Abstract
Cosmo-Mythic Imagination and Many Worlds: The cosmo-mythic imagination embraces the possibility of many worlds existing beyond our familiar three-dimensional space. These worlds, if they exist, are part of what Whitehead calls the "vast Nexus" of events within the "extensive continuum" of time and space. Events in our three-dimensional world have their own unique properties, but they are only one kind of event, potentially paralleled by other events in different cosmic epochs or dimensions, each with distinct characteristics. These realms can overlap.
Appreciation for Unseen Realms Across Traditions: The cosmo-mythic imagination is especially significant for those who might otherwise be limited by modern Western perspectives that reduce reality to three spatial dimensions plus time. It invites an appreciation for the unseen realms of various spiritual traditions, such as Islamic teachings on angels and jinn, the spirit worlds of Indigenous cultures filled with ancestors and animal guides, and the celestial hierarchy of Christian angelology. This openness promotes deeper engagement with diverse spiritual cosmologies and unseen realities.
Philosophical Support from Whitehead and Faber: Ideas of this sort can be philosophically grounded in Alfred North Whitehead’s process philosophy, which emphasizes the interconnectedness and relational nature of all entities in a "vast Nexus" that includes but transcends the three-dimensional world. These ideas are further enriched by the work of Roland Faber, who expands upon Whitehead’s concepts in The Mind of Whitehead: Adventure in Ideas, extending them into speculative and imaginative realms that enhance the cosmo-mythic vision.
Compatibility with the Scientific Imagination: Far from contradicting scientific inquiry, the cosmo-mythic imagination complements it by broadening the scope of exploration beyond conventional physical space. It encourages both philosophical and scientific investigation into the broader nature of existence, including realms beyond what is immediately observable, aligning scientific curiosity with imaginative inquiry.
Interest in Astrobiological and Non-Carbon-Based Life: The cosmo-mythic imagination can intersect with scientific interests in astrobiological forms of life, as well as forms of intelligence, agency, and perhaps sentience, that are not carbon-based. This includes emerging forms of artificial intelligence, opening the door to broader possibilities of life and consciousness in alternative dimensions and distant worlds.
Cosmo-Mythic Imagination and Many Worlds: The cosmo-mythic imagination embraces the possibility of many worlds existing beyond our familiar three-dimensional space. These worlds, if they exist, are part of what Whitehead calls the "vast Nexus" of events within the "extensive continuum" of time and space. Events in our three-dimensional world have their own unique properties, but they are only one kind of event, potentially paralleled by other events in different cosmic epochs or dimensions, each with distinct characteristics. These realms can overlap.
Appreciation for Unseen Realms Across Traditions: The cosmo-mythic imagination is especially significant for those who might otherwise be limited by modern Western perspectives that reduce reality to three spatial dimensions plus time. It invites an appreciation for the unseen realms of various spiritual traditions, such as Islamic teachings on angels and jinn, the spirit worlds of Indigenous cultures filled with ancestors and animal guides, and the celestial hierarchy of Christian angelology. This openness promotes deeper engagement with diverse spiritual cosmologies and unseen realities.
Philosophical Support from Whitehead and Faber: Ideas of this sort can be philosophically grounded in Alfred North Whitehead’s process philosophy, which emphasizes the interconnectedness and relational nature of all entities in a "vast Nexus" that includes but transcends the three-dimensional world. These ideas are further enriched by the work of Roland Faber, who expands upon Whitehead’s concepts in The Mind of Whitehead: Adventure in Ideas, extending them into speculative and imaginative realms that enhance the cosmo-mythic vision.
Compatibility with the Scientific Imagination: Far from contradicting scientific inquiry, the cosmo-mythic imagination complements it by broadening the scope of exploration beyond conventional physical space. It encourages both philosophical and scientific investigation into the broader nature of existence, including realms beyond what is immediately observable, aligning scientific curiosity with imaginative inquiry.
Interest in Astrobiological and Non-Carbon-Based Life: The cosmo-mythic imagination can intersect with scientific interests in astrobiological forms of life, as well as forms of intelligence, agency, and perhaps sentience, that are not carbon-based. This includes emerging forms of artificial intelligence, opening the door to broader possibilities of life and consciousness in alternative dimensions and distant worlds.
