Trans-Sensory Experience
Ordinary and Extraordinary
“I laugh every time I hear process philosophers and theologians privilege the idea of ‘non-sensory’ experience. For one, ‘non-sensory’ sounds too much like ‘nonsense.’ For another, sensory experience is in fact foundational—for infants, for animals, and for many adults; it is where experience begins, grounded in bodily feeling and relational contact. And for still another, so much of what is beautiful, meaningful, and spiritually rich in life comes through the senses—through sight, sound, touch, taste, and smell—especially as they are shaped by memory, mood, and relationship. Think of the smell of coffee a friend, the tone of a friend’s voice, the sensitivity we often have to the moods of others—none of these are ‘just’ sensory or ‘merely’ physical. Think of listening to music: its moods and rhythms and energies. Think of dancing. Why not use the term trans-sensory instead? It acknowledges the sensory while also moving beyond it, making space for experiences that include but exceed the five senses—mystical awareness, intuitive knowing, felt presence, and more. It’s expansive without being dismissive.”
— Claire Emerson, philosopher of embodied experience
— Claire Emerson, philosopher of embodied experience
Clare Emerson doesn't exist as an 'actual' person, but she certainly exists in my imagination. She is a composite of many people I know who find the process philosophical account of experience interesting but a bit out of touch with daily life, especially social relations. While sympathetic to its aims, they often feel that it starts too far from the ground—from the textures of ordinary perception, emotion, and bodily engagement. It jumps too quickly from momentary concrescence to cosmic consciousness, leaving out where we spend most of our time: daily life. Thus they resist its drawing of sharp distinctions between sensory and 'non-sensory' experience.
Clare’s voice gives expression to this critique. She challenges the language of non-sensory perception in particular, not to dismiss the spiritual or the intuitive, but to reclaim the sacredness of daily life experience, including its sensory dimensions.
In the spirit of the fictional Clare Emerson, then, I want to put in a word for trans-sensory experience. By trans-sensory, I mean forms of experience that pass through and often include the five senses but are not confined to them. These include richly embodied perceptions—shaped by mood, memory, intention, and felt connection—as well as more elusive experiences that transcend ordinary sensory boundaries: intuitive insight, archetypal awareness, mystical union, and a sense of presence at a distance.
The term trans-sensory resists the reductive implications of “non-sensory,” which too often suggests either unreality or nonsense. Instead, it affirms that human experience unfolds within a wide and layered field, one in which the sensory, the emotional, the spiritual, and the metaphysical are profoundly entangled. To explore trans-sensory experience is to attend carefully to what is often overlooked: the textures of perception that shape how we know, feel, and belong in the world—and perhaps how we are addressed by something more.
The Problem with the term "Non-Sensory Perception"
The problem with the term non-sensory perception is that it bears an unfortunate resemblance to the word nonsense, and, if too sharply distinguished from sensory perception, it misleadingly suggests that sensory perception—seeing, hearing, tasting, smelling, and touching—is, in everyday life, free of what philosophers and psychologists call non-sensory elements: emotions, aims, memories, felt energies, and moods. In fact, nearly all studies of ordinary experience suggest the opposite: sensory perception is deeply interwoven with these very elements. Perception is never merely passive reception of data; it is a rich, dynamic process infused with meaning, intention, and feeling.
Here are some examples that illustrate this interweaving:
The term trans-sensory resists the reductive implications of “non-sensory,” which too often suggests either unreality or nonsense. Instead, it affirms that human experience unfolds within a wide and layered field, one in which the sensory, the emotional, the spiritual, and the metaphysical are profoundly entangled. To explore trans-sensory experience is to attend carefully to what is often overlooked: the textures of perception that shape how we know, feel, and belong in the world—and perhaps how we are addressed by something more.
