Non-Duality and Process Philosophy: An Exploration of Consciousness in Alfred North Whitehead and Rupert Spira
Alfred North Whitehead was considered by many to be an absolute genius of his time. Here was a man who was as gifted creatively as he was intellectually. He somehow managed to balance metaphysics—which many 20th ce. philosophers would commit to the flames—with mathematics, physics, and poetry. In fact, he was so good at metaphysics that his imaginative brilliance shone through in the empirical sciences. When one is reading Whitehead, there is a feeling that you are being thrown into a place of poetic rapture, and at the same time, attending to the undeniable facts of existence. When you look out at the world after reading Whitehead, existence is poetry. In fact, he defined God as being a poet: “Whitehead’s God is the everlasting world-soul whose values erotically lure each moment of finite experience toward the ideal of beauty (which is nothing other than the true and the good). This is not an omnipotent Creator deity. If anything is omnipotent, it is Creativity; God is a creature of Creativity like every other. God is the poet of the world, “with tender patience leading it by his vision of truth, beauty, and goodness.” (“Whitehead, Eternal Objects, And God – Footnotes2Plato” 2012) (Whitehead 2010)”
After reading this quote, one is reminded of the concept of Lila in Hinduism, which can be translated to mean “divine play.” Perhaps without even knowing it—though I am always surprised by the scope of Whitehead’s knowledge—he scratched the surface of certain schools of Eastern thought that embraced the idea of the universe being inherently creative and playful in its expression. Although reading Whitehead has sometimes been compared to whale watching in that it takes a bit of time for these fantastic moments to leap out the water, it is difficult to find another western writer who was able to depict an image of the universe that was as enchanting as some of the Hindu conceptions of the universe.
I am saying all of this now, however, because I want to show a little appreciation before I attempt to prove that he wasn’t quite right about the role that consciousness plays in the world. And that’s okay. Whitehead was a brilliant thinker who distinguished himself from other philosophers by emphasizing the importance of feeling, but praising him as if he were correct about everything—especially consciousness—is a great mistake that is all too easy to make because he was so brilliant. This does not mean we should abandon him and all his work. It simply means that we should stand on his shoulders and reach out toward new horizons. That is what I attempt to do in this paper. In just the same way that the philosopher, Matt Segall, “Offers his Whiteheadian thinking beyond Whitehead in relation to major developments,” (Segall 2018) I am going to offer a theory of consciousness—with help from Rupert Spira—to think beyond Whitehead’s theory of consciousness, which played a peripheral role in his system. In doing so, it is my hope that readers can appreciate all that Whitehead has to offer while also opening their minds to a theory of consciousness that is a lot more fundamental to the nature of reality. If Whitehead were alive today to witness the breakthroughs happening in the study of consciousness, I believe his elastic mind would appreciate and implement such understandings into his work. There are obviously some exciting breakthroughs in the contemplative and psychedelic sciences that Whitehead would undoubtedly consider. However, I am talking more about the breakthroughs happening in the study of consciousness by means of consciousness itself, since, as Rupert Spira has pointed out, “Only consciousness can know consciousness.” (Spira 2017) There may be some readers who disagree with such a statement, but only because they are used to studying consciousness as if it were an object in a world “out there.” It is hard to overstate the importance of what I am trying to say here: when consciousness is investigated in the same way that we investigate the “objective world,” the ideas we have about it will be skewed by the limitations of what Rupert Spira calls, “the finite mind”—thought and perception. A meditative disposition is needed to fully grasp what I’m trying to say here. Here is a passage from Spira’s book, The Nature Of Consciousness, that eloquently summarizes the point I just made: “Instead of expanding the parameters of science to include the non-objective experience of being aware, researchers have superimposed their limitations of their own minds onto consciousness itself, trying thereby to bring consciousness within the limited parameters of objective experience, and thus reducing the study of consciousness to the study of neuroscience.” (Spira 2017) In following through with my promise to extend Whitehead’s thought, here is a passage from the last chapter in Process and Reality that says what Spira is saying in, of course, a Whiteheadian way: “The chief danger to philosophy is narrowness in the selection of evidence…The evidence relied upon is arbitrarily biased by the temperaments of individuals, by the provincialities of groups, and by the limitations of schemes of thought.” (Whitehead 2010) I am not including this quote in here because I think Spira and Whitehead would be in full agreement about what consciousness is. I am merely trying to remind the reader that Whitehead is as aware of the limitations as Spira is, and most importantly, the ones imposed by “the temperaments of individuals” and “the limitations of schemes of thought.”
