How to Cultivate Transcendence
Close your eyes and randomly choose any module on this website and it will get you closer to transcendence. Essentially, transcendence is the culmination of all the qualities of a flourishing human. Isn’t it a little paradoxical that all this work to be our best selves is really leading to losing ourselves into something greater?
Flow
Flow is an intense absorption in an activity that is both challenging and which you have great skill. Hobbies and activities such as music, dancing, art, athletics, or cognitive pursuits all have potential for flow where self, time and place are forgotten in a pursuit of something greater. See our Flow module for more.
Mindfulness and Meditation
Jon-Kabat-Zinn describes how meditation can be a pathway to transcendence: “Sitting or lying still, in any moment we can reconnect with our body, transcend the body, merge with our breath, with the universe, experience ourselves as whole and folded into larger and larger wholes. A taste of interconnectedness brings deep knowledge of belonging, a sense of being an intimate part of things, a sense of being at home wherever we are… Knowing our wholeness, we may find ourselves coming to terms with things as they are, a deepening of understanding and compassion, a lessening of anguish and despair.” -Jon Kabat-Zinn
Listen to Oprah describe how meditation takes her back to something bigger than herself:
See our Mindfulness Module for more.
Awe
The language we use to describe transcendent experiences may alienate some. When he does lectures, David Yaden asks the crowd, “raise your hand if you have ever felt at one with all things’. Usually about ⅓ of the hands go up. Then he asks, “raise your hand if you have had a profound religious experience or awakening that changed the direction of your life,” a few more hands go up. Then he asks, “raise your hand if you have ever felt awe,” to which nearly every hand goes up. Yaden refers to Awe as the ‘every person’s spiritual experience.’ Awe can be the experience of getting lost in beautiful music, art, or a grand scene in nature, and can be induced by physical proximity to something vast or grand such as a grove of tall trees, the grand canyon, or a mountain top view (Yaden et al., 2017). See our mini module on awe for more.
Spiritual and Religious Practices
Saints and mystics have long known what scientific research is just now discovering about transcendence—fulfillment is found in losing the self into something greater.
Maybe this is what Jesus means when he says,
“Whosoever will lose his life for my sake shall find it.”
And what the Buddhist Zen master Eihei Dogen means when he writes,
“To study the Buddha Way is to study the self.
To study the self is to forget the self.
To forget the self is to be enlightened by all things.”
And what Rumi, a scholar of Islam, means when he says,
“Isolate yourself for a while from the crowd,
And immerse yourself to the neck in thought.
Indeed you shall find that you are one with the One,
Beautiful, serene, and blessed is your self.”
If your spiritual and religious practices bring you peace, awe, joy, humility, gratitude, openness, purpose, connection with all humanity and self-transcendence, you can confidently lean into it knowing science backs these practices for well-being.
Interconnectedness
Einstein says that it is a delusion for us to experience ourselves as separate from the rest of the universe. He was pretty smart, - might be worth listening to. See our Interconnectedness module for more.
Substances
Mind altering substances such as cannabis and psilocybin have long been used in religious and cultural traditions as a method to ‘discover God within’ (Richards, 2015, p. 23). Religious seekers worldwide use cannabis in conjunction with fasting, meditation, prayer, and other traditional rituals to trigger the peak experiences of self-transcendence (Ferrara, 2021). Maslow believed that some people are more firmly entrenched in egoic thinking and that substances like psilocybin, mescaline, and LSD could help these people under the right circumstances to have a peak experience where otherwise would not be possible (Maslow, 1964).
Katherine Maclean researched psilocybin and peak experiences at Johns Hopkins University and found that they could reliably elicit these experiences in hundreds of healthy individuals. Most reported that it was among the top 5 most transformative experiences in their lives. You can watch her Ted Talk here:
If ever there was a need for the “do not try this at home” warning, this would be an appropriate place. We include the information here as a look into the future, and as research progresses there will be more opportunity for safe transformative healing through psychedelic substances.