The Problem with the term "Non-Sensory Perception"
The problem with the term non-sensory perception is that it bears an unfortunate resemblance to the word nonsense, and, if too sharply distinguished from sensory perception, it misleadingly suggests that sensory perception—seeing, hearing, tasting, smelling, and touching—is, in everyday life, free of what philosophers and psychologists call non-sensory elements: emotions, aims, memories, felt energies, and moods. In fact, nearly all studies of ordinary experience suggest the opposite: sensory perception is deeply interwoven with these very elements. Perception is never merely passive reception of data; it is a rich, dynamic process infused with meaning, intention, and feeling.
Here are some examples that illustrate this interweaving:
- Hearing a friend’s voice – The tone may evoke affection, anxiety, or longing depending on the relational history.
- Smelling bread baking – The scent might awaken memories of childhood, safety, or maternal care.
- Seeing someone’s face in a crowd – Recognition brings emotional immediacy: joy, dread, surprise, or nostalgia.
- Touching a loved one’s hand – The tactile moment becomes a vessel of tenderness, reassurance, or grief.
- Watching a sunset – The colors stir awe, melancholy, or gratitude, depending on one’s internal landscape.
- Tasting food prepared by someone you love – The taste is bound to gratitude, affection, or memory of loss.
- Walking into a childhood home – Every sensory detail evokes an atmosphere thick with memory and identity.
- Listening to music – The melodies and rhythms awaken feelings of longing, hope, transcendence, or pain.
- Looking into a pet’s eyes – There is presence, intimacy, and a sense of mutual recognition.
- Feeling the wind on your face – It might bring not only physical sensation but also a sudden, spiritual sense of freedom or aliveness.
The Phenomenological Tradition
In Western philosophy, the discipline that has been most attentive to this side of life is phenomenology. Among its major contributors, Martin Heidegger, especially in Being and Time, emphasized that experience is always shaped by moods, goals, and temporal context—a form of being he called being-in-the-world. Maurice Merleau-Ponty built upon this by showing that perception is not merely of objects but is embodied, affective, and relational; our bodies are not tools of perception, they are perception. He speaks, for example, of the hand that touches and is touched, of how we see with our bodies and not just with our eyes, and of how space itself is experienced through movement, orientation, and engagement. Emmanuel Levinas, in a different but deeply important way, reminded us that the face of the Other confronts us with ethical demand, not as sensory data alone, but as a call that exceeds comprehension—a form of perception grounded in responsibility and relation.
Other phenomenologists add further richness: Edith Stein explored empathy as a direct, lived experience of another’s inner life; Simone de Beauvoir emphasized the situated body, especially the gendered body, as central to one’s perception of the world; Jean-Luc Marion proposed the idea of saturated phenomena—experiences that overflow our conceptual grasp, such as love, pain, or revelation. For all of these thinkers, sense perception is not a detached registering of external facts but a meaning-laden event—shaped by history, culture, identity, embodiment, and the presence of others. They help us see that what we call “the senses” are already suffused with memory, anticipation, vulnerability, and the invisible fabric of relationship.
Experience in the Mode of Causal Efficacy
If you read these thinkers with care, you are struck by the intimacy and precision of their descriptions of daily life. And if you are also attuned to the philosophy of Alfred North Whitehead, you will recognize in these descriptions what he called experience in the mode of causal efficacy—that is, experience as the felt impact of the world upon the self. This includes not only bodily sensation but also mood, memory, and emotional tone. Sadly, many process philosophers and theologians have not yet engaged deeply with this phenomenological tradition.
To be sure, Whitehead does offer a concept that weaves together causal efficacy and sensory experience: experience in the mode of symbolic reference. But even this term can be misleading, as it suggests that sensory elements merely symbolize deeper realities rather than expressing and embodying them from the start. The problem is compounded when process thinkers reduce sense-experience to what Whitehead called presentational immediacy—a highly abstract, often visual mode of awareness that detaches the perceiver from the world and isolates the seen from the felt. Whitehead’s critique of this detachment is clear: it distorts the basis of lived experience and leads philosophy away from the felt connectivity that grounds all knowing.
