Chapter 3 – Actual Occasions: As Above, So Below

Articulating a new set of metaphysical ideas that can ground both mainline science and parapsychology is, I’m aware, a bold undertaking. I am, effectively, proposing the foundations for a new way of understanding reality itself. . This is a necessary step if we are going to understand a world where not only the data of quantum physics must be taken into account but one where the vast body of evidence, both scientific and anecdotal, that reveal parapsychological phenomena in general, point to survival of personality after bodily death—and that point, as well, to some kind of reincarnation. We need a new “story,” a comprehensive metaphysics large enough to hold the vision of a world that is more than mere insentient matter whirling about in a blind and “dead” universe—a world rich with sentient beings that inhabit a far more complex time-space than what science and our senses have so far detected. I believe that our science, our philosophy and, indeed, our civilization itself are in need of a new story like this if we are going to surmount the enormous challenges posed by the evolutionar crisis unfolding itself on our planet.

This enormous task, however, is made easier because, to echo Newton, I stand on the shoulders of giants. Much of the essential groundwork has already been laid, and my contribution is to gather up, recombine, and develop the fundamental insights of metaphysical revolutionaries such as Alfred North Whitehead, Sri Aurobindo, Jean Gebser, and Ernst Cassirer.

Beyond Substance

I start with Whitehead’s idea of “actual occasions.” This is Whitehead’s metaphysical generalization of “events,” which form the building blocks of quantum mechanics. This idea is central in his attempt to develop a metaphysics that would account for science, in general, and the theories of relativity and quantum mechanics, in particular, as well as the rich experience of everyday life. As we will come to discover, a slight extension of Whitehead’s notion will allow us also to account for my five fundamental propositions, and so bring our understanding of the long trajectory of human life into harmony with scientific knowledge.

Before Einstein’s theory of relativity and the advent of quantum mechanics, scientists took for granted the idea of “substance” as the metaphysical background for how to think about reality. Substance, they believed (following Descartes) was that which needs nothing other than itself to exist. It is stuff, things, atoms. Little bits of hard matter that endure in time and occupy space.

Relativity modified the notion of substance by interpreting matter as nothing but temporary configurations of energy or, even more radically, as twists in the curvature of spacetime. In the context of relativity, energy just is. In special relativity, it is a tenuous, fluid kind of substance that flows through time and occupies space. In general relativity, it exists as local distortions in the spacetime continuum—which is itself, as the permanent basis of things, also a sort of substance. But quantum mechanics does away with the idea of substance altogether, describing reality as system of abrupt, short-lived, discontinuous energetic events that, while spatial, endure in time only briefly. Furthermore, as many writers have pointed out (a fact highly relevant to the ideas explored in this book), quantum mechanics cannot be understood apart from some reference to consciousness as an independent, causal factor in the real world.[1]

Whitehead was intimately familiar with the theory of relativity[2] and early quantum theory. He developed his philosophy specifically to make quantum ideas coherent with the facts of human experience. As a metaphysician, Whitehead was critiquing the dominant conceptual tool-kit of science, and suggested that science could be liberated from many of its current conceptual confusions by interpreting quanta as instances of a new scientific idea— “actual occasions.”

The Idea Of Actual Occasions

My body, and the things I interact with in the world around me, are clearly decomposable. I have the sense that somewhere at the bottom of that decomposition process, there must be some final level, some basis, some primitive stuff out of which everything else is made. What is that stuff like?

The answer we get from materialists, the guardians of scientific orthodoxy,  dominates the imagination of modern civilization. As we saw in the last chapter, the basic explanatory concepts of materialism have evolved considerably over the past few centuries. They began with the idea of ”atoms”—of finite, self-existent, fully actual, endlessly enduring, ontologically independent things—existing in a Euclidean space and enduring in an independent, uniformly flowing time. Later, the concept of simple enduring atoms was expanded to include even more fundamental metaphysical categories  for instance, energetic fields, probability fields, variable interactions between space, time and mass, complementary sets of properties for physical entities, and even non-local interactions among such entities. The original metaphysical simplicity of the Newtonian vision had subsequently elaborated itself into a vast and baroque complexity. But no matter how elaborate their notions became, scientific materialists were, and still are, unified in their conviction that the ultimate stuff is “dead,” or insentient..

