What if you slept, and what if in your sleep you dreamed, and what if in your dream you went to heaven and there plucked a strange and beautiful flower, and what if when you awoke you had the flower in your hand? Ah, what then?
Samuel Taylor Coleridge
Samuel Taylor Coleridge
How to Think Impossibly by Jeffrey J. Kripal is an exploration of experiences that modern secular culture often dismisses as “impossible”: precognitive dreams, near-death experiences, telepathy, mystical states, UFO encounters, synchronicities, apparitions, and altered states of consciousness. Kripal’s central claim is that these phenomena are not rare anomalies or mere delusions, but recurring features of human experience that challenge conventional assumptions about reality.
In the spirit of Kripal, I offer a parapsychological bucket list: a list of seventy one experiences that people report having and that, from a process-relational perspective, are metaphysically plausible.
71 is the number of experiences I list below, but it is also a metaphor for quirkiness. Consciousness does not stay inside round numbers such as 50 or 100. What I offer is but a provisional list of extraordinary states, of which there may be many more.
I do not claim that all the experiences are veridical in every detail, or that all interpretations of them are correct. But I do think that a worldview shaped by the philosophy of Alfred North Whitehead invites openness to the possibility that reality is far stranger, more relational, and more multidimensional than mechanistic materialism allows.
My list is not entirely original. In The Adventure of Self-Discovery: Dimensions of Consciousness and New Perspectives in Psychotherapy and Humanistic Psychology, Stanislav Grof identifies and describes many of these experiences. Culling from the table of contents of the book, and supplementing it with additional experiences from parapsychology, mysticism, psychical research, and process philosophy, I list them below, using, for the most part, Grof’s language.
- Akashic or Cosmic Memory Experiences
- Ancestral Experiences
- Apparitions of the Dead
- Automatic Writing
- Being Abducted by Aliens
- Bilocation: appearing in two places simultaneously
- Clairaudience: hearing beyond ordinary sensory means
- Channelling and Being Channeled
- Clairvoyance: seeing beyond ordinary sensory means
- Communication with Animals Beyond Ordinary Means
- Cosmogenetic Experiences (Reliving the Birth and Evolution of the Universe)
- Demonic Possession: hostile transpersonal spiritual influence
- Direct Experience of Creativity Itself as Ultimate Reality
- Direct Experience of the Subjective Unification of the Cosmos as a Living Whole
- Dream Precognition: dreams anticipating future events
- Dynamic Shifts in the Psyche’s Governing Systems
- Encounters with Nature Intelligences
- Encounters with Spirit Guides and Suprahuman Beings
- Encounters with Trickster Intelligences
- Energetic Phenomena of the Subtle Body
- Experience of Cosmic Consciousness
- Experience of Dual Unity
- Experience of Inanimate Matter and Inorganic Processes as Alive
- Experience of the Demiurge and Insights into Cosmic Creation
- Experiences of Animal Spirits
- Experiences of Future Events
- Experiences of Mythological and Fairy-Tale Sequences
- Experiences of Planetary Evolution
- Experiences of Reality as Simulation, Dream, or Cosmic Play
- Experiences of Specific Blissful and Wrathful Deities
- Experiences of Synesthetic Unity: blending of sensory modalities
- Experiences of the Bardos: transitional states after death
- Experiences of Universal Archetypes
- Experiential Extension Beyond Consensus Reality and Space-Time
- Experiencing the Amniotic Universe Prior to Birth
- Exploring the Depths of the Collective Unconscious
- Extraterrestrial Experiences (including abductions)
- Healing and Hexing
- Identification with Animals
- Identification with Plants and Botanical Processes
- Identification with the Entire Physical Universe
- Intentional Psychokinesis and Ceremonial Magic
- Intuitive Understanding of Universal Symbols
- Levitation: rising unsupported above the ground
- Mindful Absorption in Divine Love
- Mystical Absorption in the Realm of Pure Potentialities (Eternal Objects)
- Mystical Union with the Consequent Nature of God
- Near-Death Experiences: consciousness near bodily death
- Oneness with Life and All Creation
- Out-of-Body Experiences: consciousness outside bodily location
- Past Incarnation Experiences
- Phylogenetic Experiences: reliving evolutionary ancestral memories
- Psychic Phenomena Involving Transcendence of Space
- Racial and Collective Experiences
- Radical Experiences of Timelessness
- Recurrent Spontaneous Psychokinesis (or Intentional Psychokinesis)
- Remote Viewing: perceiving distant unseen locations
- Shared Death Experiences
- Shared Dreaming: mutually experienced dream environments
- Siddhis: extraordinary yogic or spiritual powers
- Spiritistic and Mediumistic Experiences
- Spontaneous Psychoid Events: psyche-matter interaction events
- Supernormal Physical Feats
- Synchronistic Links Between Consciousness and Matter
- Telepathic Communication: direct mind-to-mind communication
- The Death-Rebirth Struggle Prior to and During Birth
- The Supracosmic and Metacosmic Void
- Transcendence of the Boundaries of Linear Time
- Unidentified Flying Objects: anomalous aerial phenomena or craft
- Visits to Other Universes and Meetings with Their Inhabitants
- Xenoglossy: speaking unknown foreign languages
Some of these experiences have been sought and others have just happened to people. Some have emerged with help from psychoactive substances; some in states of prayer an meditation; some in groups and some while being alone; some while being awake and others while dreaming. Some are tremendously healing, a few harmful, and many neutral.
