Rethinking Consciousness: Extraordinary Challenges for Contemporary Science

By Process Century Press

Telepathy, clairvoyance, ESP . . . in these ten chapters, leading parapsychologists and philosophers explore experiences that challenge the modern scientific worldview—a worldview that has brought us to a state of planetary crisis. It is imperative that our thinking about perception and experience be outside the box—in this case, out

• Language: English
• Publisher: Process Century Press
• Release date: Apr 30, 2020
• ISBN: 9781940447452

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Rethinking Consciousness: Extraordinary Challenges for Contemporary Science

© 2020 Process Century Press

All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations in critical publications and reviews, no part of this book may be reproduced in any manner without prior permission from the publisher.

Process Century Press

RiverHouse LLC

802 River Lane

Anoka, MN 55303

Process Century Press books are published in association with the International Process Network.

Cover: Susanna Mennicke

Acknowledgements

Chapter Six, Revision and Re-enchantment of Psychology, by Stanislav Grof, is a condensed and revised version of an article from the Journal of Transpersonal Psychology, which generously gave permission for its use in this collection. The Journal of Transpersonal Psychology, 2012, Vol. 44, No. 2, 137–63)

VOLUME XX

TOWARD ECOLOGICAL CIVILIZATION SERIES

JEANYNE B. SLETTOM, GENERAL EDITOR

ISBN 978-1-940447-43-8

Printed in the United States of America

Series Preface: Toward Ecological Civilization

We live in the ending of an age. But the ending of the modern period differs from the ending of previous periods, such as the classical or the medieval. The amazing achievements of modernity make it possible, even likely, that its end will also be the end of civilization, of many species, or even of the human species. At the same time, we are living in an age of new beginnings that give promise of an ecological civilization. Its emergence is marked by a growing sense of urgency and deepening awareness that the changes must go to the roots of what has led to the current threat of catastrophe.

In June 2015, the 10th Whitehead International Conference was held in Claremont, CA. Called Seizing an Alternative: Toward an Ecological Civilization, it claimed an organic, relational, integrated, nondual, and processive conceptuality is needed, and that Alfred North Whitehead provides this in a remarkably comprehensive and rigorous way. We proposed that he could be the philosopher of ecological civilization. With the help of those who have come to an ecological vision in other ways, the conference explored this Whiteheadian alternative, showing how it can provide the shared vision so urgently needed.

The judgment underlying this effort is that contemporary research and scholarship is still enthralled by the 17th century view of nature articulated by Descartes and reinforced by Kant. Without freeing our minds of this objectifying and reductive understanding of the world, we are not likely to direct our actions wisely in response to the crisis to which this tradition has led us. Given the ambitious goal of replacing now dominant patterns of thought with one that would redirect us toward ecological civilization, clearly more is needed than a single conference. Fortunately, a larger platform is developing that includes the conference and looks beyond it. It is named Pando Populus (pandopopulous.org)in honor of the world’s largest and oldest organism, an aspen grove.

As a continuation of the conference, and in support of the larger initiative of Pando Populus, we are publishing this series, appropriately named Toward Ecological Civilization.

~John B. Cobb, Jr.

Other Books in this Series

An Axiological Process Ethics, Rem B. Edwards

Panentheism and Scientific Naturalism, David Ray Griffin

Organic Marxism, Philip Clayton & Justin Heinzekehr

Theological Reminiscences, John B. Cobb, Jr.

Integrative Process, Margaret Stout & Jeannine M. Love

Replanting Ourselves in Beauty, Jay McDaniel & Patricia Adams Farmer, eds.

For Our Common Home, John B. Cobb, Jr., & Ignacio Castuera, eds.

Whitehead Word Book, John B. Cobb, Jr.

The Vindication of Radical Empiricism, Michel Weber

Intuition in Mathematics and Physics, Ronny Desmet, ed.

Reforming Higher Education in an Era of Ecological Crisis and Growing Digital Insecurity, Chet Bowers

Protecting Our Common, Sacred Home, David Ray Griffin

Educating for an Ecological Civilization, Marcus Ford & Stephen Rowe, eds.

Socialism in Process, Justin Heinzekehr & Philip Clayton, eds.

Two Americas, Stephen C. Rowe

Rebuilding after Collapse, John Culp, ed.

Putting Philosophy to Work, John B. Cobb Jr. & Wm. Andrew Schwartz, eds.