Unified Field of Bodily Experience
In ordinary life, experience in the mode of causal efficacy is intimately linked with engaged sense-perception. We see with our bodies, hear through our emotions, and touch in light of memory and intention. Perception is not received in parts—sense first, meaning later—but arises as a unified field of bodily resonance and emotional relevance. This is the richness that Whitehead tried to recover from the reductive habits of modern philosophy.
To reclaim this terrain, process thought must reimagine symbolic reference not as an abstract mental function but as a trans-sensory process—a process that honors the sensory while also moving beyond it. This means recognizing that human experience includes not only the richly textured fabric of ordinary life but also non-ordinary forms of awareness—intuitive, mystical, archetypal, and deeply spiritual.
This, it seems to me, is where process philosophy and theology may have a special role to play. Its cosmology offers a nuanced, multifaceted view of reality—one that welcomes ideas often excluded from more reductive frameworks. These include the collective unconscious, an extensive space-time continuum with many dimensions, the possibility of intermediate realities (such as angels, spirits, aliens, jinn, and, for that matter, demons and devils), and a richly textured and relational understanding of God.
Experiencing God
Among the most profound of these are mystical experiences explicitly related to God. Five stand out in relation to Whitehead’s understanding of divine reality:
These experiences are connected yet different. A study of the history of religious experience finds each. People may have these kinds of experience and not believe in God as they understand God. Whitehead himself used other words: Eros, Peace, Love, to name the divine side of life.
Experiencing the Universe
Alongside these God-related experiences are other non-ordinary trans-sensory experiences—not necessarily theistic, but no less real, powerful, or transformative:
All of these experiences can 'make sense' from a process perctive. These kinds of experiences stretch the boundaries of traditional sensory and rational models of perception. They invite a broader metaphysics of mind, feeling, and relational depth—a metaphysics that is as concerned with beauty, intuition, resonance, and becoming as it is with logic or physical causation. In this context, process philosophy and theology offer a particularly promising framework: one in which the divine and the human, the ordinary and the extraordinary, the sensory and the trans-sensory, all belong to the same living universe of interconnected becoming.
Discernment
It should also be added that process philosophy and theology are open to the possibility that non-ordinary trans-sensory experiences are not always benign or constructive. Not every felt presence is comforting, not every voice is wise, and not every vision is a gift. Just as the sensory world includes suffering, distortion, and violence, so too can the trans-sensory realm harbor confusion, fragmentation, and even malevolence. Process thought does not reduce all experiences to divine communication or inner harmony. Rather, it offers a framework for discernment—acknowledging that the universe is composed of many actualities, some oriented toward truth, beauty, and love, and others toward disintegration, manipulation, or illusion. The task, then, is not to reject trans-sensory experience, but to approach it with openness, humility, and moral awareness. In this way, process theology invites us to listen deeply—but also wisely—to the many dimensions of experience, trusting that even amid distortion, there remains a lure toward wholeness.
Concrescence: Where Ordinary and Extraordinary Experience Meet
At the heart of Whitehead’s metaphysics is the concept of concrescence—the process by which each actual entity becomes itself by integrating the many influences of the universe into a unified moment of experience. This idea offers a powerful way of understanding how ordinary experiences in daily life and extraordinary trans-sensory experiences are not separate or unrelated, but woven together in the same creative process of becoming.
Each moment of experience—whether sipping coffee, grieving a loss, laughing with a friend, receiving an intuitive insight, or feeling the presence of something greater—is, for Whitehead, a concrescence of the universe. It is not a private, self-enclosed mental state. Rather, it is a microcosmic act of synthesis: a unification of past actualities, present sensations, emotional intensities, and future possibilities. In this sense, every experience is cosmic in scope, even when local in content. The entire history of the universe flows into and shapes each moment of becoming, which in turn contributes to the ongoing becoming of all that follows.
This perspective allows us to understand cosmic consciousness not as an escape from the world, nor as a rare and esoteric attainment, but as a realization—often momentary, sometimes sustained—that each act of experience participates in the wider creative advance of the cosmos. A person who becomes aware of this depth, whether in mystical awe or quiet reflection, is not exiting ordinary life, but entering more deeply into its meaning.
