Transcendence—Assimilating Your Life Experiences Toward a Positive Future

What does it mean to get past something or get over something—a tragedy, for example? It doesn’t mean that it’s not with you anymore. It doesn’t mean you didn’t learn from it. It means that you’ve somehow put it past you to some degree. This might mean that you’ve been able to get back to some semblance of a normal routine. It might mean that it isn’t dominating your emotional state anymore. Moving beyond an event means incorporating that experience into your lifetime of lessons and insights. It’s about gaining a heightened perspective on yourself and how you interact with your world. It’s about transcendence. 

Moving beyond a boundary

Moving through life, you experience many milestones and watershed moments. Each of these may define you to varying degrees. Sometimes, the fact is that who you were in the moment just before and who you are in the moment just after may not be that different. Alternatively, the milestone may have prompted a sudden insight or realization that significantly changes the way you think (more below), and in the moment after, you may feel like a completely different person. There are many boundaries in life, and you move beyond these boundaries in different ways. Some may be slow and gradual, while others are sudden. Some are positive and energizing, while others may be painful and damaging. As you transcend these boundaries, who you are will evolve based on what you incorporate into your self.

Reaching an epiphany

There you are—living your life, going to work, dealing with the headaches and hassles. Then something happens that shifts your perspective. You hear or realize an insight that has significant implications for your life and the way you live it. This insight may be based on new information, or it may be that something you’ve always known has hit home in your mind and has changed the way you think about a significant part of your life. It may feel like a fog has lifted and you have a clarity about your reality that you’ve never had before. For some, the ultimate epiphany is reaching “enlightenment” or having an awakening to a transcendental truth or reality. This kind of insight can help you move beyond or transcend the ordinary. Drudgery becomes joy, anxiety becomes peace, and you achieve a heightened understanding of the world and your place in it. You don’t have to be a buddha to transcend the everyday aspects of your life. Regular practices, such as mindfulness and meditation, can help wire your brain toward transcendence, help you understand your essential self, and see the world from a deeper and more fundamental perspective. 

Transcending the everyday

Oxford Languages defines the verb transcend as to “be or go beyond the range or limits of (something abstract, typically a conceptual field or division).” How you characterize the “range or limits” depends on your life and your individual context. Moving beyond that range or set of limits can also be achieved in a variety of ways. I tend to not take that too literally. I don’t think of myself as getting past or moving away from my circumstances; rather, I work toward gaining perspective on these aspects of my life. Thinking in terms of levels of perspective on life is very helpful in this regard, and I use a model adapted from Lorena Ripol (2018) that looks at a set of concentric circles which represent different levels of perspective. 

• The Center. The very center represents focusing on your own problems, having knee-jerk emotional responses, and acting according to those responses. It involves wallowing in your feelings and having very little or no perspective on where they are coming from. 
• The first circle. At this level, you can observe the feelings of others and try to take these into account. You are open to other perspectives, but you don’t move beyond the impact of the immediate issues.
• The second circle. You have a sense of the big picture at this level—an understanding of where your immediate issues stand in relation to the world and the social-historical context. At this level, you have a firm notion of the impermanence of all things.
• The third circle. At the outermost level of perspective, you gain a sense of your place in the universe. You understand your life force and how it manifests itself. You have the ability to think, speak, and act in a way that is consistent with your life force. 

In this model, transcendence involves the ability to live at levels two and three. You still have emotional responses, but you’re able to keep those feelings in perspective; they aren’t part of your identity and don’t lead to unintended speech or actions. Being able to achieve this perspective means that your reality can actually evolve. It becomes one of deep insights and serenity—a heightened plane of existence. 

The process is not simple. However, while you strive for the ideal of the outer circles, you create new mental pathways and transcend the challenges of life. They become ripples on a serene pond.

Transcendence means different things to different people, but it will inherently be a positive aspect of your life. It requires an intimate knowledge of yourself and of your context in the world. Striving for transcendence means striving for a realization of your essential self and interacting with the world around you from a place of serenity and awareness.

Reference: Ripol, Lorena. 2018. Personal Communication.