Personal Experiment

As a personal experiment to cultivate transcendence, consult the list below and choose one or more to practice for 20-30 minutes each day for 21 days. Feel free to use your creativity and make each practice your own, spending more time on the ones that are most effective for you. Consider it an investment in yourself humanity.

  • Watch live views of earth from the international space station

  • Interconnected meditation

  • Einstein on the delusion of separateness

  • Savor feelings of awe by being in close proximity to something vast. Visit a natural park, the grand canyon, a mountain top.

  • Write a response the the following prompt: “I would like you to think of the most wonderful experience or experi­ences of your life; happiest mo­ments, ecstatic moments, moments of rapture, perhaps from being in love, or from listening to music or suddenly "being hit" by a book or a painting, or from some great crea­tive moment. First list these. And then try to tell from the way you feel at other times, how you are at that moment a different person in some ways” (Maslow, 1964).

  • In his book Transcendence, Kaufman (2020) includes 20 growth challenges to develop transcendence. The capstone is a meditation to accept your whole self including the parts you struggle with. After becoming relaxed, first focus on a few qualities you like about yourself, then shift to some of the qualities you may struggle with. Repeat the following phrases in your mind:

    • I take responsibility for my whole self, including my flaws

    • My weaknesses are the raw material for personal growth

    • I accept my whole self in this moment

Accept the sensations that arise without trying to change them. Then write down your reflections on the experience (Kaufman, 2020). As we accept and connect with our whole beings, we can better accept and connect with the world.

  • A sample of Maslow’s list of Being Exercises (Kaufman, 2020):

    • Sample things, seek fresh experiences, seek out art galleries, museums, beautiful or grand trees, the mountains, the seashore

    • Cultivate periods of quiet meditation, periodically get away from clocks, calendars, responsibilities, demands from the world, duties, and other people

    • Be compassionate with yourself

    • Try to recover the miraculous about life - a baby is a miracle. Cultivate a sense of infinite possibility and the sense of admiration, awe, respect and wonder

    • Engage in deliberate, experimental philanthropy

    • Be with babies or children for a long period of time, or the presence of animals like kittens, puppies, monkeys or apes.

    • Contemplate your life from a historian’s perspective - one hundred or a thousand years in the future

    • Imagine that you only have one year left to live

    • Look at a familiar person or situation as if viewing for the very first time

    • Look at the same person or situation as if viewing for the very last time. Imagine, for instance, that the person is going to die before you see them again. Think as vividly as you can how you would feel, what you would lose.

    • Imagine yourself to be dying, how vivid and precious everything and everyone looks. Imagine saying goodbye to each of the persons you love best. What would you say to each one? What would you do? How would you feel?