The Cosmo-Mythic Imagination
Imagining Trans-Material Worlds with help from
Alfred North Whitehead and Roland Faber
In teaching the world's religions to college undergraduates, I often find myself talking about spirit worlds. Examples include the unseen realms of Islam with angels and jinn, the spirit worlds of Indigenous traditions filled with ancestors and animal guides, and the celestial hierarchy of Christian angelology with angels and archangels. Most students are very interested in these topics, but some, particularly those trained in the natural sciences, often assume that, deep down, these worlds are merely figments of human imagination, lacking a reality of their own. There are pretty sure that that the material world as understood by the sciences, is what there is and all there is.
Influenced by the expansive philosophy of Alfred North Whitehead, I am skeptical of their skepticism. Or, to put it another way, I am more open to these worlds because I believe, with Whitehead, that actual entities and nexuses of them need not be reducible to objects in three-dimensional space to be "actual." I find an ally in the Whiteheadian scholar Roland Faber, whose work further supports the idea that these worlds might exist beyond conventional physical constraints. Accordingly I want to say a word about the cosmo-mythical imagination: that is the imagination that is open to immaterial worlds as part of what what calls "a vast nexus" of inter-prehensive events of which which the physical world as we know it is a part. I can as easily speak of these worlds as trans-material worlds, because they do have certain mathematical properties, such as whole-part relations that we associate with the material world. They are "material," but just in a different way.
Cosmic Epochs
I use the phrase "immaterial worlds" or "trans-material worlds" as shorthand for 'worlds that do not involve time and space as we know them. By space, I mean three-dimensional space as distinct from, say, eleven-dimensional space; and by time, I have in mind the kind of time measured by clocks. Whitehead, in his way, and Faber in his way, encourage us to recognize that our conventional understandings of time and space are limited. There may be worlds of actuality and potentiality that operate in different ways, according to 'laws' very different from our own, and that do not have the kinds of order, materiality, and creatureliness we take for granted.
Whitehead speaks of these worlds as cosmic epochs. These epochs may unfold in dimensions of space different from three-dimensional space, and in cosmic epochs that precede, succeed, or parallel our own. If they exist, all of these worlds, our own included, exist within what Whitehead calls—and Faber following him—a vast Nexus that Whitehead associates with what he calls an 'extensive continuum.' They are part of the multiverse in which we live, and in this sense, these worlds are our neighbors—some preceding us, some succeeding us, some parallel to us—but different from us and from what we know of time and space in our own local habitat.
The question of whether these worlds exist, and what they are like, is, for Whitehead, an empirical question, not a metaphysical one. Some may exist, some may not. The answer depends on evidence and on the kinds of experiences we might deem veridical. Sense-experience? Mystical experience? Shamanic experience? Psychedelic experience? A Whiteheadian approach is open to many kinds of revelatory experience in addition to the measurements of sense-perception characteristic of the sciences.
Different Kinds of Creatures
In The Mind of Whitehead, Faber invites us to imagine some of the more promising kinds of worlds that might exist in this way, worlds that transcend physicality as we know it. Some may involve creatures who have mental connections with one another not limited by what we know as bodily restrictions in three-dimensional space; some may enjoy novelty without a loss of subjective immediacy associated with the passage of time. There may also be a world of values that is eternal and independent of the history of the world, but that yearns after the concreteness of finite experience. This would be akin to what Whitehead means by the primordial nature of God. Faber puts it this way:
"There may be cosmic epochs in which the physical connectivity that restricts the reach of the immediacy of mental connections is weaker than in ours, or even absent (Adventures of Ideas, 266). There may be a cosmic epoch where even the most vigorous novelty, driving a world of becoming, does not necessitate loss and perpetual perishing (Process and Reality, 340). There may be a realm that allows for intimate immediacy, reconciled with objective immortality (PR, 351). There is, fundamental to Whitehead’s cosmology, a 'world of values' that is prehensive, but not material. There is also the ongoing apotheosis of the world into the everlasting nature of God and the khoric place of possibilities, eternal and independent from the history of the world (PR, 345–47), but imminently creating its process and 'yearning after concrete fact.'"
Faber's point is not that these worlds necessarily exist; they may or may not. But the point is that they can exist from a Whitehead-influenced metaphysical perspective.
