What Is Transcendence?

Transcendence is about the journey of discovering an infinitely wider context of our truth.

I often use this word, which of course in strictly dictionary terms can mean many things, depending on context. You might be surprised to hear it from me, a psychiatrist with a solid footing in science, since from the sound of it, transcendence seems to denote an esoteric, far away place in some kind of spirit world you may or may not believe in. That is too vague a notion to be useful in our context of meditative explorations of the mind, which is why a clearer explanation is in order.

Our seemingly seamless experience of reality is a well-constructed illusion. For example, you see a seamless field of vision without dark spots in the middle of it with nothing there, and yet those dark spots very much exist. They are the blind spots resulting from the fact that where the optic nerve enters the retina, there are no light sensors. The brain skillfully compensates and creates the illusion of continuity, where there is none. This same principle applies to consciousness in general. In quite the same way, we don’t notice that our ‘perception’ of reality is far from an objective or ‘pure’ perception. Instead, it is a complex, often largely distorted construction, involving concepts, words and stories we create on the basis of information bits the brain has already unconsciously manipulated to suit the occasion, so to speak, and not the pursuit of truth and a clear vision of reality. We are not conscious of living in a narrative envelope that mediates a virtual experience of reality we mistake for direct experience of reality. In other words, we keep trying to feed on the menu and don’t realize we never have the meal in front of us.

We can call this situation tragic, because it causes untold human suffering. Subjectively so deeply ensnared in fictions of our own construction, the only reality left for us to orient ourselves by is the external, objective scientific one, against which everything gets measured. What objectively works becomes worthwhile and in fact the ultimate goal of human growth. We learn to function, perform, accumulate knowledge and measure outcomes. We measure success by accomplishments and possessions, and by how well we solve problems, fix things, improve our lives, develop and get somewhere, wherever that somewhere may be. We draft legislations that exclude all that is not evidence-based and measure psychological wellbeing by symptom scales, as if they were reflective of the person being measured. We value well-functioning adaptation to life, which includes professional and financial success, the picket fence fantasy of an accomplished life and a family life that allows its members to conform and survive, maybe even thrive.

This does not sound so bad, you may say, and I would not only agree, but even subscribe to its usefulness and importance for a well-lived life. What I described is a useful fiction indeed, that ensures our ability to survive, put in place what concrete aspects of life we need and pay our taxes on time. Most counselling and psychotherapeutic approaches to mental health, and most mindfulness meditation approaches used in Western societies, teach techniques that address this practical aspect of our human lives. But that is not the whole story. Many people who live these principles successfully, are in fact not satisfied with life at all, living with a nagging sense of something fundamental missing. In addition, the more arduously they try to improve this fiction, the clearer it becomes that nothing can fundamentally change. Stuck in a nightmare, one cannot improve one’s life experience by improving the nightmarish world.

The human being as experiencing subject (as opposed to constructed object) unwittingly retreats into the shadows of non-consciousness under the overwhelming power of the tyrannical narrative mind, which research shows seems to be in part mediated by the overwhelmingly controlling left brain. We can barely taste our meal, because we overwhelmingly see menus. You can imagine how this keeps us hungry and causes us to become dysfunctional, diseased and unhappy. The question becomes, ‘what would reality really be like, if we had access to our subjective experience of life outside the narrative envelope, if we had complete access to our full subjective experience beyond concepts and stories we construct for ourselves’? This question opens the door to a very different aspect of human existence, one that is much more difficult to access.

This process of liberating ourselves from the restrictive stories we envelop ourselves with, and through direct experience engaging in the journey of discovering an infinitely wider context of truth we are embedded in, is what transcendence is all about.

In this other realm of human reality, the scales, values, calculations and therapeutic approaches to the mind described above are not applicable. We have to learn ways of extricating our consciousness from the restrictive narrative envelope we are so familiar with by learning how to relinquish all striving for improvement, and instead diligently practice the art of entering the non-verbal flow of our organism’s energy through direct experience. Rather than seek and add more to what we think we know, we need to learn the opposite – unknowing, undoing, unlearning, surrendering and getting out of our own way, in order to make room in our consciousness for a depth and contextual vastness of experience we cannot even fathom. Because the only way we know how to find meaning is through the stories we create, the moment we fall out of this narrative envelope, there is no meaning to be found in the familiar sense of the term we know. Instead, we discover a vast, wide open (energy?) field of consciousness, the direct experience of which is timeless, nameless and empty of any conceptual essence we were used to construct. Not being familiar with this aspect of human existence, we are often overcome with fear when we first encounter it, and cannot fathom the infinite and powerful healing potential it has, when we are able to consciously become transparent to it, and live by it as the ground of Being. Stuck in a nightmare, the only way to really heal is to wake up from it. When we wake up to our collective, transcendental truth, we experience life radically differently.

