Transpersonal Experience
The Peace that is here meant is not the negative conception of anaesthesia. It is a positive feeling which crowns the ‘life and motion’ of the soul. It is hard to define and difficult to speak of. It is not a hope for the future, nor is it an interest in present details. It is a broadening of feeling due to the emergence of some deep metaphysical insight, unverbalized and yet momentous in its coordination of values. Its first effect is the removal of the stress of acquisitive feeling arising from the soul’s preoccupation with itself. Thus Peace carries with it a surpassing of personality. There is an inversion of relative values. It is primarily a trust in the efficacy of Beauty.
- Whitehead, Adventures of Ideas, 285
Whitehead’s reflections on peace provide an important point of entry into what might be called transpersonal experience in process thought. Peace, for Whitehead, is not mere calm or withdrawal from struggle, but a mode of experience marked by freedom from acquisitive striving—the relaxation of the impulse to secure personal importance, continuity, or control. In peace, the self is no longer organized primarily around possession or self-maintenance and thus becomes receptive to meanings that exceed the boundaries of personality.
But Peace is only one form of transpersonal experience, of which there are many others. Whitehead’s philosophy helps clarify why transpersonal experiences can take profoundly different forms, including love and violence. In both cases, experience widens beyond the boundaries of personal identity and self-concern. The difference lies not in whether personality is surpassed, but in how the many influences shaping a moment are integrated in concrescence.
Transpersonal love arises when the loosening of personality opens the subject to a wider field of value in which others are felt as thous—as beings with lives of their own whose well-being matters. In such moments, the self’s habitual preoccupation with possession, status, or security relaxes, allowing concern for others to enter experience without being subordinated to personal advantage. Whitehead’s account of peace belongs here: the stress of acquisitive feeling diminishes, personality is surpassed without being erased, and trust in the efficacy of Beauty takes precedence over fear or control. Love, in this sense, is not merely a personal emotion but a widening of experience in which relational sensitivity deepens.
Transpersonal violence, by contrast, also involves a surpassing of personality, but in a radically different direction. Here the individual self is absorbed into a collective field organized by fear, aggression, or domination. Others are no longer encountered as thous but as threats, obstacles, or expendable means. The widening of experience intensifies solidarity and purpose, yet at the cost of relational sensitivity and moral complexity. Such experiences may occur in war, mob action, or other forms of collective frenzy, where individuality is overridden by a shared emotional current that legitimates harm.
Concrescence explains how both forms are possible. Each moment integrates a field of prehensions—bodily energies, social pressures, inherited meanings, and the felt presence of others—under the guidance of a subjective aim. When that aim orients integration toward harmony, mutual recognition, and the enhancement of life, transpersonal experience takes the form of love. When it orients integration toward exclusion, domination, or destruction, transpersonal experience takes the form of violence.
From a Whiteheadian perspective, then, the transpersonal is ethically ambiguous. The surpassing of personality is not itself a guarantee of goodness. What matters is whether the widening of experience deepens relational responsiveness or suppresses it—whether it serves Beauty or sacrifices it. Love and violence thus appear not as opposites of the personal, but as two radically different ways in which experience can move beyond personality in the ongoing creative advance of the world.