After reading the above passage, the reader probably has an idea of where I am taking this conversation and what I consider the nature of consciousness to be. In fact, I am sure many readers here have already assumed that I am a panpsychist hellbent on convincing them to believe in what I believe. After all, panpsychism is the leading edge of conventional scientific research on consciousness today. It would seem only wise to hop on the bandwagon. Although these assumptions are tempting to make, I am going to ask the reader to hold all assumptions aside and cast away all “isms” as we go into this exploration together. For the place we approach the discussion of consciousness is extremely vital. If we approach it from the mind (thought and perception), we will arrive at a mind-oriented answer. And if we dump consciousness into an ism—no matter how convincing that ism may seem at the outset—it will just remain a philosophical fancy, something exciting to speak about to your intellectual friends but lacking in substance and empirical worthiness. Indeed, if it is the case that only consciousness can know consciousness, placing it under any rubric other than itself will be a mistake. As you can tell, there is a profound subtlety I am hinting at. This subtlety has been ignored, not because it is complex, but rather because it is startlingly obvious. Thomas Merton was not referring to consciousness when he used these words, but they ring awfully true with respect to it: “The truth is so obvious that it blinds us with clarity.” (Merton 1998) Unfortunately, the minds of many scientists and philosophers are riddled with a complexity that has made something so pristine and unproblematic—the experience of being aware—a problem to solve. There is something awfully comical about this. Perhaps this is why the great spiritual teachers keep their distance from the philosophers of mind, for their approach is completely different: instead of using the mind to solve the “hard problem,” they have realized there was never a problem to begin with! When you have an undeniable intimacy with, and stable abidance in, consciousness as consciousness, the question of how consciousness arises from matter becomes meaningless because matter is seen for what it is: consciousness. The philosophical terminology we use to define the role of consciousness in the world vanishes as well, for when you have touched the source, the words we use, and the sides we take, and the arguments we have, fade away. Then, the meaning of the words, “I and my father are one” or “Atman is Brahman” make sense on a deeply experiential level (I am, of course, bringing in some spiritual and religious terminology that I will touch on later). The “hard problem of consciousness” (how consciousness emerges from matter) only exists in the minds of those who don’t understand the nature of mind itself. That is why Spira often reminds people that “The mind’s knowledge of anything is only as good as its knowledge of itself.” (Spira 2017) So, until the nature of the mind is understood for what it is in the larger context of experience, it will misinterpret experience.
To reiterate: consciousness—or the experience of being aware—is so obvious and so prevalent in our experience that we fail to acknowledge it. It is the breath within the breath, staring at us in the face, but because it has no qualities—because it is colorless, transparent, and immaculate—the mind cannot recognize it. Only it can recognize itself.
With all this in mind, let us proceed to the main part of the paper. The first order of procedure is to define what Whitehead means by consciousness and create a picture of how that fits into his metaphysical scheme. From there, I am going to compare it to Spira’s understanding of consciousness and draw a conclusion that shouldn’t surprise readers whatsoever. For some people, the lack of surprise I am alluding to may be disappointing. I am also imagining that certain readers may be thrown off by my passionate and one-sided opinion of how things are. Again, I am going to ask these readers to bear with me here as I dive in here. I may surprise you.
As Segall points out in his breathtaking book, Physics Of The World Soul, “The place of consciousness in Whitehead’s cosmology becomes more comprehensible when interpreted as a metaphysical generalization of William James’ radical empirical psychology.” (Segall 2018) So, what did that radical empirical psychology entail? Here is passage from William James’ that sums it up quite well: “In actual mosaics the pieces are held together by their bedding, for which the bedding the Substances, transcendental Egos, or Absolutes of other philosophies may be taken to stand. In radical empiricism there is no bedding; it is as if the pieces clung together by their edges, the transitions experienced between them forming their cement.. The metaphor serves to symbolize the fact that Experience itself, taken at large, can grow by its edges. The one moment proliferates into the next by transitions which, whether conjunctive or disjunctive, continue the experiential tissue, can not, I contend, be denied.” (James 1904)
In other words, according to Whitehead, there is no underlying substance holding experience together. Experience is purely relational all the way down. And “Consciousness is only a tiny, but brilliant, flicker in the sea of experience that constitutes the world.” (Mesle 2008) For Whitehead, to say there is a substance holding experience together would be to misunderstand the nature of experience itself, since it is a dynamic process without a center—or anything else for that matter—to claim it. Thus, consciousness is both subjective and objective. Consciousness is, as Segall said, “a special case of a more general cosmic mode of experience pervading all physical processes.” (Segall 2018) As you can already tell, consciousness is not crowned in the same way it is crowned by non-dualists like Rupert Spira. To use the words of Segall: “As for the significance of human consciousness, Whitehead was unwilling to grant it the sort of transcendent status that many modern philosophers have.” (Segall 2018) It is special in that it is an expression of a cosmic mode of experience, but it is not special in and of itself. To put it more succinctly, consciousness is an instrument of experience, not the other way around. It is because of experience and all it entails in a Whiteheadian sense that consciousness comes to be. This is incredibly important to remind oneself of as we move forward.