Although we live in the same world we did before, with the same car, same house, same profession, and the same people, the additional dimensions of consciousness we gained access to through practicing transparency to the transcendent, open a completely new vista onto the same landscape of human existence. It is like the ball moving through a two-dimensional world. If you were a flat, two-dimensional being in a two-dimensional world with a two-dimensional consciousness, a ball moving through that world would appear to you as a process, not an object in motion. You would see a point growing into a line up to a maximum length, then shortening again until it becomes a point and disappears. The moment you developed a three-dimensional consciousness, you would realize that the moving phenomenon of a point becoming a line and then a point again is in fact a ball moving through space. Same world, different views with different possibilities. Consequently, the journey of discovering an infinitely wider context of truth we are embedded in, is what transcendence is all about. With that comes a significant decrease in the amount of suffering we create.

The paradox is that transcendence is like being poor and sitting on a wooden box we don’t know is filled with gold. While desperately looking for gold elsewhere, we miss what is hidden in plain sight. Transcendence is about stepping outside of a self-imposed, constructed prison of our own making, realizing that the doors to freedom have always been open, but we just could not see it. This is why we sometimes talk of transcendence (= Latin ‘stepping beyond’) towards immanence (= Latin ‘dwelling inside’), whereby we have to effect a leap out of the box, so to speak, an orthogonal shift in consciousness, to discover what has always already been there, hidden in plain sight, unseen, unheard and therefore rendered powerless.

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Before you worry about symptoms such as depression and anxiety and how to improve or get rid of them, before you get your blood boiling arguing with people who can't deal with anything beyond their own viewpoint, before you develop and become ensconced in your own opinions, before you vilify who disagrees with you, before you shake your head wondering how seemingly obvious facts cannot be agreed upon, before you assume you have no blind spots, before you despair that crowds never learn from history, before you become bitter at humanity's collective stupidity, before you get passionate about religion, mythology, and archetypes, before all that, wouldn't it make sense to inquire into the source of all of it - these symptoms, views, opinions, thoughts, actions, distortions and, frankly, miseries?

While it does not take rocket science to realize that the source of it all is the embodied human mind, for most, embarking on its exploration is at best a big challenge, at worst insurmountable, non-sensical or incomprehensible. How many times have you heard nonsense like “I don’t believe in psychology”, as if the existence of the moon were a matter of belief? How often do patients enter their physician’s office complaining of being anxious or depressed, and are sent home with a prescription without one question that would try to understand how their mind creates such suffering? Many people, including professionals who should know better, live and act as if they had no mind.

The mind is the source of all subjective phenomena and experiences, and we are astoundingly unaware of it. Our mind’s task is to ensure survival and the propagation of our species, not to ensure we live our best life. To this end, it needs to be efficient, rather than concerned about maximizing its potential. Efficiency results by pairing down information processing to the bare minimum. Embedded in the way mind functions are mechanisms that cause reality distortions, delusions, wild beliefs, and a profound obliviousness of one’s own ignorance. Whether we like it or not, our mind drives our lives like our heart pumps blood through our veins. The universe's natural processes have caused us to evolve that way, and for better or worse, we are stuck with a mind that functions sub-optimally as it creates profound reality distortions that seem at first blush to have successfully allowed us to multiply and propagate towards earth dominance. In the long run, however, it turns out that humanity may end up stampeding dangerously close to extinction. To thrive both individually and as a species we must come to terms with our rather dangerous mind and train ourselves to use it beyond its basic survival mode by accessing its inherent potential evolution has graciously also built into it. That takes work, training, effort and patience.

Our human mind provides the capacity for reflection. The mirror reflects what’s in front of it, meaning that as reality beams itself onto the mirror’s surface, the mirror beams it back to us as an image we can then examine from the outside. Notice how what gets examined by looking at the mirror is not reality itself, but an image of it. Our brain provides a similar process in the form of consciousness, whereby it maps reality in a virtual form we then can observe and manipulate. However, while the mirror reflects reality exactly as it is, the virtual reality consciousness creates is not only a map of reality, but that map is modified into a new creation. The brain as mapper functions as our central relationship organ that enables us to reflexively develop a relationship to reality and ourselves by having access to a virtual, mapped and modified reality we can ponder and manipulate. This is how we are self-aware.