In this light, even the most subtle forms of awareness—like the felt presence of another person, the moral clarity that comes from silence, or the beauty of a tree against the sky—can be seen as events of cosmic participation. So, too, can trans-sensory experiences of extraordinary scope be understood not as anomalies, but as intensified expressions of what is always happening: the universe becoming itself, moment by moment, through the concrescence of relational experience.
Process theology thus offers not only a metaphysics of experience, but a spiritual cosmology in which to situate those moments when we sense that our lives are part of something greater—something dynamic, intimate, and unfolding. In the concept of concrescence, we are given a way to see that our ordinary lives are already cosmic, and that every act of attention may be a threshold to wonder. The sense of wonder may or may not be conscious - or it may be semi-conscious.
Consciousness as a Particular Mode of Experience
In popular usage, we often equate experience with consciousness, imagining that only what we are aware of—clearly, distinctly, and reflectively—is real. But in Whitehead’s metaphysical vision, consciousness is not the essence of experience; it is a particular kind of experience that arises in certain conditions and degrees.
For Whitehead, consciousness is associated especially with high-grade occasions of experience—such as those involving reflective awareness, deliberate choice, and sensory attention. Its defining characteristic is clarity and distinctness. We are conscious when we are aware of something, when contrasts are illuminated, and when novelty is coordinated with memory in a clear and graspable way.
But consciousness, as Whitehead insists, occurs by degree. It is not an all-or-nothing phenomenon. There are moments when experience is fully conscious, but many more when it is semi-conscious, peripheral, or entirely unconscious yet still meaningful. We are constantly shaped by non-conscious experience—bodily habits, ambient moods, inherited memory, background intuitions—that we do not fully register in the moment but that nonetheless guide our actions, decisions, and felt sense of the world.
In this view, experience precedes consciousness, and not the other way around. A creature or occasion may feel, respond, integrate, or be affected without being conscious in the reflective sense. What we often call “gut feeling,” “atmosphere,” or “intuition” may arise from these pre-conscious or sub-conscious layers of experience—real, relational, and meaningful, even if not verbally or conceptually articulated.
This view not only aligns with much of what contemporary neuroscience affirms (that consciousness is layered and emergent), but it also affirms the dignity of unconscious and nonverbal modes of life. It offers a more generous and inclusive picture of the world—one in which humans are not the only feelers, and in which the conscious mind is one flame among many within the fire of becoming.
The Brain
From a process perspective, concrescence—each moment of felt experience—is not something that happens in isolation from the body, nor from the brain. In ordinary human life, the brain plays a vital role in enabling complex forms of consciousness, memory, decision-making, and emotion. It gathers sensory input, integrates memory, helps regulate mood, and supports the flow of conscious attention. In this sense, the brain is a necessary condition for concrescence as we know it in embodied existence. It is an extraordinary organ of participation in the wider world.
But within process thought, concrescence is not reducible to brain chemistry. The brain is not the source of experience; it is part of the environmental context—a set of prehended actualities—that contributes to the creative synthesis of each moment. Whitehead reverses the usual materialist view: rather than consciousness being produced by the brain, the brain is one of many factors that are felt and integrated in the becoming of a moment of experience. As such, consciousness is not contained within the skull. It is relational, dynamic, and extended—shaped by bodily states, personal history, cultural meaning, and cosmic context.
A Continuing Journey after Death?
This opens the door to a profound possibility: if concrescence is more than brain activity, then the cessation of brain function at death may not entail the cessation of experience. The brain, in life, offers a structure through which the soul—a series of concrescing subject —interacts with the world. But at death, the structures change. The process doesn’t necessarily end.