The five propositions I outlined in the previous chapters are alternatives to a set of propositions that underlie the metaphysics of scientific materialism—namely, that the ultimate stuff

· Is not conscious or aware;

· Is governed by laws that are automatically administered and can be mathematically expressed;

· May act randomly, but never purposefully;

· Is not aware of itself or of others and has, thus, no value for itself.

For some of us at least, this is a stark and terrifying view of reality. It leaves us with the sense that we are epiphenomenal, accidental, and unimportant byproducts of vast, indifferent processes. Others, however, find in this view a kind of austere beauty. It brings a sense of freedom from the meddling of parental Gods. It confers on its adherents a hugely pragmatic view of life and an awesome power over local configurations of physical events. Whatever the aesthetic merits of this view, however, and in spite of its practical power, it does not do a good job of explaining the ultimate nature of reality.

No materialist has ever explained just how it is that dead stuff could manage to configure itself to become aware, to feel, to be alive, imaginative, and conscious. More to the point, since materialists must interpret personality as somehow a function of the physical operations of the biological body, they can provide no coherent explanation for the facts of personality survival and reincarnation.

The failure of materialism makes room for philosophical idealism,  where the fact that both things, and questions about those things, are always experiences in consciousness. They approach the question “what are things made of” through the question “how are things experienced?” Every truth to which you or I have access is a truth that we experience. The sensual, the vital, the emotional, and the cognitive are so many ranges in the spectrum of experience. Experience is, by definition, conscious.[3] All knowledge is knowledge of the contents of consciousness. Consciousness, or, perhaps, mind, then, is seen by philosophical idealists as the basic “stuff” out of which things arise.

The problem with idealism, however, is that it has a tendency to degenerate into solipsism, and it leaves us with a sense that the world around us ought to be dreamlike and unsubstantial. Idealists have a hard time accounting for the stubborn, indifferent, alien facticity of the material world.

Idealism also fails us in our quest for an understanding of personality survival and reincarnation in another way. If we posit that all manifestation is the expression of one, featureless, undifferentiated consciousness, (as, for example, in Advaita Vedanta), then it becomes difficult to account for the multiplicity of individual consciousnesses that are so prominent in our experience. Indeed, Advaita Vedanta itself relegates the individualization of consciousness (along with all of the other specific and changing characteristics of differing personalities and of the worlds that they experience) to the status of an illusion. A framework that provides no way of intelligibly accounting for the individualization of consciousness is unlikely to be a fruitful context in which to discuss the survival and reincarnation of the individual personality.[4]

When we see that neither a monism of matter nor a monism of mind or consciousness is entirely satisfying, we may then be tempted to posit some kind of dualism—for example, in the modern era, we may assume that the results of the hard sciences are valid within the domain of physical matter, but that there is also another kind of reality, a kind of conscious substance, that is ontologically distinct and separable from physical substance. On the face of it, this approach seems appealing because it allows us to imagine that consciousness, rather than the body, survives death and ultimately reincarnates in a new physical body.

This dualistic approach was most famously pioneered in the early modern period by René Descartes who proposed that there were two kinds of substance —res extensa (extended things) and res cogitans (thinking things). The difficulty with this idea, and indeed with all forms of ontological substance dualism, is that they provides no necessary or intelligible relationship between the two kinds of substance. In the context of Cartesian dualism, all of the causal interactions that we can measure and that, therefore, we credit as real, take place within the closed domain of the res extensa. Thus, while a dualistic perspective allows us to imagine that a consciousness, as an independent substance, survives the death of its body we are hard pressed to understand the relevance of that consciousness to the body that it inhabits in the first place. After all, there is nothing about the body—a substantial entity that needs nothing other than itself to exist—that requires it to be conscious, and nothing about the consciousness, another independent substance that also needs nothing other than itself to exist, that requires it have a body. Also, since both body and consciousness are entirely different types of being, it is very hard to understand how they can interact with each other.