If the reader found the image of a mosaic difficult, I would like to suggest a different way to understand this all—and share with the reader an experiment I conducted on a more experiential level. Yesterday, I closed my eyes while meditating and tried my best to find the difference between the sound of a bird and the content of a thought. While one of them—the thought—felt more personal and private than the sound of a bird, both experiences weaved together in a brilliant way. There was an interrelatedness that was difficult to describe. Outside and inside didn’t make sense. Mine and theirs didn’t either. For a moment, my subjective reality and the objective world seemed to be enmeshed in some type of orchestrated act of creative brilliance. Although there was a difference in the content of the experiences—one was a thought and the other a sound—they were just experiences, or to be more precise, phenomena. But thinking about it wasn’t helpful. In fact, thinking about the experiences diverted me away from understanding them. I had to be sensitive to the nature of experience itself. An openness was required to really sense the connected nature of everything going on. As Keller states in her book, From A Broken Web, “Knowing things are connected becomes a trivial insight, unless we know this knowledge connectingly.” (Keller 1988) Now, when I think or recreate the experience I had near the creek water, I can understand the range of possible outcomes that could have occurred. It can, in other words, compare the actuality of the occasion with a possible outcome that could have been the case. According to Whitehead, this is what makes consciousness so unique. To use the words of Whiteheadian philosopher, Matt Segall:
“Consciousness, we are told, is most generally ‘the feeling of negation.’ When we perceive ‘this stone as grey,’ the feeling of conscious negation is in ‘barest germ,’ while when we perceive the contingency of this coloration, that it could have not been grey, ‘such feeling is in full development.” (“Whitehead, Eternal Objects, and God – Footnotes2Plato” 2012)
There are two ways of understanding the experience I just shared. The first way to understand it would be to interpret consciousness in a Whiteheadian way so that it is merely a derivative of experience— “a tiny, but brilliant, flicker in the sea of experience that constitutes this world.” (Mesle 2008) The other way to understand the experience is to give consciousness a permanent seat in the world and crown it as the background of experience itself. In the former option, we ascribe the role of consciousness as something that moves with the tides and “never steps in the same river twice (to use the words the words of Heraclitus), since all experience is a process and consciousness is merely a magic trick in the process. In the latter option, consciousness is unmoved, stable, and independent of experience. It is, to use yogic terminology, the witness to everything that is in and out of flux. Thus, it is not a process in experience. It is that which knows, and is aware of, all thoughts, feelings, sensations, and perceptions. What’s interesting to point out here is that what makes consciousness unique, according to Whitehead, is considered a function of the finite mind, according to Spira—which is what he and his teachings attempt to see through. Since consciousness has no qualities and is always and, in all places, a clean slate, so to speak, it need not negate anything whatsoever. In other words, it embraces the isness of reality without any desire to think of how it could have been otherwise. That is why Krishnamurti defined intelligence as the ability to “observe without evaluating.” Only the mind weighs out the possible outcomes, compares, and contrasts because it is never quite comfortable in the present moment.