What Is Ecological Civilization, Philip Clayton and Andrew Schwartz

Conceiving an Alternative, Demian Wheeler & David Conner, eds.

Acknowledgements

This book would not have come into existence if it not for the seminal conference, Seizing an Alternative, which took place in Claremont, California, in June of 2015. As envisioned by John B. Cobb, Jr., this conference explore d the many possibilities offered by process thought for reimagining our civilization in light of the manifold threats that now face humanity and the planet. Our thanks go out to the hundreds of people whose hard work made this gathering possible, and especially to John Cobb, Andrew Schwartz, and Vern Visick, who were the backbone of this enterprise.

Next, our great appreciation to the contributors to this volume, most of whom were part of the Extraordinary Challenges track at the Seizing an Alternative conference, but several of whom were unable to participate directly in our track discussions. They were persuaded to contribute chapters to this book nonetheless, and the essays by John Cobb, David Ray Griffin, and Larry Dossey have strengthened and deepened the general view being developed in these pages. Thanks to the track participants for their additional efforts to turn their conference presentations into the chapters you will find in this book, and for their patience and goodwill during the editing process.

For their diligent help in the initial editing of the chapters, a tip of the hat to Gina Picard and Nancy Walter at the University of West Georgia. Our particular thanks go to Elizabeth Stemen, who coordinated the final editing of the chapters and the assorted details involved in preparing a book for publication. Finally, this project would not have even gotten underway without the encouragement of John Cobb on the front end and Jeanyne Slettom on the publishing end. Jeanyne’s labors at founding and managing Process Century Press have created an important venue for process-related books, something we feel is of great value.

A special note of thanks to the Journal of Transpersonal Psychology, which generously gave permission to include in this volume a revised version of an article by Stanislav Grof. Also, we would be remiss not to acknowledge Catherine Keller for her helpful suggestion regarding the title for this book.

Rethinking

CONSCIOUSNESS

Extraordinary Challenges

for Contemporary Science

John H. Buchanan

Christopher M. Aanstoos

Editors

Foreword by Stanley Krippner

ANOKA, MINNESOTA 2020

Contents

Series Preface: Toward Ecological Civilization

Other Books in this Series

Acknowledgements

Foreword

by Stanley Krippner

Introduction

by John H. Buchanan & Christopher M. Aanstoos

Denigration of the Subject in Late Modern Thought

by John B. Cobb, Jr.

Parapsychology and Whiteheadian Panexperientialism

by David Ray Griffin

Parapsychology

by John Palmer

Parapsychology Needs a Theory—and It Has One

by James Carpenter

First Sight: A Whiteheadian Perspective

by John H. Buchanan

Revision and Re-enchantment of Psychology

by Stanislav Grof

Amplified Subject

by Leonard Gibson

David Ray Griffin on Steiner and Whitehead

by Robert McDermott

A Phenomenology of the Ecological Self

by Christopher M. Aanstoos

All Tangled Up: Life in a Quantum World

by Larry Dossey

Contributors

Foreword

by Stanley Krippner

This book is remarkable. Its chapters propose an ecological civilization, one that reflects the impending climate changes of the twenty-first century. These have been discussed since the establishment of the greenhouse effect in the 1800s and the subsequent predictions at the turn of the twentieth century. In recent years there has been a plethora of books and articles on this topic, as well as some dissenting voices. However, the latter objections do not deny that the climate is changing, but claim that human activity has little to do with it.

What is new about this volume is its link to exceptional human experiences, especially those anomalies that cannot be easily reconciled with mainstream science’s understanding of time, space, and energy. On the one hand, we have mainstream science’s contention that an ecological crisis is impending, and, on the other hand, we are told that it can be prevented (or at least managed) by data that contradict the constructs of that same science. This type of dialectic is not uncommon in postmodernity dialogue, but here the consequences are more than an intellectual exercise. Personally, I recall the philosopher Alan Watts, a pioneer ecologist, discussing these portents with me and my friends on his houseboat in Sausalito, California.¹ At the time we had no idea how prescient he was!