The doctrine of metaphysical dualism is unstable. It may, as we can see in our the modern intellectual tradition, quickly reduce the res cogitans to the status of an epiphenomenon, thus rendering it essentially irrelevant, and banishing it from respectable discourse. Or, as we can see in some significant strands of Western idealism and also in some significant strands of Vedic thought, it may fall back into a monism of consciousness by relegating matter, and all other differentiations, to the status of an illusion. In either case, like materialism and idealism, dualism does not provide a satisfactory resolution to the “hard problem”—explaining how mind and body, or consciousness and the physical world, are related.

Materialism claims that mind emerges from brain; idealism claims either that the material world emanates from pure consciousness or that the material world is illusory; and dualism claims that both mind and matter are real but exist in separate ontological domains. The “hard problem” for materialists is to explain the emergence of consciousness from dead matter; for idealists, it is to explain the emanation of a world of discrete individuals from an undifferentiated unity; and for and dualists, it is to explain interaction between two radically different and separate substances. The stubborn persistence of this hard problem, or “world knot” as Schopenhauer called it, indicates that something is profoundly mistaken about the basic metaphysical terms used to figure out the mind-body relation. Whitehead’s great contribution to this issue was to identify the notion of “substance” as a prime source of the error. Instead of substance, Whitehead famously reconceived the mind-matter relationship in terms of conscious process.

Philosophical debate over the past few centuries in the West, then, has,constellated into arguments between idealists, materialists, and dualists.[5] Either the basic stuff out of which things are made is dead matter, or it is conscious mind, or it is some awkward combination of two kinds of ontological ultimate. Each of these positions is compelling, and represents some important element of the truth of things. But none is entirely satisfactory.

Recognizing this impasse, Whitehead opened up a new and useful way of reconceptualizing the basic nature of reality. First, he pointed out—in perfect accord with our experience of the world and with scientific understanding—that what is out there in the real world are not self-existent things that endure unchanging through time, but rather happenings or events.

When we look to science, we find that the early modern atomists had a difficult time accounting for the richness of the world—and, in particular, for the richness of interactions among atoms—in terms of the simple “billiard ball” idea of atoms. In attempts to account for chemical and electrical interactions among atoms, scientists first resolved them into moving systems of particles, each of which carries both an electrical and a gravitational field; then, later, with quantum mechanics, these smaller particles were further resolved into dynamic fields of probability that occasionally collapse and manifest themselves as short-lived, causally efficacious, energetic blips. Scientists have now discovered that describing ultimate reality in terms of enduring, self-existent, independent things is not tenable. Instead, they have been forced to describe objective reality rather as a field of causally interacting, temporally extended events.

Because we are familiar with scientific reasoning, it is not too surprising for us to follow this line of thought, and to see, with Whitehead, that we can conceptualize outer, objective reality in terms of interacting events rather than in terms of substantial, self-existent things.

But what happens if we turn around and look at the texture of our own, everyday experience? Suppose we ask: “What unit of analysis best serves for producing an interesting and useful description of our own experience?” Whitehead suggests that the most interesting way to identify the fine-grade of our own experience is in terms of “drops of experience.”[6]

If I ask myself “What am I experiencing?” I begin to notice meaningful chunks, such as “I am experiencing this room,” or “I am experiencing that table.” These chunks are not, of course, entirely separate from one another. They are causally interconnected, and they do run one into another in our experience. Nonetheless, if we play back our experience in memory, we can notice that we are not consciously aware of any process in the formation of the objects that we perceive. For example, I see the lamp on my desk. The “lamp experience” comes to me all at once, without any awareness that I am composing that experience out of smaller parts. I may, under certain circumstances, be confused and not know just what it is that I am perceiving. Perhaps, for example, I am looking into a room through a narrow crack, and am not quite able to make out the lines and shapes that I am inspecting. In that case, I am experiencing, let us say, a grey blob and a black line. The experience of the grey blob comes to me all at once, as does the experience of the black line. And, if and when I do recognize those shapes as belonging to a chair, that recognition comes to me all at once, as a relatively discrete drop of experience.

I want to be clear that neither I nor Whitehead are denying the obvious continuity of our experience. But I am pointing out that there is a certain grain, or texture, to experience that allows it to be analyzed into distinct (though not separate) “drops” or “occasions” of experience.

The point here is that the actual drops of experience I find when I inspect my own consciousness are full, complex, internally structured events that exhibit, in spite of their particularity, intrinsic relations with other events in the larger field in which they are situated.

