Ultra-Sensory Experience
expanding Whitehead to include a Sacramental Sensibility
When you understand all about the sun and all about the atmosphere and all about the rotation of the earth, you may still miss the radiance of the sunset. There is no substitute for the direct perception of the concrete achievement of a thing in its actuality. We want concrete fact with a high light thrown on what is relevant to its preciousness.
- AN Whitehead, Science and the Modern World
Process philosophy is often characterized by its suspicion of what Whitehead calls “experience in the mode of presentational immediacy”—the clear, sharply defined perception of colors, sounds, shapes, and spatial relations. This mode of experience is frequently conflated with sense-experience as such. I want to suggest, however, that this conflation is unnecessary. Whitehead’s critique of presentational immediacy can be uncoupled from a consideration of sense experience, allowing sense experience itself to be affirmed as a site for encountering what is important and beautiful in life.
Whitehead’s concern is that modern thought has mistaken sensory clarity for the whole of experience, neglecting the deeper dimension of what Whitehead calls "experience in the mode of causal efficacy" - the bodily, affective, relational inheritance through which we feel the past, receive divine lures, sense the profound interconnectedness of all things, and participate in a world of value. For this reason, process thinkers have often emphasized non-sensory modes of apprehension—simple physical feelings, hybrid physical feelings, initial aims, all examples of causal efficacy and also feelings of possibilities, ideas, and values—as more fundamental than sense perception. What is primary, in this account, is relational depth rather than sensory surface.
Yet this emphasis can leave some readers feeling that the sensory world has been flattened or demoted. For many, it is precisely through the senses—not apart from them—that other people and the natural world are encountered as vibrant presences. A face is not first received as neutral data and only later interpreted as expressive; it is immediately felt as alive. Forests, rivers, animals, and stars are sensed as energy-charged and worthy of appreciation in their own right. If process philosophy appears to subordinate sensory experience to a deeper, non-sensory layer, it risks seeming out of step with this sacramental sensibility, in which sight, sound, touch, and movement already disclose a world alive with value.
The tension, however, rests on a misunderstanding. What is primary in process philosophy is not “non-sensory experience,” understood as awareness detached from the senses. Rather, what is primary might better be described as ultra-sensory experience—a term that includes both the pre-sensory and the trans-sensory. The pre-sensory names those relational processes that condition perception from within: causal efficacy, bodily attunement, hybrid physical feelings, and the reception of divine initial aims that shape how the world is felt prior to its articulation in sight or sound. The trans-sensory refers to dimensions of depth, resonance, valuation, and companionship that permeate and exceed any single sensory moment. Ultra-sensory experience gathers both into a unified framework.
Whitehead’s notion of symbolic reference provides the bridge. When presentational immediacy and causal efficacy are integrated, sense perception ceases to be a flat display of data. It becomes thickened by inherited feeling and divine valuation. The sensory field is modulated by subjective form; colors, tones, textures, and movements are received within a matrix of relational depth. In this intensified integration, we do not merely see the world—we see while feeling ourselves seen; we do not merely hear—we hear within an atmosphere of empathic reception. The divine lure and the divine consequent receptivity can be felt as shaping the very texture of perception.
Ultra-sensory experience, then, does not diminish the senses; it deepens them. The visible and audible world becomes the articulation of underlying relational processes. Hills and rivers, faces and forests, are encountered not as inert objects but as participants in a shared field of becoming. In this way, process philosophy can recover a philosophically rigorous sacramental sensibility without relinquishing its metaphysical commitments. What lies beneath and beyond the senses does not replace them; it suffuses and intensifies them, rendering the world experientially charged with value, presence, and sacred participation.
To be sure, not all ultra-sensory experience is sacramental. Some of it is painful and tragic. Witness the hospital room where machines breathe in mechanical rhythm while a family waits in suspended time. Witness the siren at midnight. Witness the trembling body in grief, or caught in trauma, the child who learns too early that the world can wound.
Intensity is not automatically holy. There are sounds that shatter rather than heal, lights that expose rather than illumine, touches that harm rather than bless. The nerves of the body are not only pathways of delight; they are conduits of fear and shock. The world presses itself upon us not only as beauty but also as rupture.