The extraordinary suggestion of the chapter authors is that the concepts and data from transpersonal psychology and parapsychology, long rejected, ridiculed, or ignored by mainstream science, are the very resources needed to reorient this endangered world and its tattered societies. None of this would come as a surprise to Alfred North Whitehead, the visionary philosopher whose process philosophy easily encompasses both quantum physics and the anomalous experiences enumerated by the chapter authors. Indeed, such physicists as Henry Stapp and such cosmologists as Bernard Carr have accommodated these phenomena within their models. Further, it was not so long ago that seminal physicists such as David Bohm, Niels Bohr, and Wolfgang Pauli expressed an open-minded attitude to parapsychological data. I was fortunate enough to be present when Bohm presented his new theory of mind and matter to an appreciative audience in New York City.²

The anthropologist Jeremy Narby has expanded this discussion in his landmark book Intelligence in Nature, pointing out that intentional behavior is not limited to the human species.³ Self-deterministic decisions, behaviors, and activities can be found not only in other animals but in many other forms of life—not only the proverbial birds and the bees but in microscopic organisms as well. Abraham Maslow, a founder of transpersonal psychology, once told me that there was a need for a transhuman psychology, one that would recognize these uncanny dispositions of other forms of life. I responded that, for me, psychology is the scientific study of experience and behavior, and that humans are not the only organisms that experience and behave.

Maslow’s ideas constantly ran counter to those of his fellow past-presidents of the American Psychological Association, many of whom modeled cognitive neuroscience after the natural sciences.⁴ However, the celebrated hard problem in psychology argues for human subjectivity and doubts that it can be explained by current paradigms.⁵ Susan Gordon has proposed a solution, replacing materialistic cognitive science with a nondualistic neurophenomenology informed by Indo-Tibetan Buddhist philosophy.⁶ Julia Mossbridge and Imants Baruss go a step further by proposing a post-materialist science of consciousness in a paradigm-shifting book published by the American Psychological Association.⁷ These authors build their case on data from parapsychology, transpersonal psychology, and associated disciplines that have spent decades waiting for an opportunity to join the discourse that finally seems available to them.

Over the years, it has been my great pleasure to visit the University of West Georgia, where Chris Aanstoos and his colleagues have developed a pioneering but rigorous curriculum in transpersonal and humanistic psychology. He and coeditor John Buchanan, an alumnus of the West Georgia graduate psychology program, are the perfect shepherds for this stimulating series of essays, thought-provoking probes into implementing a platform for a civil civilization, one that is uniquely appropriate for the twenty-first century. It calls for a recognition of the connectedness not only of humanity but of all life forms. The recognition of this connection could forestall ecological disasters and nuclear catastrophes as well. Let us hope this vision can be incarnated before it is too late.

Stanley Krippner

Alan Watts Professor of Psychology

Saybrook University

---

1 Alan Watts, The Book: On the Taboo Against Knowing Who You Are (New York: Pantheon, 1966).

2 David Bohm, A New Theory of Mind and Matter, Journal of the American Society for Psychical Research 80 (1986): 113–35.

3 Jeremy Narby, Intelligence in Nature: An Inquiry into Knowledge (New York: Tarcher/Prager, 2005).

4 Stanley Krippner, The Plateau Experience: A. H. Maslow and Others, Journal of Transpersonal Psychology 4 (1972): 107–20.

5 Johnathan Shear, Explaining Consciousness: The Hard Problem (Cambridge: The MIT Press, 1997).

6 Susan Gordon, Existential Time and the Meaning Of Human Development, The Humanistic Psychologist 40 (2012): 79–86.

7 Julia Mossbridge and Imants Baruss, Transcendent Mind: Rethinking the Science of Consciousness (Washington, DC: American Psychological Association, 2017).

Introduction

by John H. Buchanan & Christopher M. Aanstoos

In June 2015, a large international gathering met in Claremont, California, to explore the possibilities offered by process thought for reimagining civilization. Titled Seizing an Alternative: Toward an Ecological Civilization, this conference articulated the need for such a reorientation in response to the catastrophic threats currently facing our world. The subtitle’s focus on ecological was meant to indicate that this reorientation requires a more holistic vision of reality, as well as effective ways of preserving and restoring the planet. Among the more than eighty tracks that explored these issues, one focused on extraordinary experiences, that is to say, experiences that cannot be fully accounted for by the dominant scientific paradigm of our times. The subject matter of this track included the evidence for parapsychological, transpersonal, and other anomalous phenomena. If such experiences could be truly understood, on their own terms, they might offer real insight into the more holistic workings of an intrinsically interconnected universe. This kind of understanding of deep interrelatedness truly seizes an alternative to the modern Western worldview that still relies too uncritically on old notions of insentient elements connected only by extrinsic causality.