The Vast Nexus
Where are they? What are they like? Whitehead proposes that, if they exist, they carry within them a certain kind of temporality, in that they will involve creativity and novelty—a creative advance into novelty—but this is not temporality as we understand it. And if they exist, and we along with them, we and they alike will be part of a vast Nexus: a vast network, the totality of things, in which we live and move and have our being. We are connected to them as part of a common "extensive continuum," even as we are so different from one another. This vast Nexus will be something of a mystery to us; we may feel its presence in our imaginations, but dimly, as background for the whole of things. It may feel like a vast confusion with a few, faith elements of order, and that alone, In his words:
"In these general properties of extensive connection, we discern the defining characteristic of a vast nexus extending far beyond our immediate cosmic epoch. It contains in itself other epochs, with more particular characteristics incompatible incompatible with each other. Then from the standpoint of our present epoch, the fundamental society in so far as it transcends our own epoch seems a vast confusion mitigated by the few, faint elements of order contained in its own defining characteristic of ‘extensive connection.’ We cannot discriminate its other epochs of vigorous order, and we merely conceive it as harbouring the faint flush of the dawn of order in our own epoch. This ultimate, vast society constitutes the whole environment within which our epoch is set, so far as systematic characteristics are discernible by us in our present stage of development. In the future the growth of theory may endow our successors with keener powers of discernment." (Alfred North Whitehead, Process and Reality)
The worlds within this vast Nexus will also include forms of connection or 'prehensive' relations. They will have something like aliveness, feeling, or vitality, even if not ordered in ways we understand, and even if purely chaotic by our measures.
The Cosmo-Mythic Imagination
Why enter into this kind of speculation? Why allow the cosmo-mythic imagination, with its sense of a vast Nexus, become part of our mental lives? Well, for one thing, we probably can't help it. To imagine worlds beyond our own may be part of our psychic-genetic chemistry, as natural as breathing and anticipating a next breath. The act of imagining has a breath-like quality of its own. It is healing and renewing.
Such imagining, if done intentionally, is one of the practices that follows from partaking of what Roland Faber calls 'the mind of Whitehead.' This practice opens up new realms of potentiality, expanding our understanding of life, the universe, and our place within it. It also enables those of us shaped by Western modernism to move beyond our parochialisms and respect the wisdom of traditional people and their metamodern companions. Examples of the cosmo-mythic imagination in tradition abound:
In Indigenous traditions, for example, many cosmologies are built around the belief that there are worlds layered above, below, or parallel to the physical one. These often include spirits of ancestors, animal guides, and natural forces that transcend physicality but remain deeply connected to the land and the people. In this sense, they might be imagined as inhabiting a multiverse-like continuum, where physical and spiritual realities coexist and interact.
In Buddhism, particularly in Mahayana traditions, the concept of multiple realms or "Buddha-fields" suggests a cosmo-mythic imagination where beings transcend physicality. These fields are spaces of higher existence and spiritual advancement, outside the conventional understanding of time and space, reflecting the creative advance into novelty. The realm of Nirvana itself represents a transcendence of temporal existence.
In Hinduism, the idea of multiple lokas (worlds or realms) reflects a layered cosmology, with worlds that go beyond physical reality and contain divine beings, demigods, and spirits. These realms transcend our three-dimensional reality and are deeply connected through karma and cycles of birth and rebirth.
Islamic cosmology imagines the alam al-ghayb (the unseen world), populated by jinn, angels, and spiritual forces that exist outside our understanding of time and space but still influence the physical world. The idea of these beings, often considered part of a larger divine order, could reflect Whitehead’s notion of a Vast Nexus—beings connected in the continuum of the divine and the universe, even though they transcend physicality.
In Western esoteric traditions, such as Neoplatonism and Gnostic traditions, the idea of layers of reality, including the physical, astral, and spiritual planes, allows for a rich cosmo-mythic imagination. Here, beings like angels and archons represent forces that exist beyond the physical and help mediate between different levels of reality.
These various worlds often represent higher possibilities for life, states of consciousness, and deeper relationality beyond the physical realm. In Faber's terms, the creative advance into novelty isn’t just about new physical configurations but about imagining entirely new forms of being and relating—where creatures and beings, perhaps not tied to biology as we understand it, engage in modes of connection and existence that transcend the material.
