Whitehead’s metaphysics as a cosmological framework for transpersonal psychology.

Abstract

While it is tempting to eschew metaphysics in our postmodern and poststructuralist milieu, one of the reasons given for the founding of transpersonal psychology was a dissatisfaction with existing "person-centered" psychologies that "ignored placing human beings within a cosmic perspective" (Hartelius, Friedman, & Pappas, 2015, p. 44). Even more significantly, Grof (2015) sharply critiques those scientific approaches that take "leading paradigms for an accurate and definitive description of reality" and whose materialistic explanations of reality cannot account for recent observations in consciousness research. This paper argues that the philosophy of organism of Alfred North Whitehead provides an effective metaphysical framework for transpersonal psychology because of his integration of subjective, objective, and transpersonal experience within one integrated cosmos, his argument that existence is made up of dynamic events that are both mental and physical, his unification of body and mind, his refusal to bifurcate subject and object within a relational reality, his validation of nonsensory perception as the basis for internal relations, and his description of a participatory cosmos of creativity and freedom where novelty, value, purpose, and transformation are universally available realities.

Epistemological foundations of humanistic psychology’s approach to the empirical.

“…Eventually, this current of thought would go on to be foundational for the deep empiricism of Alfred North Whitehead (Stenner, 2011) and the transcendental empiricism of Gilles Deleuze. The former has been somewhat influential in both humanistic (May, 1967) and transpersonal psychology (Kling, 2019), while the latter has only now begun to influence the related social science of sociology (Adkins & Lury, 2009).…”

Welcoming the next generation of transpersonal researchers and scholars.

“…In the fourth article, Sheri Kling (2019) provides a succinct yet comprehensive discussion of Alfred North Whitehead's (1979) relational and participatory metaphysics as a philosophic basis for transpersonal scholarship and practice. Kling herself is a theologian working at the juncture of Whitehead's process philosophy, Jungian dream work, and spirituality.…”

Untitled

“…But when asked the question of what reality is, what principles are at its heart and how to know them, they diverge in their own cosmological interpretations. This issue has not yet been adequately explored in the scientific literature, despite the growing interest in Whitehead's cosmology today (Bansal, 2018;Berve & Maassen, 2016;Kling, 2019;etc. ) and some attention to Russell's one (Pribram-Day, 2018).…”