As an aside, the mind is more than the creator of a virtual adaptation of reality we can reflexively relate to and have a relationship with. It can transcend self-awareness, and knowingly experience reality and awareness without the detour of mapped mirroring duality. That is the shift from observation to being, from knowing we exist in a universe to realizing we are the universe. More about that in another context.

The eye has a blind spot where the optic nerve enters the retina, but you don’t see it. You have the impression of enjoying a seamless field of vision without two black holes in the middle, even though the holes are there. The brain manages to fill in the missing information to make the field seem seamless. Extrapolate that to the whole brain to realize that to function effectively for everyday survival our brain adapts our field of consciousness in two ways: It fills what’s missing to provide a sense of continuity and simplifies available information to not overwhelm you. It hides blind spots from you to provide continuity and withholds information to ensure efficiency. Both these mechanisms distort reality to ensure survival, while simultaneously laying the foundations for ignorance and suffering.

We each have many blind spots, but the core blind spot affecting us all is the proclivity to live as if we had no mind. We use our minds without realizing the extent to which our experience of reality is created by our mind. Without our conscious knowledge our brain creates the reality we experience. We don’t notice that the reality we experience is our brain’s creation. We mistake our brain’s constructions for reality. This results in a dangerous situation, in which we ignore the fact that our experience is subjectively constructed. We mistakenly believe that what we see and experience is automatically true, and because it seems true it seems real, and because it seems real it cannot be changed. Our primordial blind spot towards the brain’s constructions robs us of freedom of choice, of the power of clear view, wise discernment, and respectfully compassionate mutual understanding.

Our mind’s constructions seem so real that we hold on to them for dear life and want to shove them down other people’s throats without exploring their veracity. We get strongly identified with what we believe we know, emotions take over, and the capacity to hear each other vanishes. Identification with mind processes is the single most destructive problem in the way humans use their minds. Emotions suffocate the mind’s spaciousness to freely consider, question, doubt and explore, and before we know it, we are in conflict. If we cannot agree on facts, emotions drive us to use force to impose our views instead of inquiring more deeply into the divergent realities, and if necessary, compromising to try to resolve complexities. Force can take the form of yelling and screaming at each other, or legal and physical action.

The reality our mind constructs and we can have a relationship with, is in fact threefold. We first have objective reality, which is what happens in the universe independent of whether we know about it or there is anyone around to witness it. This reality consists of energy flow that is independent of how our brains and minds construct reality, and therefore as far from information as energy flow can get. The black death virus killed thousands of people without them knowing what viruses are or being able to see them. Although this is the easiest reality to agree upon, like in the case of flat-earthers, emotions still manage to cause distortions of objective facts.

Subjective reality is our own private experience nobody else has access to. This energy flow is entirely within as a construction by our own brain and mind. Although it is largely independent of objective reality, it is profoundly shaped by interactions with others. Even if everyone denies that I am in pain, if I experience pain, it is totally real for me. That is a difficult reality to agree upon, because seeing it from the outside requires trust and our capacity for empathy.

Then there is intersubjective reality, which is the reality of stories. This energy flow is deeply symbolic in the sense that language and stories are symbolic, therefore experienced as information flow, and a mutual co-creation with others. It is the reality that emerges through mutual narrative construction and is neither objective, nor subjective. It only exists in the interpersonal realm containing people who are willing to participate in it by accepting the shared reality. One such reality is money, but there are many others such as all collective ideas we can share. Money means nothing and has no reality unless it is shared in the interpersonal space. This is also a difficult reality to deal with, because it depends on the mutual capacity to regulate the multilayered energy flow between our intuition, our emotions and our intellect. When that occurs, empathy and clear insight become possible, allowing a degree of harmony within the intersubjective dance of energy and information flow to emerge. Any dance couple may dance a Tango, but those in conflict will not be able to present a harmonious dance.

To manage these three realities we each have a relationship with, requires a good deal of self-awareness and emotional regulation many people don’t have. Much of the time, the mind remains transparent like air to our eyes, invisible or not known, yet profoundly determining how we relate to real reality and live our lives. Like children playing in a house on fire, we remain oblivious to the many ways our ignorance of mind causes suffering and destruction all around.