If we look more closely at these drops of experience, we see that they are always composed of other, simpler, drops of experience. If I look at my experience of that chair, across from me in my office, and I try, retroactively, to further decompose it, I notice smaller drops such as the experience of an arm rest, the experience of the back and so on. Each of these elements is itself encapsulated in a whole drop of experience. Each is intrinsically interrelated with other drops of experience in my field. Each may be further decomposable. Whitehead calls the drops of experience, out of which more complex drops of experience are composed, “prehensions.”

We can leave for later the question of whether or not this decomposition has a unique bottom. We are not entirely certain that sub-atomic particles (such as quanta, quarks, or superstrings), are the absolutely ultimate constituents of physical reality. Similarly, we need not know, for our current purposes, whether the process of analytically decomposing our experience has a unique bottom. The point is that no matter how far we take analysis, we find not independent, self-existent, enduring things, but rather dynamically interacting, whole, temporally extended, distinct drops of experience. We notice, in fact, a striking resemblance between the wholeness, discreteness, and interrelatedness of quanta and the wholeness, discreteness, and interrelatedness of our “drops of experiences.” It seems that both the physical world and the world of experience are “quantized.”

We see, then, that it is quite plausible to describe outer, objective reality in terms of causally interacting events and that it is quite plausible to describe inner, subjective experience in terms of dynamically interconnected drops of experience.

We are now in a position to dissolve the bewildering gap between mind and matter played out in debates between materialists, idealists, and dualists. Whitehead invites us to consider the possibility that all of reality, whether objective or subjective, is made of just one kind of reality—a reality composed of events or actual occasions. Experienced from the outside, actual occasions are objective events; experienced from the inside, they are drops of experience. Each instant of my experience is an actual occasion in the outer world. Everything I experience outside me is some configuration of other actual occasions. The process of manifesting as an energetic event on one hand, and the process of coming into consciousness as a drop of experience on the other, are the same process seen from two different points of view.

This way of conceptualizing reality frees us at a stroke from the utterly perplexing ontological divide between mind and matter that has haunted the modern psyche for centuries.

The ontological notion of actual occasions carries with it an interesting epistemological implication—it provides a compelling philosophical justification for the old Hermetic principle of correspondence: “As above, so below” reformulated now as “As without, so within.” This principle, supported by an analysis of reality into postmodern “actual occasions,” is radically at odds with a fundamental assumption of modernity. Since the beginning of the scientific revolution, the split between the outer reality of matter and the inner reality of mind has been thorough and complete. It has been assumed as a given that any attempt to reason about outer reality by reference to inner experiences is both inadmissible and erroneous. It has been dismissed as “projection” or “anthropomorphism.”

However, this rejection of the Hermetic principle has always involved a performative contradiction. No matter what our epistemological claims, we always reason from inner experience. All of our most fundamental notions—space, time, energy, causality—are drawn from experience, as idealists, at least, have recognized. As long as we imagine consciousness and physical stuff to be entirely different orders of being, however, our reasoning from inner experience has to be, at least in scientific discussions, bracketed out and ignored. As a result, the explicit use of the Hermetic principle has been relegated to the philosophical hinterlands of psychology and occultism.

By contrast, in a world of actual occasions, the Hermetic principle is rehabilitated. For example, my ongoing experience is an ordered sequence of actual occasions, occurring from moment to moment. Each occasions is partially constituted by its experience of past events. And each of those past events was itself, previously, an actual occasion. In turn, the actual occasion constituting this moment of my experience will be an event for all future occasions.

If I am brought into being by the same kind of process that brings all other events that I experience into being, then I am entirely justified in reasoning about the nature of those events by reference to my own experience.

Now let us see what happens if we apply the Hermetic principle to an analysis of events. First of all, we know that every drop of experience that constitutes us has a di-polar structure. That is, our experiences are experiences of and experiences by. Every drop of experience is, thus, a relationship between a subject and a field of objects. The subject of an experience—Whitehead calls this the “mental pole” of the actual occasion—is an active, purposeful, deciding awareness.

In every conscious moment, I am (however dimly) aware. I notice that my awareness is the centralizing pole around which the experience of diverse objects is organized into some kind of unity. I notice that my awareness is my capacity to be affected by external events, and that what I am aware of is precisely those external events that are affecting me.