From a process perspective, the idea of a continuing journey after death is not irrational or wishful thinking; it is a philosophically meaningful possibility. If we take seriously that the universe is composed of actual occasions of experience—each with its own aim, intensity, and relational context—then we may also allow that a new mode of concrescence could emerge beyond the patterns we now know. Experience may shift into other fields of connection, other dimensions of the space-time continuum, or other orders of relational intensity.
To be sure, process thought makes no dogmatic claim about what lies beyond death. But it does affirm that creativity does not cease, that each life is preserved in the divine memory, and that the lure toward beauty and peace is never finally extinguished. In this sense, it invites us to imagine a more expansive horizon for experience—one in which the boundaries of brain and body give way to forms of becoming that continue to be shaped by love, memory, and divine companionship.
Back to Daily Life
And so, after all the reflections on mystical awareness, cosmic participation, and the wide range of trans-sensory experience, I return—intentionally and gratefully—to daily life. Not as a retreat from the expansive, but as a recognition of where experience most faithfully unfolds.
The trans-sensory includes the sensory—it does not bypass it. Rather, it deepens and expands it. The smell of morning coffee, the feel of bare feet on cool earth, the sound of a friend’s voice—all of these are sensory experiences, but they are also shaped by memory, mood, intention, and bodily resonance. They are never merely raw data. They are meaning-laden events of becoming, rich with feeling and interconnection.
Daily life experience, including its sensory dimensions, is not secondary to spiritual insight. It is the medium through which the sacred often arrives. In the language of process philosophy, every act of perception is a concrescence of the universe—a gathering of past influences, present responses, and future possibilities. Whether we are conscious of it or not, we are always participating in something larger than ourselves.
To return to daily life, then, is not to leave behind the mystical or metaphysical. It is to recognize that they are woven into the very fabric of the ordinary. The trans-sensory does not require extraordinary visions; it is already present in our embodied lives, in the spaces between words, in the glances exchanged, in the quiet awe of being alive.
The spiritual task is not to escape the world, but to enter it more fully. In paying attention to what is here—this breath, this moment, this face before us—we may find that the sacred is not hidden behind the world, but humming quietly within it, waiting to be noticed in the ordinary grace of a life well-lived.
Other phenomenologists add further richness: Edith Stein explored empathy as a direct, lived experience of another’s inner life; Simone de Beauvoir emphasized the situated body, especially the gendered body, as central to one’s perception of the world; Jean-Luc Marion proposed the idea of saturated phenomena—experiences that overflow our conceptual grasp, such as love, pain, or revelation. For all of these thinkers, sense perception is not a detached registering of external facts but a meaning-laden event—shaped by history, culture, identity, embodiment, and the presence of others. They help us see that what we call “the senses” are already suffused with memory, anticipation, vulnerability, and the invisible fabric of relationship.
Experience in the Mode of Causal Efficacy
If you read these thinkers with care, you are struck by the intimacy and precision of their descriptions of daily life. And if you are also attuned to the philosophy of Alfred North Whitehead, you will recognize in these descriptions what he called experience in the mode of causal efficacy—that is, experience as the felt impact of the world upon the self. This includes not only bodily sensation but also mood, memory, and emotional tone. Sadly, many process philosophers and theologians have not yet engaged deeply with this phenomenological tradition.
To be sure, Whitehead does offer a concept that weaves together causal efficacy and sensory experience: experience in the mode of symbolic reference. But even this term can be misleading, as it suggests that sensory elements merely symbolize deeper realities rather than expressing and embodying them from the start. The problem is compounded when process thinkers reduce sense-experience to what Whitehead called presentational immediacy—a highly abstract, often visual mode of awareness that detaches the perceiver from the world and isolates the seen from the felt. Whitehead’s critique of this detachment is clear: it distorts the basis of lived experience and leads philosophy away from the felt connectivity that grounds all knowing.
Unified Field of Bodily Experience
In ordinary life, experience in the mode of causal efficacy is intimately linked with engaged sense-perception. We see with our bodies, hear through our emotions, and touch in light of memory and intention. Perception is not received in parts—sense first, meaning later—but arises as a unified field of bodily resonance and emotional relevance. This is the richness that Whitehead tried to recover from the reductive habits of modern philosophy.