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As biological beings we function in analog mode, shifting from one physical and mental state to another, using intelligence to solve problems and consciousness to guide our intuition to make the best possible choices. In contrast to intelligence, which we also find in AI (artificial intelligence), consciousness involves both feelings and the capacity to self-reflect, resulting in the ability to resist reality and by extension suffer. Our biological organism functions naturally as a continuous energy and information flow changing with time through an infinite number of states (like the grandfather clock that shows the whole flow of time), while AI is digital, based only on two discreet states, 0 and 1, from which it organizes information (like your digital watch that only shows the exact time it is now). AI as an information processing system is completely alien to our organic nature. AI is an algorithm that like a table has no feelings and never sleeps, never needs a rest, never feels anything, and is incapable of ethical consideration (if it seems to have ethical reflections it is because it has been programmed to imitate ethical views, not because it feels anything). In social media it is programmed to make money by eliciting user engagement through emphasis on information that activates feelings in human beings, such as anger, awe, attraction, joy etc. The AI algorithm just chugs along as a soulless, emotionless information process like robots or zombies if you prefer the world of fantasy.

Humans, in turn, need rest, sleep, and the cultivation of various mental states through play, intimacy, physical activity, problem-solving, daydreaming and meditation. Within that richness of mental states lies creativity, and at the core of creativity is silence and stupidity. The cultivation of silence, and by extension unknowing, is paramount for the discovery of contexts within which all knowing is embedded. Stupidity relates to the fact that a majority of thoughts we have are crazy, non-sensical, false, deluded, unintelligible, and mysterious. Like a tree spreading millions of seeds, only a few of which will thrive into a new tree, our mind spews out millions of thoughts and fantasies, only a few of which are reflective of truth and conducive to living the good life. Nevertheless, that prolific productivity is the bedrock of creativity and requires skillful management. If we want to be healthy, we need to create a safe, private space for those thoughts to live, evolve, and be processed within the entirety of the mind. That space is the silence of contemplation and the safety of intimacy. Under the incessant barrage of the AI algorithm through social media we have been robbed of such a space, because we are swept away into the algorithmic stream of likes, dislikes, approvals, disapprovals, comparisons, competitions etc. The energy of stupidity then, is used to feed our narcissistic nature and flow unchecked into the public domain of the internet, with really nefarious results.

We are far from having developed the full potential of mind. More often than not we succumb to our internal algorithm of conditioned reflexes, behaviors, reactions and mindless activities that cause untold suffering. If mind has a choice between easy and difficult, it will always choose easy. Easy is what can be manipulated in the concrete world; it is easier to control the body and fast, for example, than to practice mind concentration. We have a certain command over the body and the external world, but not over our mind. Faced with the challenge of mind exploration, we must engage in a rigorous mind training and learn to observe it without judgment.

Most importantly, non-judgmental inquiry requires the privacy of our own intimate space with ourselves and a few chosen people we trust, where stupidity can have full latitude of manifestation. Caring for stupidity requires free private and intimate time, which should be a basic human right. Stupidity and silence are gold mines guaranteeing mental integration and expansion of awareness towards larger contexts. Once we have incorporated such mind hygiene into our lives, we are better equipped to meet the demands and responsibilities of reality, including social reality, and wisely chose what we responsibly allow into the public domain. The non-judgmental attitude of intimate and private investigation needs to give way to the discerning attitude of social manifestation and public expression. In the public domain it has catastrophic social consequences if anything goes and the first thought that enters one's mind is spewed out. Social authenticity in the public domain has nothing to do with spontaneously spewing out whatever stupidities and unformed thoughts fly through one’s mind. It is rather based on one’s capacity to cogently and responsibly express what is relevant to the demands of any life situation after having sifted through the chaos of one's thoughts. In that sense, opinions must be carefully crafted if we want a society that functions wisely.

This dialectic between internal freedom for stupidity and silence and external responsibility for wisdom and perspective requires a difficult ingredient – the capacity to face the truth. Information and truth are not the same, and most information is not truth. We are flooded daily with plenty of information, but truth is a rare and costly kind of information integration process that requires hard work and time to be discovered. Truth is costly because it demands research and investment. Fiction and fantasy (not as literary genres) are cheap and don't require any investment; they can be made as attractive as you would like them to be. They are simplistic, deluded and disconnected from reality. Truth on the other hand is complicated and complex, often painful and unattractive, and the hallmark of our mind’s connection with reality.

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