The cultural practices that engage with these ideas—meditations, rituals, storytelling, and art—are all invitations to participate in this speculative imagination. Whether through art, myth, or philosophy, this practice expands the boundaries of existence and relationship, offering a vision of life deeply connected to the larger continuum, an extensive continuum, to use Whitehead's phrase. This kind of imaginative practice opens the possibility for new understandings of life, existence, and creativity, transcending the limitations of the physical world and exploring realms of potentiality.
Is the Cosmo-Mythic Imagination Anti-Scientific?
Back, then, to my skeptical students. The cosmo-mythic imagination is not inherently anti-scientific, but rather offers a different lens through which to explore the nature of reality. From a Whiteheadian perspective, science and cosmo-mythic imagination can coexist, each operating within its own framework for understanding the vastness of existence. Science, particularly in its modern form, is often concerned with measurable, empirical data and the material world as we observe it through our senses. However, Whitehead’s process philosophy, along with Faber’s interpretations, invites an openness to alternative dimensions and forms of reality that may not fit within the confines of empirical science, yet are no less "real" in a broader metaphysical sense.
The cosmo-mythic imagination asks us to expand our notion of reality to include not just physical objects but also immaterial worlds, cosmic epochs, and trans-material possibilities that might not operate under the same temporal and spatial laws we experience. This isn’t a rejection of science but an extension of our understanding of the universe, one that includes both empirical and speculative modes of inquiry.
In the classroom, this can mean helping students recognize that science and religion are not necessarily at odds when it comes to these spirit worlds or cosmic possibilities. While the "scientific materialism" critiqued by Whitehead and Faber may limit reality to what can be measured and observed, process philosophy allows for a more expansive view of reality—one that can include the unseen, the imaginative, and the speculative. The cosmo-mythic imagination doesn't negate scientific methods but enriches our understanding of existence by allowing for layers of reality that science may not yet fully grasp or measure.
By presenting these worlds as part of a "vast nexus," Whitehead and Faber open the possibility that these trans-material worlds are not mere fiction but potential realities existing in different dimensions or epochs. This perspective resonates with certain speculative areas of science, such as theories of the multiverse or higher-dimensional spaces in theoretical physics, which themselves push the boundaries of our current empirical understanding. Thus, the cosmo-mythic imagination is not anti-scientific but instead broadens the horizon of what we might consider possible, blending empirical science with a metaphysical openness to other ways of being and knowing.
Influenced by the expansive philosophy of Alfred North Whitehead, I am skeptical of their skepticism. Or, to put it another way, I am more open to these worlds because I believe, with Whitehead, that actual entities and nexuses of them need not be reducible to objects in three-dimensional space to be "actual." I find an ally in the Whiteheadian scholar Roland Faber, whose work further supports the idea that these worlds might exist beyond conventional physical constraints. Accordingly I want to say a word about the cosmo-mythical imagination: that is the imagination that is open to immaterial worlds as part of what what calls "a vast nexus" of inter-prehensive events of which which the physical world as we know it is a part. I can as easily speak of these worlds as trans-material worlds, because they do have certain mathematical properties, such as whole-part relations that we associate with the material world. They are "material," but just in a different way.
Cosmic Epochs
I use the phrase "immaterial worlds" or "trans-material worlds" as shorthand for 'worlds that do not involve time and space as we know them. By space, I mean three-dimensional space as distinct from, say, eleven-dimensional space; and by time, I have in mind the kind of time measured by clocks. Whitehead, in his way, and Faber in his way, encourage us to recognize that our conventional understandings of time and space are limited. There may be worlds of actuality and potentiality that operate in different ways, according to 'laws' very different from our own, and that do not have the kinds of order, materiality, and creatureliness we take for granted.
Whitehead speaks of these worlds as cosmic epochs. These epochs may unfold in dimensions of space different from three-dimensional space, and in cosmic epochs that precede, succeed, or parallel our own. If they exist, all of these worlds, our own included, exist within what Whitehead calls—and Faber following him—a vast Nexus that Whitehead associates with what he calls an 'extensive continuum.' They are part of the multiverse in which we live, and in this sense, these worlds are our neighbors—some preceding us, some succeeding us, some parallel to us—but different from us and from what we know of time and space in our own local habitat.