Whitehead invites us to generalize this characteristic of our own experience to all events constituting the universe. In other words, he suggests that every experience I have of some entity in the objective world—whether human being or a billiard ball—is the experience of the outside of drops of experience that occurred in my past. And, he suggests, every drop of experience—including, for example, the one I am having right now as I write this word—is an event that can and will be experienced by actual occasions in the future.

To those of us educated in modern times, this is a rather shocking assertion. We are, in general, willing to grant awareness to humans. We are, usually, willing to grant awareness even to domestic animals. But many of us think it’s “going too far” to suggest that there might be awareness in jellyfish, plants, cells, atoms, or in sub-atomic events.

It is important, however, to realize that Whitehead is not suggesting that atoms, for instance, are self-conscious thinking beings. He is also not suggesting that a billiard ball is conscious of itself as such. (I will return shortly to the important subject of differences among events, and between events and the systems they form.) What Whitehead is suggesting, however, is that all events—from those constituting human awareness to the events that make up sub-atomic particles—have the same general structure involving some degree of both matter and mind. He is suggesting that each and every event is ordered around a pole of awareness, and that the capacity to be causally affected on one hand, and the capacity to experience, on the other, are two sides of the same coin.

Let ’s pause for a moment to admire the formal elegance of this suggestion. In our modern, materialistic way of thinking, we imagine a closed domain of non-conscious things—we call the “the physical world”—among which causal interactions take place. Causal interactions are thus imagined as entirely automatic. Consciousness, if there is such a thing, is a kind of transparent, ineffective double, a “ghost in the machine.” Once we have banished consciousness from the workings of nature, we are hard pressed to see how it could have any actual effect on the world in which it appears. And yet, in all of our practical dealings, and especially in our ethical dealings, we have no option but to act as if conscious choice (at least in human beings) is of decisive importance.

Whitehead’s notion of actual occasions structured around a core of awareness re-situates consciousness within the natural world. Every event, as we know from our study of physics, arises out of field of possibility. It emerges into manifestation as it resolves the partial indeterminacy inherent in that field. Whitehead suggests that the factor in every event that allows it to register possibilities and to resolve their indeterminacy is consciousness or awareness.

The awareness of a sub-atomic particle and the awareness of a human being are evidently very different in degree, but we need not imagine that they are entirely different in kind. Once we realize that “to be aware of something” and “‘to be causally affected by something” are, in a deep sense, synonymous and complementary phrases, many of the philosophical conundrums of modernity disappear. Consciousness no longer presents itself as an extra-cosmic mystery, but rather as the crucial factor that, by making choices, resolves possibility into actuality and gives to the universe its discrete determinations. I am conscious not because I am miraculously different from all other material entities,; rather I am conscious precisely because I am, in my process of coming into being, structurally similar to all other material entities. Sentience goes all the ways down.

The first result, then, of applying the Hermetic principle to the analysis of events is the realization that all discrete events are structured around a mental pole, a “drop” or “quantum” of conscious, deciding awareness.

Let us continue the investigation, and see what other results we might derive.

The Internal Structure of Every Actual Occasion

We will now see that the arising of every actual occasion, or “drop of experience,” involves the same dynamic structure that includes experience, imaginative interpretation, and choice.

For example, when I deconstruct a moment of my own waking life, I perceive that it grows out of an experience of the past. As I begin each new moment of my existence, I feel the last moment of my existence, and I feel the immediate past of the present situation around me. But my experience is more than that original rush of feeling.

Not only do I feel the immediate past, but in each moment I generate a coherent interpretation of the immediate past. This process of interpretation is quite complex. Whitehead has, particularly in Process and Reality,[7] analyzed this process in great detail. For our purposes, we can be satisfied with a very general description—the process of interpretation arranges all of the diverse data of the past into a coherent pattern, ordered around the mental pole of the “ concrescing” occasion. (“Concrescing” is Whitehead’s technical term to describe the process whereby past occasions or events converge on, or flow into, the current momentary new event being interpreted.) The process of interpretation is not uniquely determined by the past. It sometimes happens that in the process of interpreting the data of my experience, I have a new idea, a new way of organizing my perceptions. This capacity to introduce novelty into the interpretation of the past is part of what we mean by the term imagination.

