Finding the Transcendent
| Genuine happiness and the joy it engenders really only arise from our connection to the transcendent. Any other kind of happiness is a sloppy second, a half-happiness, a false joy. The happiness and joy we are hard-wired to deeply long for, is found in the transcendent dimension of life.
How do we connect with the transcendent? Where does it come from, what does it look like and where is it hiding? The first clue to finding the transcendent is know where and what it is not. And so, we begin with the ego, the nemesis of the numinous. The ego and the transcendent have a very interesting relationship to one another. They cannot occupy the same moment of consciousness at once. They are antithetical to one another. Ego consciousness displaces our transcendent consciousness. The more identified and plugged in we are to our ego personality, the more we are disconnected from our transcendent nature. The ego, more specifically, obscures the transcendent. Ego is thick, opaque, heavy and noisy. The transcendent is diaphanous, transparent, light and completely still. Every piece of content that the ego contains blocks our experience of the transcendent. How much content does the ego hold? If we could put a number on that, I think we would be mortified. The ego collects our life history like a pack rat. Everything you’ve ever experienced, it’s still there, faithfully accumulated in the ego, and as real to the ego as the day it happened. I like to think of the ego as a repository of our life experience. Filled with memories good and sad, images of people and places and events, the emotional sting of painful experiences, the psychological wounds of every kind of trauma, and all the stories we have ever told ourselves about who we are and everything that has happened to us. The ego is broad and wide and not really very deep. It exists along the horizontal plane of our physical existence in time and space. It is our operating system and we can’t live without it. But we can put it on a diet. Purge its excess. Delete unused files. A lean, efficient ego is a good friend to have. Whereas the ego is horizontal in nature, the transcendent exists along a vertical plane of experience that runs through the very core of our knowable being. I experience it as gossamer threads of a delicately electric energy, moving upward and inward. It may not be coincidental that in heightened moments of joy or excitement or love or reverence, we can experience a tingling sensation run up our spine. Sometimes there’s a lovely little shudder as the sensation enters our head and moves upward still, as if to the sky. Visually, I like to see the relationship of our ego consciousness and our transcendent consciousness like the warp and woof of the ‘x’ – ‘y’ axis in geometry. We can break down the complexity of our conscious awareness with two lines, in the form of a cross. The ego is the horizontal woof and the transcendent is the vertical warp. And we can say that the further we stray from the central vertical axis, the more disconnected we are from our true being and our higher consciousness. Ideally, we want to live in the center, where the two lines meet. This, I think, is a central meaning to the idea of “being centered”. numinous ego |
Melanie,
You make the mistake that most spiritual seekers make, which is to perceive a false dichotomy between the transcendent and the temporal. It is all one consciousness; the transcendent and the temporal are different relationships to all that is, not different in essential nature, just different in experience. Happiness and joy are in the one, not a part of the one. We are not hardwired to seek joy in the transcendent; we are hardwired to find joy in the oneness – the all inclusive, unified consciousness. If we are “longing”, it is not because we have not found the transcendent, it is because we have yet to comprehend the nature of the one existence.
Gary
Gary,
You make a good point, and I agree with it on spiritual grounds. There is a Oneness in which we all live and have our experience. It is essential that we recognize the One as a singular, ontological Existence in which EVERYTHING exists.
The transcendent is a subset of the One and the temporal is a subset of the One. Ken Wilber’s model of nested dimensions of existence along the physical-spiritual spectrum is a viewpoint that I accept.
I believe it is as essential to understand, with some specificity and depth, the components of this spectrum as it is to know and feel the Truth that it is all One.
Many spiritual seekers make the mistake of oversimplifying the magnificently complex psychological-spiritual life of a human being. I have seen in spiritual seekers and ashrams that the psychological is conveniently pushed aside for a feel-good spirituality that puts all the chaos of our psychological nature into a neat and tidy bundle. It is all One is absolutely true. But how does this help me change that which is standing in the way of my feeling it and living it, not just knowing it?
On purely spiritual grounds, it is all One. On psychological grounds, every person is a patchwork quilt of mostly unconscious dynamics that occlude the meaningful and actual recognition and realization of the fact that it is all One.
My spiritual path has lead me from the excited zeal of reading and listening to spiritual wisdom, which I merely carried in my mind, to a profound dissatisfaction that knowing spiritual truth doesn’t change me, doesn’t make it real. My spiritual path now is really very practical and involves the recognition and understanding of the psychological apparatus that is my vehicle for actualizing the One in my human experience.