Some of these experiences overlap with one another. Abductions by aliens and the experience of estraterrestial spirits often, but not always, go together, Aliens can come from the oceans, or from other dimensions of reality, rather than outer space. And it is difficult to distinguish cosmic consciousness from an experience of the subjective unity of the universe, although cosmic consciousness 'can be' an experience of the cosmos as a whole, without claiming that it is subjectively unified by a single consciousness.
It is important to note, in addition, that some of the experiences may be more extraordinary than others, relative to what is important to a person at issue. In some societies, a sense of kinship with animals and plants is commonplace, whereas an experience of being at one with the primordial nature of God is extraordinary. What is 'ordinary' and what is 'extraordinary' is by no means absolute.
A few of the 71 experiences are ones that I myself have tasted or known in personal experience, but most are, at some level, foreign to my own experience, even if still imaginable from a Whiteheadian point of view. My hope is that this list encourages us to approach those who have had such experiences with a sympathetic imagination, understanding the contexts in which they emerge, why they matter to the people involved, and how they might be windows into that enchanted universe in which we all participate, whether we know it or not.
How might experiences such as these 'make sense'? Here are some key ideas in Whitehead’s philosophy that make the kinds of experiences listed above plausible, if not also, in some instances, probable.
The Extensive Continuum as Multidimensional
One key idea is that reality unfolds within a multidimensional extensive continuum, such that three-dimensional space is only one dimension or layer of a much richer cosmic matrix. Whitehead’s “extensive continuum” is not reducible to the measurable space of classical physics. It is a deeper spatio-temporal field within which many kinds of actualities may emerge and be experienced. This leaves open the possibility that there are dimensions of existence ordinarily hidden from sensory awareness but nevertheless real and experientially accessible under certain conditions.
Cosmic Epochs and Evolving Laws of Nature
A second key idea is that we live within a cosmic epoch: that is, within a universe characterized by relatively stable habits or laws of nature that may themselves evolve over time. Whitehead suggests that our cosmic epoch may have been preceded by other cosmic epochs and may someday be succeeded by others with different structures and habits. It is also conceivable, from this perspective, that parallel cosmic epochs coexist alongside our own, each with distinctive forms of order, causality, embodiment, or consciousness. Reality is thus more fluid, pluralistic, and adventurous than static mechanistic cosmologies suggest.
Hybrid Physical Prehensions
A third key idea is the notion of hybrid physical prehensions, whereby one actual entity directly prehends the mental states of another actual entity in a physical way. Whitehead’s philosophy does not reduce perception to sensory reception alone. It allows for direct feeling of the aims, emotions, intentions, and experiences of other beings. This idea provides a metaphysical basis for phenomena such as telepathy, mediumship, encounters with nonordinary intelligences, empathic communion, and other forms of transpersonal awareness.
Reality as Whatever Can Be Experienced
A fourth key idea is that reality itself consists not simply of what is disclosed in ordinary sense perception, but rather of whatever can in fact be experienced, whether sensory or nonsensory. Whitehead rejects the bifurcation of nature into a supposedly objective world of material facts and a merely subjective world of feelings and appearances. Experience itself is part of reality. This does not mean that all objects of experience are veridical in the sense of corresponding exactly to external realities as interpreted by the experiencer. But it does mean that the experiences themselves are real as experiences and therefore worthy of interpretation rather than automatic dismissal.