Finally, in order to close out, as it were, the interpretive process in any given moment, I must make a choice among any incompatible possibilities that my imaginative interpretations present. For example, I am walking down a path that splits in two. I have a moment of awareness, an actual occasion, in which I must decide which of the two paths to take. I draw the situation into my awareness by a process of feeling the sensory inputs, I interpret the situation (possibly in some novel way), and then I make a decision.

Thus, we see that, in ourselves at least, every actual occasion of experience involves feeling, imaginative interpretation, and decision. First, an experience of some object from the past; then an interpretation of that past experience; sometimes followed by an imaginative grasp of new possibilities; and finally, a choice that selects from the field of possibilities. Whitehead calls this whole process of feeling, interpreting and deciding the “‘concrescence” of an actual occasion.

Can we fruitfully generalize this internal observation to the understanding of events in the outer world?  Are all events the outcome of a process of concrescence?

Certainly other human beings seem to operate in this way. Again, it is quite plausible to imagine that domestic animals do so as well. But with domestic animals, the function of decision seems to be less developed. Other animals do make decisions—when confronted with a split in the road they do go left or right—but the range of options they consider seems to be smaller, and the process of decision-making seems, in them, to be less emphasized than it is in humans. But, clearly, other animals do feel their own past and the immediate past of the surrounding world; they do interpret that world into an ordered, and sometimes novel whole; and they do make decisions. As we examine less and less complex forms of life, we see that all of them exhibit this same trio of functions—feeling, interpretation, and decision. However, the simpler the form, the more simplified and abstract its feeling of the past is, the less elaborate its imaginative interpretation of that past, and the fewer the number of possibilities that it considers in its decision making process.

There is nothing to prevent us from applying this same analysis even to inorganic entities. We know that a hydrogen atom is a complex system of events. It is causally affected by the past, it responds to that past from its own point of view (or unique position in spacetime), it resolves the indeterminacies in that past and even, in extreme circumstances, such as those at the center of a sun, it shows imagination by ceasing to function as a hydrogen atom and entering, instead, into the cosmic adventure of helium.

This use of the term “imagination” needs some elaboration. As a quantum event, the behavior of a hydrogen atom is not entirely predictable. In fact, given a particular hydrogen atom at a certain time, there is some uncertainty regarding the position and momentum of its next appearance. The way in which the hydrogen atom interprets its world presents it with a field of possibilities among which it must choose as it comes into actuality. Generally speaking, a hydrogen atom considers only those possibilities that will lead to its reappearance as a hydrogen atom again. However, under the extreme pressure and temperature obtaining in a star, for example, two different hydrogen atoms might each interpret the world in a new way—a way that registers (or prehends) the possibility of becoming helium. This registering of a new possibility is what I am here calling “imagination.”

Finally, sub-atomic particles, which emerge out of the collapse of a field of probability, are particularly easy to understand in terms of actual occasions.[8] It is important to note that none of these ideas contradicts any of the findings of physics. If sub-atomic particles were, as I am suggesting, actual occasions structured around a pole of deciding and appreciating awareness, they would still behave the same way physicists say they do. The range of options surveyed by these occasions is very small. Nonetheless, the indeterminacy attending their behaviors could not, by the methods of physics, be distinguished from the results of a limited free choice.

The second result, then, of our use of the Hermetic principle is the idea that the differences between the occasions making up our stream of conscious thought differ from the other occasions in nature not in fundamental kind, but only in emphasis on one or another of their constituting processes. By analogy with the nature of our own ongoing experience, we can validly extrapolate to the experiences of animals, vegetables, minerals and subatomic particles. We are all, alike, either actual occasions or complex groupings of actual occasions. And every occasion making up all of these societies is constellated around a pole of awareness.

While there is a continuum of differentiations among occasions, Whitehead suggests that we group occasions into grades.

· Low-grade actual occasion, which corresponds to inorganic events, experience the initial rush of feeling (by means of which they are causally affected by the past) in a very simplified and abstract way. Electrons, for example, interprets the entirety of their past as an electrical field. They interpret their initial rush of feeling with a bare minimum of imaginative variation. By and large, they simply decide to perpetuate the past they have experienced without considering other possibilities.