I speak and think in dualistic terms because that’s where I’m at. This is where I must begin. The duality, though, is not merely dual. Duality is the means through which the One permeates the many. Duality provides a dynamic evolutionary tension by which I will become One. The One needs duality, lest it cannot know itself.
The fact that my ego longs for transcendence is fantastic, because, as a human being, my ego is in charge. In longing for transcendence, my ego is really longing for the One, but it can’t handle the One without the upstep of the transcendent.
In other words, the transcendent is the vehicle for the everyday consciousness in which I live to experience the One, not just comprehend it.
Great discussion!
The first major mistake that seekers make is that they are seeking, usually for some thing or idea — God enlightenment, transcendence, joy, salvation, redemption… the Holy Grail. The second mistake that seekers make is that they think that they will know what “it” is when they find it. The third mistake that seekers make is that in their arrogance, hubris and folly they tell others what to search for even though they themselves are still searching for that thing that cannot be attained.
The self or ego perceives everything as a dichotomy, because the self is the baseline or point of reference — me and you, us and them, good and evil, temporal and eternal. From the standpoint of the ego no matter what “spiritual” concepts or dogma of a comprehension of oneness, transcendence, or unified consciousness that we hold to will always leaves us longing and wanting. The ego or self has no existence except in its own mind. Humans live from this egocentric existence much like “the church” held to a geocentric rather than a heliocentric POV (point of view) — I hope the irony is apparent.
The church, along with all other human religious endeavors, is essentially egocentric in the misguided attempt to objectify, identify and own that which defies any Egoic reference point.
The Buddha spoke in the Diamond Sutra: “’…These arbitrary concepts and ideas about spiritual things need to be explained to us as we seek to attain Enlightenment. However, ultimately these arbitrary conceptions can be discarded. Think Subhuti, isn’t it even more obvious that we should also give up our conceptions of non-existent things’”( Diamond Sutra chapter 6, http://www.diamond-sutra.com/diamond_sutra_text/page6.html).
Our conceptualizations and beliefs around our existence and non-existence do not enlighten us nor do they indicate enlightenment. The Buddha’s concepts and ideas are little more than breadcrumbs along a path that leads us away from our selves, to Being, where we never left in the first place. Once we have truly partaken from the Buddha’s bread, we must allow the inner transformation or digestion of the bread to nourish and enliven us. After digestion, the crumbs are no longer important, nor do they bear any resemblance of what they were. Let us ruminate rather than regurgitate and eliminate the waste of mental attachment.
The psychological dilemma that we face as humans is all wrapped up in the incongruous perception of the ever present numinous itch that we can’t quite scratch. Jetsunma Tenzin Palmo in Tricycle stated that “we’re gods acting like monkeys. We are standing in our own light; we don’t see who we really are” (http://www.tricycle.com/feature/no-excuses).
Our psychology is a reflection of our own preoccupation that we exist as egos and that our ego is separate from other egos. We suffer as a direct result of our identification with nonexistence and the void or longing that is created in this vacuous state.
A spiritual teacher, Wei Wu Wei, was once asked “Why do we suffer?” “Because 99.9% of everything you think and everything you do is about yourself and there isn’t one.” Wei Wu Wei in the book Open Secret wrote:
“’Are you still thinking, looking, living, as from an imaginary phenomenal centre?
As long as you do that you can never recognize [sic] your freedom.”
Wherever there are others there is a self,
Wherever there are no others there can be no self,
Wherever there is no self there are no others,
Because in the absence of self I am all others’”
The ego is always longing, the seeker is always seeking, the mind is always thinking and the result is that there is no resolution from an egocentric POV. Wei Wu Wei writes: “There seem to [be] two kinds of searchers: those who seek to make their ego something other than it is, i.e. holy, happy, unselfish (as though you could make a fish unfish [sic]), and those who understand that all such attempts are just gesticulation and play-acting, that there is only one thing that can be done, which is to disidentify [sic] themselves with the ego, by realizing [sic] its unreality, and by becoming aware of their eternal identity with pure being” (http://www.weiwuwei.8k.com/bits.html). Therein lies the rub, as the Bard once wrote. “There is no spoon” (http://www.voidspace.org.uk/cyberpunk/matrix_quotes.shtml).
Our ideas or conceptualization of transcendence don’t actually make us transcendent. We are only limited by our attachment to our egocentric world and our psychological morass. The longing from which Rumi and other enlightened bards have expressed in their ardor and yearning from Divine connection, does not come from a place of comprehension of the nature of the one existence or the lack thereof, because the very nature of the one existence draws us away from our mental assertions and conceptualizations and brings us to Being.
Rumi says it best, therefore I will I end with one of my favorite Rumi poems.