The question of whether these worlds exist, and what they are like, is, for Whitehead, an empirical question, not a metaphysical one. Some may exist, some may not. The answer depends on evidence and on the kinds of experiences we might deem veridical. Sense-experience? Mystical experience? Shamanic experience? Psychedelic experience? A Whiteheadian approach is open to many kinds of revelatory experience in addition to the measurements of sense-perception characteristic of the sciences.
Different Kinds of Creatures
In The Mind of Whitehead, Faber invites us to imagine some of the more promising kinds of worlds that might exist in this way, worlds that transcend physicality as we know it. Some may involve creatures who have mental connections with one another not limited by what we know as bodily restrictions in three-dimensional space; some may enjoy novelty without a loss of subjective immediacy associated with the passage of time. There may also be a world of values that is eternal and independent of the history of the world, but that yearns after the concreteness of finite experience. This would be akin to what Whitehead means by the primordial nature of God. Faber puts it this way:
"There may be cosmic epochs in which the physical connectivity that restricts the reach of the immediacy of mental connections is weaker than in ours, or even absent (Adventures of Ideas, 266). There may be a cosmic epoch where even the most vigorous novelty, driving a world of becoming, does not necessitate loss and perpetual perishing (Process and Reality, 340). There may be a realm that allows for intimate immediacy, reconciled with objective immortality (PR, 351). There is, fundamental to Whitehead’s cosmology, a 'world of values' that is prehensive, but not material. There is also the ongoing apotheosis of the world into the everlasting nature of God and the khoric place of possibilities, eternal and independent from the history of the world (PR, 345–47), but imminently creating its process and 'yearning after concrete fact.'"
Faber's point is not that these worlds necessarily exist; they may or may not. But the point is that they can exist from a Whitehead-influenced metaphysical perspective.
The Vast Nexus
Where are they? What are they like? Whitehead proposes that, if they exist, they carry within them a certain kind of temporality, in that they will involve creativity and novelty—a creative advance into novelty—but this is not temporality as we understand it. And if they exist, and we along with them, we and they alike will be part of a vast Nexus: a vast network, the totality of things, in which we live and move and have our being. We are connected to them as part of a common "extensive continuum," even as we are so different from one another. This vast Nexus will be something of a mystery to us; we may feel its presence in our imaginations, but dimly, as background for the whole of things. It may feel like a vast confusion with a few, faith elements of order, and that alone, In his words:
"In these general properties of extensive connection, we discern the defining characteristic of a vast nexus extending far beyond our immediate cosmic epoch. It contains in itself other epochs, with more particular characteristics incompatible incompatible with each other. Then from the standpoint of our present epoch, the fundamental society in so far as it transcends our own epoch seems a vast confusion mitigated by the few, faint elements of order contained in its own defining characteristic of ‘extensive connection.’ We cannot discriminate its other epochs of vigorous order, and we merely conceive it as harbouring the faint flush of the dawn of order in our own epoch. This ultimate, vast society constitutes the whole environment within which our epoch is set, so far as systematic characteristics are discernible by us in our present stage of development. In the future the growth of theory may endow our successors with keener powers of discernment." (Alfred North Whitehead, Process and Reality)
The worlds within this vast Nexus will also include forms of connection or 'prehensive' relations. They will have something like aliveness, feeling, or vitality, even if not ordered in ways we understand, and even if purely chaotic by our measures.
The Cosmo-Mythic Imagination
Why enter into this kind of speculation? Why allow the cosmo-mythic imagination, with its sense of a vast Nexus, become part of our mental lives? Well, for one thing, we probably can't help it. To imagine worlds beyond our own may be part of our psychic-genetic chemistry, as natural as breathing and anticipating a next breath. The act of imagining has a breath-like quality of its own. It is healing and renewing.
Such imagining, if done intentionally, is one of the practices that follows from partaking of what Roland Faber calls 'the mind of Whitehead.' This practice opens up new realms of potentiality, expanding our understanding of life, the universe, and our place within it. It also enables those of us shaped by Western modernism to move beyond our parochialisms and respect the wisdom of traditional people and their metamodern companions. Examples of the cosmo-mythic imagination in tradition abound:
In Indigenous traditions, for example, many cosmologies are built around the belief that there are worlds layered above, below, or parallel to the physical one. These often include spirits of ancestors, animal guides, and natural forces that transcend physicality but remain deeply connected to the land and the people. In this sense, they might be imagined as inhabiting a multiverse-like continuum, where physical and spiritual realities coexist and interact.