This volume contains essays based on most of the presentations from this track on anomalous experience, as well as three additional papers contributed by individuals who were unable to participate directly. These essays explore experiences that present significant challenges to the modern scientific worldview, in particular, to its insistent refusal to reconsider its underlying commitment to a materialistic, mechanistic, atheistic metaphysics. Philosophically, Alfred North Whitehead’s process view of experience is described as being more congenial not only to extraordinary experience, but to the current state of scientific research, which has revealed that activity, selection, and response are facets of every level of reality from the quantum event to the neural cell. Ironically, the only part of our world whose synthetic responsiveness—whose subjectivity—is regularly called into question by the academy is the human subject. And the primary reason for this most peculiar situation is modern science and philosophy’s largely unconscious metaphysical allegiance to one-half of an abandoned Cartesian dualism, which in practice is no longer accepted by any scientific discipline. Nonetheless, try to assert some idea that does not cohere with this assumed notion of reality and prepare to be informed it is impossible, while at the same time being told that this response is not related to any preexisting metaphysical sentiments.

The area of scientific research that challenges the modern paradigm most head-on is parapsychology, which has for decades churned out careful study after study supporting the existence of extrasensory perception, especially telepathy, clairvoyance, and psychokinesis. The reasons why this research has been doubted, challenged, and sometimes vilified are several, but underlying all of them are certain philosophical and, surprisingly, theological choices made about the nature of reality during the formative period of the scientific endeavor. Descartes’ mind/matter metaphysics on the philosophical side, and the denial of action at a distance—partly in order to preserve the unique quality of Christian miracles—on the religious side, still haunt the foundations of modern science, even though mind (and God) have been exorcised, while action at a distance remains a shrouded constant in scientific theory (e.g., gravity and electromagnetic attraction).

Transpersonal psychology, which studies all types of extraordinary experience—mystical, psychedelic, near-death, out-of-body, and psychical—presents an even greater challenge to the modern paradigm’s materialist-mechanical worldview: the notion that the universe is composed solely of bits of inert, insentient matter in motion. While the phenomena studied by transpersonal psychology offer more dramatic anomalies for the modern paradigm, especially in its most recent atheistic incarnation, the phenomena researched by parapsychology are far more amenable to experimental investigation and thus present a challenge on science’s home turf. This may also help account for the vehement reactions often elicited by the mere mention of parapsychology as a credible science.

But it is important not to oversimplify the reasons for the widespread suspicion of psychical powers, especially in academic circles. If they exist, why don’t we see them regularly in action? Or if only certain people are significantly endowed with these abilities, why aren’t they at least able to provide clear-cut demonstrations of their existence? Beyond these valid questions, there is the more complex issue of how telepathy or psychokinesis might operate, that is, what is a possible explanatory mechanism for how they function? The essays in this volume provide coherent—and, to us, persuasive—answers to these excellent questions by offering important new ways of looking at the nature of reality and the basic structure of the universe.

It should come as no surprise, given the context of the conference from which these papers originated, that the primary philosophical framework being drawn upon here is that of Alfred North Whitehead. Whitehead’s metaphysical vision is especially important and useful because of his wide-ranging expertise in mathematics, logic, physics, history of ideas, and the philosophies of science, nature, and religion. Particularly important here is Whitehead’s incorporation of both quantum theory and relativity into his mature philosophical synthesis. Thus his efforts to fuse religion and science within one encompassing vision of the nature of reality and the universe is one that still holds import for us today and is uniquely suited to addressing the issues raised by parapsychological research and the findings of transpersonal psychology.

While, to some, talk of metaphysics, truth, and constructive philosophy may seem out of touch and behind the times—several hundred years behind, if Kant’s critique of metaphysics is taken to be the final word—just the opposite may well be the case. Whitehead might have been so far ahead of his time that the world at large is only now starting to catch up with his ideas. In his conference-closing lecture, David Griffin outlined trends suggesting that Whitehead’s ideas are making important gains in many parts of the academic and scientific community around the world, especially in Europe and China. Since these ideas offer vital possibilities for a new way of organizing our civilization in order to confront the enormous environmental and societal challenges that face our world, we truly hope that Griffin is right in suggesting that we may be witnessing the beginnings of a Whiteheadian Century.