The idea of an eternal knower with no qualities other than knowing is by no means a new idea. In the yoga sutras, for example, purusha—or pure consciousness—is unaffected by all processes in nature, what they call prakriti. It cannot be born and does not die. While the show of the world goes on in its flux, and dancers come in and out, it remains unaffected, unperturbed, and unworried. In the words of the great scholar, Edwin Bryant: “Pure consciousness, called purusa, animates and pervades the incessant fluctuations of thought—the inner turmoil of fears, emotions, cravings, etc.—but the two are completely distinct entities.” (Bryant 2015)
Without getting into a battle of concepts and bashing each other over the head with theoretical suppositions, let us investigate this carefully within experience and see what is actually true. As philosophers, it is vital we do this, for we can get ridiculously carried away with our intellects and our imaginations—which are expressions of the very faculty we are trying to understand the nature of: mind. The first question we must ask ourselves is this: am I aware of my experience? As long as you are a sensible human being, the answer to that question should be a resounding, “yes.” If you answer, “no” to the question you have, in fact, affirmed the very thing you have denied. For you can only deny your existence if it is alive and well. So, there is no getting out of it. Awareness is an undeniable aspect of our experience. Now, the next question we must ask is this: is awareness separate from experience? Or is it merely part of some process? Answering this question is going to require yet another practice of self-inquiry. First, we can ask ourselves this question: “Has there ever been an experience that has not been known?” Obviously not. For you cannot experience something without knowing it. A Whiteheadian may argue that knowing comes from experience, that we know because we experience; but let’s go even deeper: is there a permanent quality we can separate from experience that is independent of it? To answer this question, I’d like to include a passage from Rupert Spira’s book, I Am:
“Throughout our lives we make statements such as, “I am five years old’, I am twenty-four years old’, I am lonely’, ‘I am in love’, ‘I am excited’, ‘I am depressed’, ‘I am having lunch’, ‘I am reading a book’, ‘I am married’, ‘I am single’, and so on.. In each of these statements we refer to our basic self or being— ‘I am’—which is subsequently coloured by various thoughts, feelings, states of mind, activities or relationships. In each of these descriptions a temporary quality or characteristic is added to our being, and as a result, ‘I am’ becomes, or seems to become, ‘I am this or that.’” (Spira, 2021)
Let’s compare this passage to one of Whiteheads. You might remember a passage in Adventures Of Ideas that has a similar ring to it, though the emphasis of Whitehead is directed toward the variety of experiences and not the subject hiding underneath all of them. Here is the passage from Adventures Of Ideas: “In order to discover some of the major categories under which we can classify the infinitely various components of experience, we must appeal to evidence relating to every variety of occasion. Nothing can be omitted, experience drunk and experience sober, experience sleeping and experience waking, experience drowsy and experience wide-awake, experience self-conscious, and experience self-forgetful… ” (Whitehead 1967) It goes on.
Note the difference: Whitehead wants to classify and categorize all experience, whereas Spira wants to point toward the background of all experience. We can admire the ambitiousness of Whitehead, sure, but Spira’s aim is a lot more uncomplicated and relatable. It cuts through experience, straight to the core. Even though the right thing do to is not always the simplest thing to do, in this case, the simple solution is the most effective. We don’t need to categorize and classify all experiences if there is a shortcut to the background of all experiences. I am reminded of a Rumi quote here that seems relevant: “The art of knowing is knowing what to ignore.” That is one of the qualities of wisdom: instead of playing the same game as the mind, it exits the game completely, and in doing so, wins the game.
What Spira is pointing toward is so subtle that it’s easy to miss. The sense of ‘I am’ is the mystery hiding in plain sight, again, not because it is complex, but because it is obvious. However, I can’t emphasize this enough: there is absolutely no value in conceptualizing or thinking about this fact. Again, the moment we attempt to intellectualize about consciousness, we misunderstand it and place our limitations on it. The tail cannot wag the dog. If you are familiar with Whitehead, you will notice that, in many ways, I am asking us to approach consciousness in the same way that Whitehead wants us to approach God’s existence. In the same way that “the source of reason cannot be reasoned,” the source of experience—consciousness—cannot be experienced. It must be independent of it and felt as the knower of experience. But we can only know this by direct means. And now we are getting into territory that is, dare I say, spiritual. For the only way of knowing this is by having a sort of spiritual awakening, what, in Zen they would call a satori. Of course, the word “spiritual” doesn’t necessarily have to be used in this specific case. However, in just the same way that Whitehead chooses the word “God” in order to honor the undeniable religious impulse, I have decided to use the word “spiritual” to honor the profundity of what has been embodied in many mystics, saints, and sages. The word “spiritual” also separates the idea of unconditional freedom from the neuroticism and craziness of the modern world, even though it is being somewhat abused and misunderstood in new age circles.