Feeling and Intelligence at Every Level of Reality
Another key idea is that there is something like feeling and also intelligence at every level of existence, from the submicroscopic to the galactic. Whitehead’s universe is panexperientialist. Actual entities are not inert bits of matter but moments of experience with their own forms of feeling, responsiveness, and self-organization. Human consciousness is not an absolute exception in an otherwise dead universe; it is a highly complex expression of a more pervasive experientiality woven throughout reality itself. This opens the possibility that the universe is alive in ways modern materialism has often ignored or suppressed.
Panexperientialism: Kinship with Animals, Plants, and Minerals
Still another key idea is that human beings exist within, not apart from, the larger web of life. From a process-relational perspective, animals, plants, ecosystems, and even inorganic realities are kin in an ontological sense. All are composed of actual entities or momentary acts of experience participating in the ongoing creative advance of the universe. Human beings differ in degree and complexity from other forms of existence, but not in absolute metaphysical kind.
This means that the world is not divided between fully alive human subjects and utterly dead or insentient objects. Rather, varying forms of feeling, responsiveness, relationality, and self-organization are present throughout reality. Plants prehend their environments. Animals experience the world in emotionally and bodily meaningful ways. Even inorganic realities participate in patterns of relational becoming and energetic responsiveness. The universe is thus a continuum of experiential existence rather than a hierarchy separating mind from matter.
From this perspective, absorptive experiences with animals, plants, forests, rivers, mountains, or even apparently inorganic realities make sense. Such experiences need not be dismissed as merely subjective projections onto an otherwise dead nature. They may instead reflect real forms of relational contact within a living cosmos.
This idea is especially important ecologically and spiritually. It encourages humility, reverence, sympathy, and attentiveness toward the larger community of life. It also helps explain why many mystical, indigenous, ecological, and parapsychological experiences involve encounters with animals, plants, landscapes, elemental forces, or living presences within nature itself.
Distributed Rather than Merely Localized Subjectivity
Still another key idea is that subjectivity itself can be distributed subjectivity, not simply localized subjectivity. That is, subjectivity can be a feature not only of individual actual entities but also of nexuses or societies of actual entities functioning together in patterned forms of unity. This possibility allows for forms of group consciousness, collective fields of awareness, social or ecological minds, ancestral presences, cosmic consciousness, and perhaps even forms of consciousness associated with ecosystems, planets, or galaxies. Subjectivity need not always be confined within the boundaries of a single brain or organism.
Angels and Devils
Still another idea, pertaining especially to reports of encounters with immaterial spirits, is that from a process-relational perspective entities such as angels and devils can, at least in principle, exist. In Alfred North Whitehead’s philosophy, actual entities need not be composed of dense physical matter as human beings ordinarily understand it. Reality includes many possible modes of embodiment and organization within the wider extensive continuum. It is therefore conceivable that there are forms of experiential existence that are primarily mental, energetic, symbolic, or transphysical in character.
Such entities, if they exist, would likewise possess subjective aims. Angels would be associated with healthy subjective aims: aims conducive to harmony, widening awareness, compassion, beauty, healing, relational depth, courage, truthfulness, and the flourishing of life. Their influence would not normally be coercive but luring, invitational, and transformative. They would help draw sentient beings toward richer forms of becoming and toward constructive participation in the larger web of existence.
Devils, by contrast, would be associated with destructive subjective aims. Their orientations would incline toward fragmentation, domination, cruelty, deception, violence, despair, hatred, confusion, addiction, diminishment of life, and the narrowing rather than widening of consciousness. From a process perspective, evil is not an illusion. It is real. It consists in forms of energetic violence inflicted upon the psyches and bodies of oneself and others. Such violence may be physical, emotional, social, political, symbolic, spiritual, or transpersonal.
Whitehead’s philosophy does not require that all reports of angels, devils, possession, or spiritual warfare be interpreted literally. Many such experiences may involve symbolic, psychological, cultural, archetypal, or social dimensions. But process philosophy does leave open the possibility that forms of agency and influence exist within the wider ecology of reality that are not reducible to ordinary material explanation.
Self-Creativity and Subjective Aims
Balanced against the possibility of destructive or demonic subjective aims is the equally important idea of healthy subjective aims. From a process-relational perspective, people can and do live from aims that widen their perspectives with strength, sensitivity, courage, and openness. Such aims enable people to become receptive to dimensions of reality and forms of experience for which they might otherwise remain closed. These aims may involve harmony, but they may also involve tension, contrast, adventure, vulnerability, and transformation. They are not always immediately comfortable, but they can nevertheless be deeply life-giving and connective.