The essays in this volume are concerned, in their various ways, with not only pointing out the limitations of the modern scientific and philosophic worldview, but also revealing a richer and deeper way of understanding the universe and ourselves. John B. Cobb, Jr. starts off this exploration in chapter one with the provocative question of whether subjects have any efficacy at all. Do human actions really count? While the answer may seem obvious, this universally shared experience has been more or less denied in scientific theory, if not in practice, for much of the modern era. Since Descartes, the notion of purpose as causative has slowly been replaced by efficient causation based on matter in motion. Through a historical review of how subjectivity has been exorcised from the Western academic worldview, Cobb also reveals what its disappearance has meant for our civilization. In the inexorable advance of modernity, subjects became persona non grata in science and the academy; all reality was to be studied objectively, thus reality became synonymous with objects. The fact that this study is carried out by subjects is held to be irrelevant, rather than ironic.

Using the field of economics as an example, in particular the theories of Adam Smith and Karl Marx, Cobb exposes some of the negative impacts that favoring this objective worldview has had on society. Viewing society instrumentally inevitably diminishes the intrinsic value of human beings. This process has been resisted with relatively limited success by the Romantics, the existentialists, and, most recently, through language studies. But it has been an uphill battle, given that the triumphs of the physical sciences and technological advances have been the primary drivers of Western civilization.

In order for our society’s general orientation to change, Cobb argues, philosophy must change. It needs to become radically experiential—based on all experience, not just the world of objects as revealed through visual perception. We must start instead with the act of seeing, rather than the objects given through sight, that is, start with the act of experience itself. This, Cobb argues, will lead us to a radically different understanding of perception, of reality, and of subjective/object relations. After offering a nontechnical description (at least, as nontechnical as is possible) of the alternative worldview offered by William James and Alfred North Whitehead, Cobb shows how paranormal phenomena become normal when considered through the lens of process philosophy. Broadening science’s view on what is considered valid evidence concerning the nature of reality in this way provides a starting point for reclaiming the importance of the subject and, paradoxically, the value of the world as well.

In our second chapter, David Ray Griffin expertly diagnoses the reasons for the rejection by most scientists of the possibility of parapsychological phenomena. Their underlying suspicion arises from a fundamental conflict between the modern worldview and the very existence of psychical powers. In order to locate and contextualize this decisive clash, Griffin traces the pertinent developments in philosophy and science from around the time of Descartes through their latest modern incarnation as mechanistic, materialistic atheism—which is now held to be the scientific worldview. While science claims to be truly empirical, a special version of empiricism has come to dominate. This sensate empiricism privileges the data of visual perception above all else, although other conscious sensory data may at times be recognized. Like Cobb, Griffin suggests that a real empiricism is needed: something like the radical empiricism advocated by William James, or better yet, Whitehead’s panexperientialism, which draws heavily on James’s insights.

Modern science’s commitment to its brand of materialism, which denies any inner activity or sentience to matter, along with its belief that mechanical causation is the only efficacious form of causation, make parapsychological phenomena inherently impossible, since psi requires some sort of action at a distance or direct communication between feeling individuals. Whitehead’s metaphysics, on the other hand, opens the door to things like telepathy and psychokinesis through his revisionary theory of perception and his understanding of nature as composed of active, synthetic events. Griffin reviews the evidence for these types of parapsychological phenomena and also explains why it is so difficult to refute charges that parapsychology is a pseudoscience: basically, because circular logic is employed to discredit it. Finally, Griffin argues that true precognition—exact knowledge of a settled future—belongs in a different category than other hypothesized psychical powers, in that it is logically impossible. Thus parapsychology might strengthen its standing by ceasing to advocate for the existence of literal precognition, which Griffin sees as generating the strongest resistance in the scientific and philosophic communities.

Chapter three provides an overview of parapsychology by John Palmer, one of this field’s top researchers and theorists. Palmer’s subtle analysis of the debate over the reality of psi phenomena reveals that employing meta-analysis techniques to assess the validity and power of parapsychological studies is not as simple as advocates or opponents might hope. Palmer also offers some helpful suggestions on how to reframe the general controversy over psi by changing the question from does it exist? to how does it work? Focusing on the issue of mind-body relations in the latter part of his paper, Palmer considers medium-ship and near death experience as possible evidence supporting the idea that mind can exist apart from the body. His essay