says that every new moment of experience physically prehends—that is, directly feels—the settled actuality of the past world. We inherit the feelings, energies, and causal influences of those actualities as they have become objective. But Whitehead also proposes that, under certain conditions, a concrescing subject may prehend not merely the objective outcome of another subject's experience but something of that subject's own mental states, as existing in the mental pole of that subject's experience. This is what he calls a hybrid physical prehension. The object of a hybrid prehension is the mental state of other other, including its subjective aims and purposes.
If such hybrid prehensions occur, they suggest that one center of experience may sometimes communicate with another more directly than ordinary sensory perception would allow. They would represent an especially intimate form of relationality within the universe.
From the perspective of this essay, the possibility is worth considering. If there exist enduring spiritual societies or personal streams of experience beyond those ordinarily perceived, then hybrid prehensions provide one conceivable way in which they might influence human experience. Such influence need not involve complete domination of the personality. It may take the form of feeling the energy of the spirit, unexpected intuition, a compelling image, a deep sense of presence, an inner voice, a sudden movement toward compassion, or, in some cases, a more encompassing experience interpreted as spirit possession.
The same conceptual framework also allows for the opposite possibility. Just as benevolent presences might communicate wisdom, healing, or encouragement, destructive presences—if they exist—might communicate confusion, fear, or compulsive patterns. Whitehead's philosophy does not tell us which experiences are genuine, nor does it encourage credulous acceptance of every spiritual claim. Rather, it offers a metaphysical account of how such interactions might be possible within a thoroughly relational universe.
Seen in this light, hybrid prehensions reinforce the central theme of this essay. The porous mind is not merely influenced by its own past or by its immediate social environment. It is open, at least in principle, to a much wider field of relationships than modern materialism typically allows. Whether these relationships are understood psychologically, socially, ecologically, or spiritually, they invite the same response: careful discernment, humility, and an ongoing search for what deepens beauty, truth, compassion, and life
Living Wisely and Compassionately in a Porous Universe
None of this requires accepting every reported spiritual encounter at face value.
Whitehead's philosophy encourages discernment rather than either credulity or skepticism.
Experiences of spiritual presences may arise from many sources—psychological, interpersonal, biological, cultural, ecological, or genuinely transpersonal—and each deserves careful interpretation. The task is neither to dismiss such experiences in advance nor to affirm them indiscriminately, but to cultivate wisdom concerning the many ways in which each new concrescing subject is continually constituted through its relations with the world.
On this understanding, healing involves more than reorganizing one's own internal psychology. It also involves learning to discern which relationships—whether personal, ancestral, social, ecological, or spiritual—nourish life and which diminish it. The porous mind is therefore not simply vulnerable; it is also capable of receiving wisdom, compassion, beauty, and grace from realities beyond the narrow boundaries of the individual self.
This insight is relevant not only to psychotherapy but also to education, spiritual direction, pastoral care, medicine, friendship, family life, and indeed to the way we encounter every person. Good care begins by meeting people where they are, with the language and symbols that are meaningful to them. Whether someone understands an experience in psychological, biological, social, or spiritual terms, the first task is not to impose a metaphysical explanation but to listen with respect, to discern what is life-giving, and to accompany them toward greater wholeness.
Every concrescing subject is a fresh act of becoming, a new Now in which the personal, the communal, the ecological, and the spiritual dimensions of the universe come together in a unique moment of experience. To live well is to cultivate the wisdom to discern and respond creatively to the many influences and presences that continually shape this ever-renewing Now, whether our own or that of another person, always seeking those relationships and influences that deepen beauty, compassion, and life.
In this way, the porous mind is not simply open to the world; it is one expression of a relational universe in which every moment of experience is both an inheritance from the past and a creative contribution to the future.
Interview with Robert Falconer
Today I interview Bob Falconer about his new book, The Others Within Us: Internal Family Systems, Porous Mind, and Spirit Possession (Great Mystery Press, 2023). Falconer’s book is the result of a decade-long journey to understand a phenomenon that raises questions not only about how we, as a contemporary Western culture, understand ourselves. It’s also a challenge to the limits of how we understand—the models of self and mind that we assume to be true. In The Others Within Us, Falconer offers a paradigm-shifting vision of what it means to be human and how therapists who work within the model of Internal Family Systems can help to relieve human suffering. Falconer offers both a methodology for therapists as well as an intellectual and transcultural history of the farther reaches of our inner worlds. Falconer himself is a long-time practitioner and trainer of Internal Family Systems (or IFS) and has previously co-written a book with the founder of the IFS model, Richard Schwartz, entitled Many Minds, One Self. Enjoy my conversation with Bob Falconer.
Videos featuring Robert Falconer
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