To reclaim this terrain, process thought must reimagine symbolic reference not as an abstract mental function but as a trans-sensory process—a process that honors the sensory while also moving beyond it. This means recognizing that human experience includes not only the richly textured fabric of ordinary life but also non-ordinary forms of awareness—intuitive, mystical, archetypal, and deeply spiritual.
This, it seems to me, is where process philosophy and theology may have a special role to play. Its cosmology offers a nuanced, multifaceted view of reality—one that welcomes ideas often excluded from more reductive frameworks. These include the collective unconscious, an extensive space-time continuum with many dimensions, the possibility of intermediate realities (such as angels, spirits, aliens, jinn, and, for that matter, demons and devils), and a richly textured and relational understanding of God.
Experiencing God
Among the most profound of these are mystical experiences explicitly related to God. Five stand out in relation to Whitehead’s understanding of divine reality:
- A sense of immersion in an infinite field of possibility—resonant with Whitehead’s primordial nature of God, the eternal realm of pure potentiality where all possibilities are held in loving regard.
- An overwhelming experience of inclusive, unconditional love—reflecting the consequent nature of God, who receives all actualities into a divine empathy that redeems nothing by erasing, and everything by embracing.
- A felt presence of personal or sacred guidance—which may be understood as the superjective nature of God, the divine aim entering experience as lure, invitation, or companion.
- An awareness of the universe as an interconnected whole, where each entity, however small, plays a role in the becoming of others—a vision aligned with process theology’s affirmation that the multiplicity of the world is not outside of God, but woven into the divine life itself. In such moments, the cosmos is not simply background to the sacred but a living participant in it.
- An experience of profound peace, as described in Whitehead’s Adventures of Ideas—a harmony of harmonies that transcends the compulsions of the ego and emerges only when striving, fear, and self-centered desire fall away. This peace is not the absence of conflict, but the presence of depth and spiritual poise—one that reconciles contrast and holds multiplicity together without flattening difference. It is not something we grasp; it is something that gently takes hold of us.
These experiences are connected yet different. A study of the history of religious experience finds each. People may have these kinds of experience and not believe in God as they understand God. Whitehead himself used other words: Eros, Peace, Love, to name the divine side of life.
Experiencing the Universe
Alongside these God-related experiences are other non-ordinary trans-sensory experiences—not necessarily theistic, but no less real, powerful, or transformative:
- A felt connection to archetypal presences or the collective unconscious, as in visionary, mythic, or Jungian encounters that carry symbolic and transformational significance.
- A vivid awareness of past lives, often emotionally charged and psychologically meaningful, suggesting continuities that defy linear time.
- Tele-empathic awareness—the capacity to sense another’s emotional state, even across physical distance, with immediacy and intimacy.
- Out-of-body experiences (OBEs) in which consciousness seems to transcend the boundaries of the physical body, observing from a separate vantage point.
- Near-death experiences (NDEs) that reveal unexpected dimensions of consciousness and often evoke a sense of love, light, or life-review that reshapes one’s sense of reality.
- Spontaneous moments of moral or aesthetic insight that seem to arise from a deeper, unseen source rather than from ego or reasoning alone.
- Creative callings or inner voices that orient a person’s life with clarity and purpose, even when not consciously chosen—often described by artists, mystics, and visionaries as guidance from “beyond the self.”
- Encounters with aliens, elemental spirits and energies from the more than human world.
All of these experiences can 'make sense' from a process perctive. These kinds of experiences stretch the boundaries of traditional sensory and rational models of perception. They invite a broader metaphysics of mind, feeling, and relational depth—a metaphysics that is as concerned with beauty, intuition, resonance, and becoming as it is with logic or physical causation. In this context, process philosophy and theology offer a particularly promising framework: one in which the divine and the human, the ordinary and the extraordinary, the sensory and the trans-sensory, all belong to the same living universe of interconnected becoming.