In Whitehead’s philosophy, subjective aims are not merely arbitrary desires. They are directional feelings shaping the becoming of each moment of experience. Healthy aims help weave human lives into constructive relationships with other people, the natural world, and the wider universe. They deepen rather than diminish relationality.
From a process perspective, the divine reality—God—is present as that feature of immediate experience by which people feel drawn toward these richer possibilities for life. God is the lure toward intensity tempered by harmony, toward beauty, compassion, truthfulness, and creative transformation. In this sense, some parapsychological or mystical experiences may not simply be bizarre anomalies; they may be responsive to, and even conducive to, the widening of consciousness associated with healthy subjective aims.
Varieties of Mysticism
Still another key idea is that there can be many different varieties of mysticism. From a process-relational perspective, mystical experience is not limited to one single kind of ultimate union or absorption. Many forms of mysticism are imaginable. All involve some degree of self-loss, self-transcendence, or decentering of the ego, but they may be attentive to or absorbed in very different dimensions of reality.
One form would be a mysticism of what Whitehead calls Creativity, which is the fathomless Urgrund of which all things are expressions. This would involve a direct intuition of the sheer generative activity of existence itself: the ceaseless becoming out of which all actualities arise.
Another would be a mysticism of what Whitehead calls the primordial nature of God. This would involve a kind of absorption in a realm of pure potentiality: eternal objects or pure possibilities. These pure potentialities can include mathematical realities, geometrical forms, aesthetic contrasts, archetypal structures, and potentialities for feeling, emotion, value, harmony, and beauty. Mysticism here becomes contemplative participation in the field of possibility itself.
A third would be absorption in what Whitehead calls the consequent nature of God, which can be understood as a field of pure love in which the entire universe is gathered, felt, remembered, and woven together. This kind of mysticism emphasizes tenderness, compassion, reconciliation, and the sense that all joys and sufferings are held within a wider divine empathy.
Still another form of mysticism would involve an intense feeling of the absolute interconnectedness or inter-becoming of all things, in which each moment of experience is felt as internally related to the whole universe. In Whiteheadian terms, every concrescing moment prehends aspects of the world and carries the world within itself. Mysticism here becomes an intuition of radical relationality: the feeling that all beings are ingredients in one another’s becoming.
All of these forms of mysticism make sense from a process perspective, and none need exclude the others. They may overlap, intermingle, or emerge in different contexts and temperaments.
Conscious and Unconscious Awareness
Still another key idea is that awareness, or prehension, is a feature of every concrescing subject and that this awareness need not be conscious in the sense of involving clear and distinct perception in order to be efficacious and important in a person’s life. In Whitehead’s philosophy, much of experience is prereflective, unconscious, or only dimly felt. Actual entities continually prehend aspects of the world around them, integrating them into their own becoming, even when these prehensions never rise into explicit consciousness.
This means that human beings may be affected by realities, energies, moods, aims, emotions, symbolic forms, and even other forms of subjectivity without clearly recognizing the source or content of these influences. Dreams, intuitions, bodily feelings, anxieties, attractions, sudden insights, spiritual impressions, and nonordinary experiences may emerge from layers of awareness deeper than conscious cognition. Consciousness itself is thus only a small crest on a much wider ocean of feeling and apprehension.
From this perspective, many anomalous or mystical experiences may operate partly through unconscious modes of relational awareness before they are translated into conscious images, narratives, symbols, or interpretations.
The Question of Experiencing Future Events
Still another important idea concerns the possibility of experiencing future events. From a process-relational perspective, this possibility can make sense, but only in a qualified way. In Whitehead’s philosophy, the future does not yet exist as a fully actualized reality waiting to be perceived in advance. Actual entities become actual only in the process of concrescence. The future consists not of completed facts but of unrealized possibilities, tendencies, probabilities, and lures toward becoming.
This means that what may sometimes be experienced are not future events as already existing actualities, but rather potent possibilities that carry a relatively high likelihood of realization. A person may prehend tendencies, trajectories, emotional currents, emerging patterns, or impending actualizations before they become fully concrete in ordinary space-time experience. Such anticipatory experiences may emerge symbolically in dreams, intuitions, bodily feelings, archetypal imagery, or sudden flashes of insight.
This view preserves both the meaningfulness of precognitive experience and the openness and creativity of the universe. It avoids reducing the future to a predetermined script while still allowing that human beings may sometimes become aware of powerful unrealized possibilities before they fully actualize.
