TWELVE KINDS OF TRANSCENDENCE
We need to explore our potential for transcendence. We are not bound to the finite.
- You experience difficulties. You react. You become your worst critic. You hate yourself. You feel you are a failure. You see through this conditioned, habitual and self-punishing view. You are friends with yourself. You have transcended this old pattern of prosecutor, jury and judge on your inner life. This is Transcendence.
- Your inner life is no longer a prison. You are free. This is Transcendence.
- You reflect on a difficult situation. You see how you inflamed it through memory, feelings, thoughts, projections and the manufacturing of a story. You see the Emptiness of it. This is Transcendence.
- You find yourself receptive to the Deep. You realise insights, fresh ways of seeing, inner outflows of creativity and fresh visions that you apply. You have transcended the mundane and the ordinary.
- You understand a situation that remained problematic, unresolved and troubling. This understanding means the situation stand- under you. This is Transcendence.
- There is the capacity to sustain love, friendship and empathy regardless of the behaviour of another or others. Supported with wisdom and stability, this love transcends reactivity and blame.
- There is realisation of a profound sense of freedom, of liberation. Such liberation has no colour, shape or taste to it. This freedom is not bound to an experience, a state of mind or series of thoughts. There is no formation to this liberation. Having no formation, this liberation has no beginning, middle or death to it. This is Transcendence.
- You meditate on a plant or a painting or piece of music. You realise the plant, painting or music has no essence to. It. It is made up of a composite of multiple conditions. You see the object reveals everything else. There is Transcendence while meditating on the object.
- You realise that ‘you’ is not ‘you.’ ‘I’ is not ‘I.’ ‘My’ is not ‘my.’ There is the realisation that these concepts are simply figures of speech. There is no essence to the self as the subject or self as the object. This is Transcendence.
- There is realisation of the Infinite, the Limitless and the Eternal. This realisation puts your entire modest, finite life into a perspective. This realisation is Transcendence.
- There is the knowing of the ending of karma – old, unhelpful activities and movements from the past impacting on the present. This is Transcendence.
- There is realisation of the Ultimate (different languages, such as Nirvana, God, Truth or Awakening). This is Transcendence. Silence and stillness are among the open doorways.
MAY ALL BEINGS SEE FORM IS EMPTINESS AND EMPTINESS IS FORM.
MAY ALL BEINGS SEE EMPTINESS IS EMPTINESS AND FORM IS FORM.
MAY ALL BEINGS KNOW REALISATION
(SEE THE REAL) OF TRANSCENDENCE
Transcendence and (referring to previous reply) metaphysics!!
Yikes! I spent most of my early life trying to connect with these words.
I always did love the poetry, the music, the sound of them. Still do.
However, I thought they referred to some kind of experience that I would never be able to reach, because I wasn’t philosphical or spiritual enough.
The consequent yearning made me punch walls and become involved in hungry argument.
Ah, better to be older, now I don’t know anything at all, haha, as my illusions unfold and flutter away, as if they are paper swans.
I’ve often heard people describe transcendence as a rising above certain reactive emotions, that are no longer useful to oneself or anyone else.
I’m not sure about the idea of rising above, perhaps the words scare me. I think for me its more like heading on through.
As a follow on from Christopher’s and Robert’s writing, (because you both got me thinking), I just put transcendence into Wiki.
Religion, Mathematics, Philosophy, Media.
OK …..
Mathematics?? I think I might go and breathe deeply, try to transcend my feelings of frustration because I am in love with the logic and wonder of mathematics, but I still count on my fingers. haha.
It’s clear from this that ‘transcendence’ is a word that has great resonance for you, but it leaves me with no idea of what it is supposed to mean in experience. Here’s a quick analysis of your examples:
1. A dialectical progression, a use of the Middle Way to see beyond both sides of a dual absolutisation and reframe one’s view.
2. The term ‘inner life’ is so ambiguous that I’ve no idea whether the feeling of freedom here is justified in any way. Presumably it’s meant to be, if we’re not to take any old feeling of ‘freedom’ as necessarily good.
3. A development of awareness looking back at a past event when one was less aware.
4. An inflow of inspiration.
5. A development of awareness.
6. A rather idealised capacity for love and compassion.
7. Sounds like a jhana or similar experience.
8. A reflective insight
9. An awareness of the limitations of words and labels
10. Fruitless metaphysical abstraction. You can’t even imagine the infinite, let alone realise it. What you can do is have a very integrated, intense experience and attach the label ‘infinity’ to it. Why should we try to see through words about metaphysics of self (no.9) but not this kind of abstract language?
11. This seems to be an entirely abstract belief about karma, dependent on belief in karma and thus having no connection to experience.
12. More metaphysics – illegitimately pasted onto integrative experiences like those of silence and stillness.
So what am I to conclude that ‘transcendence’ is from your examples? Is it an appeal to metaphysical abstractions? Is it an identifiable progression in experience, from a less aware or less integrated perspective to a more aware or more integrated perspective? Is it just a positive feeling of insight or inspiration? More likely, I must conclude, a confused yoking together of all three. But I think that if you want to communicate better what transcendence means to you in your experience you need to cut out a lot more of the unhelpful metaphysical language.