Transcendence--what, why and who gives a care anyway?

RevJohn and I were verging on a discussion of what this is all about over on B-net a fairly short time ago. Seems apropo to raise the subject here among people whom I know to be thoughtful and spiritually quite varied.

As with so many other such terms, I find myself falling back into ex-debater/debate coach mode and wanting to begin with a definition to be as certain as possible that everyone discussing understands the term in the same way.

But how on earth do we begin to define what constitutes a transcendent experience?

In a rather flippant attempt to suggest how daunting the task, I referred on that B-net board to an instance from a long-ago heard sermon on the topic. The minister told a brief anecdote illustrating the difficulties of understanding what this term means as follows: He was peacefully napping on the living room sofa one Sunday afternoon when one of his stepsons came running into the house, slamming the screen door, blurting out with no prelude: "Dad, what does sexual intercourse feel like?"

I'm not sure that transcendence is something that can be defined. Is it enough to believe whatever we label thus actually is extraordinary when it may be quite the opposite? Is the fact that such occurrences seem personally extraordinary of any significance really?

What I might refer to as a transcendent experience could easily be regarded as nothing of much significance or even out-of-the-ordinary by another person. Fair enough--it's transcendent only for me (whatever "transcendent" means anyway, and we're probably further than ever from being on a wavelength as to what that means.)

Thinking back upon experiences I've had that I'd label that, some of them seem more than slightly mundane to me now even though at the time they provided spectacular revelations.

At bottom, as we so often suggest here, "It's all UPG [unverified personal gnosis] anyway." Why, I wonder, do we even bother designating such experiences by any particular terminology? Isn't any revelation, even the most ordinary, part and parcel of the accumulating knowledge any human individual acquires simply from continuing to breathe? Why would one type of experience necessarily be regarded as extraordinary and largely inexplicable whereas others are not? Maybe we're just dumb enough to be regarding a delusion as something marvelous...

For instance, I was a few years into my English teaching career before I truly understood when it's grammatically appropriate to use "who" and when "whom" in a sentence. One of those "aha! moments" as they're sometimes called. Up till that point, I'd simply guessed or referred to an exercise key when that was possible. However, finally I experienced a flood of understanding of just what constituted nominative as opposed to objective case in complex sentence structures.

Quite honestly, I regard that moment of similar import to another that I had about a decade later which was much more of a "transcendent experience." Back firmly against the trunk of a large fir tree, I had spent a half hour or more sitting on some rather damp soil musing upon why I'd always hated the color pink. Several lines of thought suddenly merged, and I experienced a moment of feeling that I finally understood why and all was right with the world, the universe and everything.

I guess that's transcendence. It was a moment of intense revelation for me although thinking about it now, I'm rather inclined to regard it as much ado about not much finally becoming resolved in my mind.

The occult discipline which I've now been involved with for almost twenty years (and not very deeply for the most part, I confess) stresses the importance of keeping a detailed journal of one's practice, trying different rituals and meditations, and then writing out what occurred in a scientific manner so as to leave behind information that might aid others as well as providing one's mentor with a means of assessing one's progress if one is attempting to qualify for rankings in a mystical lodge or is being mentored on a less formal basis. I suspect that part of the reason for detailed recordkeeping is that people bandy about terms like "transcendence" and "transcendent experience" but haven't any clear understanding what those involve for the most part. Admittedly, I'm nowhere near being an adept, so perhaps those who are understand that it's impossible to describe such experiences meaningfully for another person and thus such meticulous recordkeeping isn't terribly useful. Why would anyone else care what you think happened to you anyway? It had impact only upon your own life and may be quite banal or meaningless to anyone else, certainly not constituting what those others might regard as transcendent experiences.

So, at bottom, what's the point and why do we bother unless perhaps it's for a momentary feeling of superiority to all those crass others who haven't achieved--we think--our personal moments of exaltation?

Wellllll I'm having a *pint of ice cream and a spoon* sorta day. So I will provide an all too succinct first response to your thoughtful op DOT.

I agree with you; transcendence cannot be described. In fact, I think if someone can describe it, then they have never experienced it.

I have seen people seek, so much, to transcend that they distract themselves and stall their spiritual growth. In fact, I've seen worse... people try to transcend (transcend something they do not understand to begin with) and become narcissistic.

To transcend (blank) requires, first and foremost, to relieve oneself of the ego... the moment a thought stirs the waters, transcendence is lost.

Like sitting for meditation; consider: we sit, and we sit... and sit..... then, perhaps,for the briefest of moments it's like 'woosh' ... we're all one, but we don't know it; it's like millions of little spacemen in their spacesuits with their personal dramas going on, yet no one realizes that we're all in the same space together, and then we think to ourselves: 'I'm doing it!' and......




We have similar discussions in Yogic circles; people want to cleanse the nadi's so they can raise their kundalini to shushumna..... people talk about it, but no one (I know) has ever done it.