Discernment
It should also be added that process philosophy and theology are open to the possibility that non-ordinary trans-sensory experiences are not always benign or constructive. Not every felt presence is comforting, not every voice is wise, and not every vision is a gift. Just as the sensory world includes suffering, distortion, and violence, so too can the trans-sensory realm harbor confusion, fragmentation, and even malevolence. Process thought does not reduce all experiences to divine communication or inner harmony. Rather, it offers a framework for discernment—acknowledging that the universe is composed of many actualities, some oriented toward truth, beauty, and love, and others toward disintegration, manipulation, or illusion. The task, then, is not to reject trans-sensory experience, but to approach it with openness, humility, and moral awareness. In this way, process theology invites us to listen deeply—but also wisely—to the many dimensions of experience, trusting that even amid distortion, there remains a lure toward wholeness.
Concrescence: Where Ordinary and Extraordinary Experience Meet
At the heart of Whitehead’s metaphysics is the concept of concrescence—the process by which each actual entity becomes itself by integrating the many influences of the universe into a unified moment of experience. This idea offers a powerful way of understanding how ordinary experiences in daily life and extraordinary trans-sensory experiences are not separate or unrelated, but woven together in the same creative process of becoming.
Each moment of experience—whether sipping coffee, grieving a loss, laughing with a friend, receiving an intuitive insight, or feeling the presence of something greater—is, for Whitehead, a concrescence of the universe. It is not a private, self-enclosed mental state. Rather, it is a microcosmic act of synthesis: a unification of past actualities, present sensations, emotional intensities, and future possibilities. In this sense, every experience is cosmic in scope, even when local in content. The entire history of the universe flows into and shapes each moment of becoming, which in turn contributes to the ongoing becoming of all that follows.
This perspective allows us to understand cosmic consciousness not as an escape from the world, nor as a rare and esoteric attainment, but as a realization—often momentary, sometimes sustained—that each act of experience participates in the wider creative advance of the cosmos. A person who becomes aware of this depth, whether in mystical awe or quiet reflection, is not exiting ordinary life, but entering more deeply into its meaning.
In this light, even the most subtle forms of awareness—like the felt presence of another person, the moral clarity that comes from silence, or the beauty of a tree against the sky—can be seen as events of cosmic participation. So, too, can trans-sensory experiences of extraordinary scope be understood not as anomalies, but as intensified expressions of what is always happening: the universe becoming itself, moment by moment, through the concrescence of relational experience.
Process theology thus offers not only a metaphysics of experience, but a spiritual cosmology in which to situate those moments when we sense that our lives are part of something greater—something dynamic, intimate, and unfolding. In the concept of concrescence, we are given a way to see that our ordinary lives are already cosmic, and that every act of attention may be a threshold to wonder. The sense of wonder may or may not be conscious - or it may be semi-conscious.
Consciousness as a Particular Mode of Experience
In popular usage, we often equate experience with consciousness, imagining that only what we are aware of—clearly, distinctly, and reflectively—is real. But in Whitehead’s metaphysical vision, consciousness is not the essence of experience; it is a particular kind of experience that arises in certain conditions and degrees.
For Whitehead, consciousness is associated especially with high-grade occasions of experience—such as those involving reflective awareness, deliberate choice, and sensory attention. Its defining characteristic is clarity and distinctness. We are conscious when we are aware of something, when contrasts are illuminated, and when novelty is coordinated with memory in a clear and graspable way.
But consciousness, as Whitehead insists, occurs by degree. It is not an all-or-nothing phenomenon. There are moments when experience is fully conscious, but many more when it is semi-conscious, peripheral, or entirely unconscious yet still meaningful. We are constantly shaped by non-conscious experience—bodily habits, ambient moods, inherited memory, background intuitions—that we do not fully register in the moment but that nonetheless guide our actions, decisions, and felt sense of the world.