From a Whiteheadian perspective, a recognition of the power of sense-experience must be honest. It must include, as Whitehead puts it, the dancing of the fairies and Christ nailed on the cross. A sacramental sensibility does not say that everything is a sacrament. It seeks instead to celebrate the sacramental dimension of life and help the world become more sacramental, as is possible. This does not happen by denying value to the sensory. It happens by holding the sensory dimension of life carefully, tenderly, lovingly, so that it can find healing.
- Jay McDaniel
Whitehead’s concern is that modern thought has mistaken sensory clarity for the whole of experience, neglecting the deeper dimension of what Whitehead calls "experience in the mode of causal efficacy" - the bodily, affective, relational inheritance through which we feel the past, receive divine lures, sense the profound interconnectedness of all things, and participate in a world of value. For this reason, process thinkers have often emphasized non-sensory modes of apprehension—simple physical feelings, hybrid physical feelings, initial aims, all examples of causal efficacy and also feelings of possibilities, ideas, and values—as more fundamental than sense perception. What is primary, in this account, is relational depth rather than sensory surface.
Yet this emphasis can leave some readers feeling that the sensory world has been flattened or demoted. For many, it is precisely through the senses—not apart from them—that other people and the natural world are encountered as vibrant presences. A face is not first received as neutral data and only later interpreted as expressive; it is immediately felt as alive. Forests, rivers, animals, and stars are sensed as energy-charged and worthy of appreciation in their own right. If process philosophy appears to subordinate sensory experience to a deeper, non-sensory layer, it risks seeming out of step with this sacramental sensibility, in which sight, sound, touch, and movement already disclose a world alive with value.
The tension, however, rests on a misunderstanding. What is primary in process philosophy is not “non-sensory experience,” understood as awareness detached from the senses. Rather, what is primary might better be described as ultra-sensory experience—a term that includes both the pre-sensory and the trans-sensory. The pre-sensory names those relational processes that condition perception from within: causal efficacy, bodily attunement, hybrid physical feelings, and the reception of divine initial aims that shape how the world is felt prior to its articulation in sight or sound. The trans-sensory refers to dimensions of depth, resonance, valuation, and companionship that permeate and exceed any single sensory moment. Ultra-sensory experience gathers both into a unified framework.
Whitehead’s notion of symbolic reference provides the bridge. When presentational immediacy and causal efficacy are integrated, sense perception ceases to be a flat display of data. It becomes thickened by inherited feeling and divine valuation. The sensory field is modulated by subjective form; colors, tones, textures, and movements are received within a matrix of relational depth. In this intensified integration, we do not merely see the world—we see while feeling ourselves seen; we do not merely hear—we hear within an atmosphere of empathic reception. The divine lure and the divine consequent receptivity can be felt as shaping the very texture of perception.
Ultra-sensory experience, then, does not diminish the senses; it deepens them. The visible and audible world becomes the articulation of underlying relational processes. Hills and rivers, faces and forests, are encountered not as inert objects but as participants in a shared field of becoming. In this way, process philosophy can recover a philosophically rigorous sacramental sensibility without relinquishing its metaphysical commitments. What lies beneath and beyond the senses does not replace them; it suffuses and intensifies them, rendering the world experientially charged with value, presence, and sacred participation.
To be sure, not all ultra-sensory experience is sacramental. Some of it is painful and tragic. Witness the hospital room where machines breathe in mechanical rhythm while a family waits in suspended time. Witness the siren at midnight. Witness the trembling body in grief, or caught in trauma, the child who learns too early that the world can wound.
Intensity is not automatically holy. There are sounds that shatter rather than heal, lights that expose rather than illumine, touches that harm rather than bless. The nerves of the body are not only pathways of delight; they are conduits of fear and shock. The world presses itself upon us not only as beauty but also as rupture.
From a Whiteheadian perspective, a recognition of the power of sense-experience must be honest. It must include, as Whitehead puts it, the dancing of the fairies and Christ nailed on the cross. A sacramental sensibility does not say that everything is a sacrament. It seeks instead to celebrate the sacramental dimension of life and help the world become more sacramental, as is possible. This does not happen by denying value to the sensory. It happens by holding the sensory dimension of life carefully, tenderly, lovingly, so that it can find healing.
- Jay McDaniel