1223. I am struck by how naturally . . .

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I am struck by how naturally – and repeatedly – Whitehead speaks of an occasion of experience's being related to everything else.

Thus he says, for example, that "the self-knowledge inherent in the bodily event is the knowledge of itself as a complex unity whose ingredients involve all [sic!] reality beyond itself, restricted under the limitation of its pattern of aspects. Thus we know ourselves as a function of unification of a plurality of things which are other than ourselves" (SMW: 216 f.).

Or, again, he says, "[T]he actual world is a community of epochal occasions. . . . The epochal occasions are the primary units of the actual community, and the community is composed of the units. But each unit has in its nature a reference to every [sic!] other member of the community, so that each unit is a microcosm representing in itself the entire [sic!] all-inclusive universe" (RM: 91). 

Or, yet again, he says, "Consciousness is only the last and greatest of such elements by which the selective character of the individual obscures the external totality [sic!] from which it originates and which it embodies. An actual individual of such higher grade, has truck with the totality [sic!] of things by reason of its sheer actuality. . . . The task of philosophy is to recover the totality [sic!] obscured by the selection" (PRc: 15). 

Finally, Whitehead says, "We experience more than we can analyse. For we experience the universe [sic!], and we analyse in our consciousness a minute selection of its details" (MT: 121). 

Compare also the following statement of Hartshorne's: 

"[I]t is only the distinct or fully conscious aspect of human experience which is finite; while the faint, slightly conscious background embraces all past time (else this phrase has no meaning), all the future, all space, and all possibilities. And thanks to this dim consciousness of infinity, we can conceive in principle an indefinite extension of the distinct consciousness which in us is finite. For the theist, the infinite we dimly feel is God in whom are distinct all the values that are distinct anywhere, and whose experience is the measure of the infinite variables as such, as well as the integration of all the finite values which happen to be anywhere actualized" (BH: 122).

8 August 2001