Whitehead and the Imaginal
While Whitehead does not develop an explicit doctrine of “the imaginal,” he nevertheless places a remarkably high priority on the role of imagination in human life. For Whitehead, imagination is not merely fictive or escapist. It is one of the ways human beings respond to possibilities within the universe itself. In Adventures of Ideas, he repeatedly emphasizes the importance of imaginative vision in science, religion, ethics, and civilization. Imagination discloses possibilities not yet fully realized in the actual world but nevertheless real as potentials for experience and becoming.
This openness to imagination is closely connected to Whitehead’s understanding of the universe as multidimensional. Reality is not exhausted by what appears within ordinary three-dimensional sensory space. The universe includes multiple dimensions of existence and forms of relatedness that exceed the narrow range of everyday perception. Whitehead’s extensive continuum already points beyond a merely three-dimensional cosmology, suggesting a deeper and richer structure to reality itself.
Correspondingly, human experience may itself be multidimensional. There is no reason why a concrescing subject—a momentary subject of experience in Whitehead’s sense—cannot simultaneously prehend realities within ordinary three-dimensional space while also prehending realities arising from other dimensions of existence. These modes of experience may occur at the same time, woven together within the unity of a single experiential act. Much of ordinary consciousness may be oriented toward the familiar physical world, but this does not preclude forms of perception, intuition, dream, symbol, or vision that participate in dimensions of reality not reducible to standard spatial extension.
In this context, the term imaginal can serve as a helpful name for realities encountered through the imagination that are nevertheless real in their own way. The imaginal is not simply imaginary in the sense of unreal or illusory. Rather, it names forms, presences, worlds, or meanings accessed through imaginative participation in dimensions of experience that transcend ordinary three-dimensional perception. Such realities may not be “physical” in the usual sense, yet they can still possess their own mode of actuality and efficacy within the ongoing process of experience.
From a Whiteheadian perspective, then, imagination may be understood as a mode of prehension: a way of feeling and participating in dimensions of reality that are ordinarily overlooked by reductive forms of materialism. Dreams, symbols, visionary experiences, mystical states, artistic inspiration, and perhaps even some paranormal phenomena may belong, at least in part, to this broader imaginal field. The imaginal becomes not an escape from reality, but a deeper participation in the many-layered richness of reality itself.
God and Creativity
A final key idea concerns the relationship between God and Creativity. In Whitehead’s philosophy, Creativity is the primordial Urgrund of which all things are expressions. It is the ultimate activity of becoming itself: without fixed form or character except as expressed in actual occasions of experience. Creativity is not confined to three-dimensional space, nor to the particular laws and habits of our present cosmic epoch. It is expressed wherever actuality occurs, in whatever dimensions actuality may arise.
Creativity is present both as the self-creativity of each and every concrescing subject and as the ongoing creativity of the universe itself. Every actual entity participates in this creative advance into novelty. Reality is not a static order but a ceaseless unfolding of becoming, transformation, emergence, and relational expression.
Within this wider context, God can be understood as the primordial—but not exclusive—expression of Creativity. Whitehead’s God has two fundamental poles or natures. The primordial nature of God is the envisagement of pure potentialities: the ordering, valuation, and feeling of eternal objects or possibilities. The consequent nature of God is the receptive and responsive side of divine life, the aspect of God that feels, remembers, gathers, and weaves the experiences of the universe into an ongoing harmony of harmonies.
Together these divine natures help make sense of a universe that is not merely mechanical but profoundly experiential, relational, and open-ended. The primordial nature of God suggests that possibilities exist far beyond what is presently actualized in ordinary human awareness, while the consequent nature suggests that all experiences, relations, sufferings, beauties, and intensities are gathered into a wider field of divine feeling.
From this perspective, the presence of God is not confined to three-dimensional space or to ordinary sensory awareness. God is present in every dimension in which actuality occurs. Divine presence permeates the whole extensive continuum. This does not mean that every unusual experience is automatically divine or trustworthy. But it does mean that reality itself is spiritually textured in ways that may exceed ordinary perception.
Such a vision is conducive to an appreciation of parapsychological and mystical experiences because it portrays the universe as dynamically alive, experientially layered, and open to forms of communion, intuition, and perception that transcend the narrow boundaries of mechanistic materialism.
Experiences of telepathy, mystical union, archetypal encounter, cosmic consciousness, anomalous perception, or transpersonal awareness become conceivable within a universe understood as creatively emergent, relational to its depths, and permeated by dimensions of feeling and meaning that surpass ordinary consciousness.
The universe is enchanted.