· Medium-grade occasions, which correspond to living events, experience the initial rush of feeling in a fairly full and complex way. In their process of interpreting the past, they regularly introduce novelty. As often as not, they decide to perpetuate what they have imagined rather than what they have received. In other words, they respond to circumstances with novel adaptations. In fact, medium-grade occasions regularly introduce novelty into the creative advance of occasions. Change is built into their nature, and manifests as growth, decay, and adaptation.

· High-grade occasions, which correspond to thinking events, not only feel the past in a very full way, interpret it with a great deal of imaginative freedom, they also apprehend a variety of alternatives, and consciously choose among them.

As we proceed, we will consider in some detail the modes of interaction among actual occasions of various grades. In fact, I will define the human personality as “a society of high-grade occasions embodied in a society of medium-grade occasions,that are, in turn, embodied in a society of low-grade, inorganic occasions.

Finally, applying the Hermetic principle,  we also arrive at the insight that all causal transmission between events may, in fact, be understood as a transmission of feeling, or a kind of impersonal memory.

Whenever any event is causally affected by another event, the affected event feels the determinate qualities of the affecting event. Say, for example, at this moment I prehend a past actual occasion (or some group of such occasions) that were characterized by the property of redness. I see a red flash. I receive it into myself as a felt experience. How did a past actual occasion come to express itself (to “objectify itself” in Whitehead’s language) as red? Only by receiving redness into itself from some actual occasion in its past and passing that redness on unchanged; or by receiving the objectification of some non-red past, imagining red as a response to that experience, and then deciding to pass on redness into the future.

Now, if we define memory as an experience of past experience, then we realize that any causal transmission is an experience of a past experience, and so it is a kind of memory.[9] This identification of causal transmission with memory will be a very useful component of our understanding of personality survival and reincarnation.

Whitehead, thus, is suggesting that all entities in the universe, including ourselves, are composed of actual occasions. If so, and we further apply the Hermetic principle, then it follows that: All discrete events in the universe are, on the inside, drops of experience.

When we, as observers, see an event being causally affected, it feels those effects in its own subjective immediacy: To be causally affected is to feel.

When we, as observers, see the emergence of an event with novel qualities, then some actual occasion has, in its own subjective immediacy, engaged in an act of imagination: To improvise is to bring new feelings into being through imagination.

When we, on the outside, see the indeterminacy of a situation resolved by a particular event, on the inside of that event a decision has been made: To become definite is to decide among possibilities.

· All actual occasions come to have their determinate characteristics by a process of feeling, imagining, and deciding. All occasions in the future will experience past actualities by feeling some portion of the experiences that constituted those actualities. All transmission of causes through time is a transmission of experiences, or a flow of memory.

· Actual occasions differ among themselves to the extent that they emphasize one or another of their three primary stages of functioning, and thus fall roughly into three grades—inorganic, living, and thinking.

In this chapter, we saw that one of the key stumbling blocks to an adequate metaphysics is the notion of “substance.” Reality cannot be merely a collection of “atoms in space” because that could never produce sentient, experiencing beings like us. We saw, too, that Alfred North Whitehead has provided an opening to a radically new way of understanding the world by substituting “events” and “process” for the old idea of substance. Instead of “atoms in the void,” Whitehead tells us, reality is fundamentally constituted by “causally interacting drops of experience,” or “actual occasions.”

With this idea, we can now define reality in a way that includes not only everything we know about the world through the lens of science, but also what we know from our own direct experience. Nothing need be left out.

In the next chapter, as I push deeper into an exploration of what it means to be “real,” I will focus on an important distinction between the abstracti and the concrete—between, on one hand, those aspects of reality that are possible and, on the other, those that actually exist.

This may seem an unexpected place to focus our inquiry into reality.However, I am suggesting that the distinction between the abstract and concrete, the possible and the actual, is at the root of all philosophy and science—and, in fact, ultimately of all human endeavor. Confusion about what is actual and what is merely possible is a kind of psoriasis of the mind. It leaves us scratching our heads trying to figure out how we could ever have gotten our civilization mired in so many serious problems that, together, leave our very future in question.

Let’s now turn attention to this very basic and crucial distinction between the abstract and the concrete.