In Buddhism, particularly in Mahayana traditions, the concept of multiple realms or "Buddha-fields" suggests a cosmo-mythic imagination where beings transcend physicality. These fields are spaces of higher existence and spiritual advancement, outside the conventional understanding of time and space, reflecting the creative advance into novelty. The realm of Nirvana itself represents a transcendence of temporal existence.
In Hinduism, the idea of multiple lokas (worlds or realms) reflects a layered cosmology, with worlds that go beyond physical reality and contain divine beings, demigods, and spirits. These realms transcend our three-dimensional reality and are deeply connected through karma and cycles of birth and rebirth.
Islamic cosmology imagines the alam al-ghayb (the unseen world), populated by jinn, angels, and spiritual forces that exist outside our understanding of time and space but still influence the physical world. The idea of these beings, often considered part of a larger divine order, could reflect Whitehead’s notion of a Vast Nexus—beings connected in the continuum of the divine and the universe, even though they transcend physicality.
In Western esoteric traditions, such as Neoplatonism and Gnostic traditions, the idea of layers of reality, including the physical, astral, and spiritual planes, allows for a rich cosmo-mythic imagination. Here, beings like angels and archons represent forces that exist beyond the physical and help mediate between different levels of reality.
These various worlds often represent higher possibilities for life, states of consciousness, and deeper relationality beyond the physical realm. In Faber's terms, the creative advance into novelty isn’t just about new physical configurations but about imagining entirely new forms of being and relating—where creatures and beings, perhaps not tied to biology as we understand it, engage in modes of connection and existence that transcend the material.
The cultural practices that engage with these ideas—meditations, rituals, storytelling, and art—are all invitations to participate in this speculative imagination. Whether through art, myth, or philosophy, this practice expands the boundaries of existence and relationship, offering a vision of life deeply connected to the larger continuum, an extensive continuum, to use Whitehead's phrase. This kind of imaginative practice opens the possibility for new understandings of life, existence, and creativity, transcending the limitations of the physical world and exploring realms of potentiality.
Is the Cosmo-Mythic Imagination Anti-Scientific?
Back, then, to my skeptical students. The cosmo-mythic imagination is not inherently anti-scientific, but rather offers a different lens through which to explore the nature of reality. From a Whiteheadian perspective, science and cosmo-mythic imagination can coexist, each operating within its own framework for understanding the vastness of existence. Science, particularly in its modern form, is often concerned with measurable, empirical data and the material world as we observe it through our senses. However, Whitehead’s process philosophy, along with Faber’s interpretations, invites an openness to alternative dimensions and forms of reality that may not fit within the confines of empirical science, yet are no less "real" in a broader metaphysical sense.
The cosmo-mythic imagination asks us to expand our notion of reality to include not just physical objects but also immaterial worlds, cosmic epochs, and trans-material possibilities that might not operate under the same temporal and spatial laws we experience. This isn’t a rejection of science but an extension of our understanding of the universe, one that includes both empirical and speculative modes of inquiry.
In the classroom, this can mean helping students recognize that science and religion are not necessarily at odds when it comes to these spirit worlds or cosmic possibilities. While the "scientific materialism" critiqued by Whitehead and Faber may limit reality to what can be measured and observed, process philosophy allows for a more expansive view of reality—one that can include the unseen, the imaginative, and the speculative. The cosmo-mythic imagination doesn't negate scientific methods but enriches our understanding of existence by allowing for layers of reality that science may not yet fully grasp or measure.
By presenting these worlds as part of a "vast nexus," Whitehead and Faber open the possibility that these trans-material worlds are not mere fiction but potential realities existing in different dimensions or epochs. This perspective resonates with certain speculative areas of science, such as theories of the multiverse or higher-dimensional spaces in theoretical physics, which themselves push the boundaries of our current empirical understanding. Thus, the cosmo-mythic imagination is not anti-scientific but instead broadens the horizon of what we might consider possible, blending empirical science with a metaphysical openness to other ways of being and knowing.