In this view, experience precedes consciousness, and not the other way around. A creature or occasion may feel, respond, integrate, or be affected without being conscious in the reflective sense. What we often call “gut feeling,” “atmosphere,” or “intuition” may arise from these pre-conscious or sub-conscious layers of experience—real, relational, and meaningful, even if not verbally or conceptually articulated.
This view not only aligns with much of what contemporary neuroscience affirms (that consciousness is layered and emergent), but it also affirms the dignity of unconscious and nonverbal modes of life. It offers a more generous and inclusive picture of the world—one in which humans are not the only feelers, and in which the conscious mind is one flame among many within the fire of becoming.
The Brain
From a process perspective, concrescence—each moment of felt experience—is not something that happens in isolation from the body, nor from the brain. In ordinary human life, the brain plays a vital role in enabling complex forms of consciousness, memory, decision-making, and emotion. It gathers sensory input, integrates memory, helps regulate mood, and supports the flow of conscious attention. In this sense, the brain is a necessary condition for concrescence as we know it in embodied existence. It is an extraordinary organ of participation in the wider world.
But within process thought, concrescence is not reducible to brain chemistry. The brain is not the source of experience; it is part of the environmental context—a set of prehended actualities—that contributes to the creative synthesis of each moment. Whitehead reverses the usual materialist view: rather than consciousness being produced by the brain, the brain is one of many factors that are felt and integrated in the becoming of a moment of experience. As such, consciousness is not contained within the skull. It is relational, dynamic, and extended—shaped by bodily states, personal history, cultural meaning, and cosmic context.
A Continuing Journey after Death?
This opens the door to a profound possibility: if concrescence is more than brain activity, then the cessation of brain function at death may not entail the cessation of experience. The brain, in life, offers a structure through which the soul—a series of concrescing subject —interacts with the world. But at death, the structures change. The process doesn’t necessarily end.
From a process perspective, the idea of a continuing journey after death is not irrational or wishful thinking; it is a philosophically meaningful possibility. If we take seriously that the universe is composed of actual occasions of experience—each with its own aim, intensity, and relational context—then we may also allow that a new mode of concrescence could emerge beyond the patterns we now know. Experience may shift into other fields of connection, other dimensions of the space-time continuum, or other orders of relational intensity.
To be sure, process thought makes no dogmatic claim about what lies beyond death. But it does affirm that creativity does not cease, that each life is preserved in the divine memory, and that the lure toward beauty and peace is never finally extinguished. In this sense, it invites us to imagine a more expansive horizon for experience—one in which the boundaries of brain and body give way to forms of becoming that continue to be shaped by love, memory, and divine companionship.
Back to Daily Life
And so, after all the reflections on mystical awareness, cosmic participation, and the wide range of trans-sensory experience, I return—intentionally and gratefully—to daily life. Not as a retreat from the expansive, but as a recognition of where experience most faithfully unfolds.
The trans-sensory includes the sensory—it does not bypass it. Rather, it deepens and expands it. The smell of morning coffee, the feel of bare feet on cool earth, the sound of a friend’s voice—all of these are sensory experiences, but they are also shaped by memory, mood, intention, and bodily resonance. They are never merely raw data. They are meaning-laden events of becoming, rich with feeling and interconnection.
Daily life experience, including its sensory dimensions, is not secondary to spiritual insight. It is the medium through which the sacred often arrives. In the language of process philosophy, every act of perception is a concrescence of the universe—a gathering of past influences, present responses, and future possibilities. Whether we are conscious of it or not, we are always participating in something larger than ourselves.
To return to daily life, then, is not to leave behind the mystical or metaphysical. It is to recognize that they are woven into the very fabric of the ordinary. The trans-sensory does not require extraordinary visions; it is already present in our embodied lives, in the spaces between words, in the glances exchanged, in the quiet awe of being alive.
The spiritual task is not to escape the world, but to enter it more fully. In paying attention to what is here—this breath, this moment, this face before us—we may find that the sacred is not hidden behind the world, but humming quietly within it, waiting to be noticed in the ordinary grace of a life well-lived.