So, what is a spiritual awakening? And why has it entered this discussion? In a beautiful letter written to a curious seeker, Spira defines an awakening as follows: “Awakening is the realization that what we are, that is, the awareness that is seeing these words and experiencing whatever else is being experienced at this and every moment, is neither limited nor located. This realization does not happen to a body or mind. It happens to itself, awareness.” (Spira 2010) This would be a good time to distinguish panpsychism from the theory of consciousness Spira is proposing, since an awakening has nothing to do with realizing that consciousness is fundamental to matter. Instead, it has to do with realizing that the universe and all the appearances within it owe its nature to consciousness. In some forms of panpsychism, consciousness is fundamental to the world. This may seem alluring to some people, but it does not, according to Spira, solve the entire problem because it “depends on the existence of things. It starts with a diversity of things! It is equivalent to saying that the screen is fundamental to an image. Although this appears to be a true statement, it contains a misunderstanding, and it is in this subtle misunderstanding that the real problem for contemporary philosophy lies… To suggest that the screen is a fundamental property of the image is to credit the image with more existence than it deserves.” (Spira 2019)
Even though Whitehead’s philosophy may provide “an adequate metaphysical framework for transpersonal psychology” (Kling 2019) because of his emphasis on an integrated cosmos, there is not enough emphasis placed on self-realization and everything that it entails in an embodied and practical sense for human beings. This could be for many reasons, one of which is probably because Whitehead was a British mathematician and a formal English chap. The idea of self-realization—or enlightenment—may have not occurred to him as a realistic possibility, even though he honored the history of mystical experience. Indeed, the idea of self-realization never really occurs to anyone until it happens, sometimes spontaneously, sometimes gradually. Whitehead did propose an idea of “perfect realization” as something that “implants timelessness on what in its essence is passing, (Segall 2018)” which makes one think of tragedy as “the highest form of beauty that our universe is capable of realizing, (Segall 2018)” but this very beautiful and poetic realization has very little to do with the permanent and stable abidance in pure consciousness, which is always and at all times timeless and independent of all processes. So, even though Whitehead’s metaphysical scheme—which I don’t pretend to know completely and with precision—accounts for transpersonal experience, it does not seep into our lives and set us unconditionally free. As I mentioned earlier, the work of Whitehead can throw you into a place of poetic rapture; it can also shake a materialist out of their limited rut so that the universe is not merely understood as a mechanistic glob of meaningless matter. Like panpsychism, that is a great first step. But ultimately, we must go further than that, into territory that stretches beyond all schemes, isms, and philosophical ponderings. Being convinced of something is not the same as realizing it in the depths of one’s bones. When self-realization takes place in the depths of one’s bones, everything we know is taken away to make space for the strong current of wisdom that the unknown contains. That is why Adyashanti often defines enlightenment as “the end of your world” and why Ramakrishna—the great Bengali saint—uttered these words: “Only two people can attain self-knowledge: those who are encumbered at all with learning, that is to say, whose minds are not over-crowded with thoughts borrowed from others; and those who, after studying all scriptures and sciences, have come to realize that they know nothing.” (Ramakrishna 1957)
If it is possible to awaken to awareness by means of awareness itself (and it seems to be based on the accounts of multiple teachers) why are we wasting our time? If we are the ocean identifying as waves, shouldn’t our priority be to realize why we have wasted so much time in the world of the waves? And shouldn’t we be investigating the nature of consciousness instead of talking about it and theorizing about it so much? This is the problem with academia: it is constantly obsessed with endless talk about talk. When we are investigating consciousness and wish to know it’s true name, we must orient our lives in a completely different manner. On that note—and to finish off this paper—I would like to include a quote from G. Spencer Brown’s mystical treatise, Laws Of Form, to add the final touch:
“To arrive at the simplest truth, as Newton knew and practiced, requires years of contemplation. Not activity. Not reason. Not calculating. Not busy behavior of any kind. Not reading. Not talking. Not making an effort. Not thinking. Simply bearing in mind what it is one needs to know. And yet those with the courage to tread this path to real discovery are not only offered practically no guidance on how to do so, they are actively discouraged and have to set about it in secret, pretending meanwhile to be diligently engaged in the frantic diversions and to conform with the deadening personal opinions which are being continually thrust upon them.” (Spencer-Brown 2008)
Bibliography
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