Whenever I have a
transcendence moment, which is thankfully more and more often, everything just
clicks. Suddenly I see existence and the universe in a much clearer light. How these
cosmic forces have slowly created everything in a slow determinate fashion and
how everything we have done and become is a result of this order. It is really
like jumping high up in the air and for a brief moment peaking outside of
Plato’s Cave, like a curtain that is separating us from reality blowing in the
wind and momentarily lets us see the world for what it really is. It is a
whoa-feeling indeed. William Blake summoned it up when he wrote:
“If the doors of
perception were cleansed everything would appear to man as it is, Infinite. For
man has closed himself up, till he sees all things thro' narrow chinks of his
cavern.”
This line was used a
metaphor for LSD in the 60s and in turn inspired the name of one of my all-time
favorite bands, The Doors, which were also heavily associated with drug abuse.
This is no coincidence, as a lot of people get these moments with the help of
“mind-expanding” drugs, and although this is another topic to be covered more
thoroughly later I will say as much as I don’t think this is a necessity to
reach transcendence moments any more than I think you would have to be a
Buddhist monk living as a recluse (probably also to be covered later). Rather,
just rely on your brain to get you there in due time, it has plenty of
potential to do so without any outside assistance. If you keep expanding your
personal world and manage to quiet the noise around you and follow your
intuition, the transcendence moments will find you and guide you. They are the
language of the universe, the illusive moments when it can actually communicate
with us, even if it’s only one way communication. As I base these notes solely
on my own experience I will confess that quite a few of these moments came to
me while being drunk on alcohol, but so many more stand brighter in my memory
in a sober mind frame, making me lean more towards the Buddhist monk route to
transcendence rather than the drug route, but still remaining on a neutral
middle ground. (Another discussion!)
I have experienced
transcendence moments since childhood but only with a large personal world can
you start putting more pieces together. Depending on their time period and
state of living, transcenders expanded their personal worlds in various
fashions, but I find travelling to be unparalleled, followed by digesting
different ingredients in our cultural stew, i.e. books, art, films etc., and of
course conversation, the ping-pong of learning, an intellectual give-and-take.
Transcendence moments can come anytime as the very title of this blog suggests,
sometimes out of nowhere similar to the feeling of a déjà vu. But what really triggers
them in my experience is being confronted with nature’s grandeur up close, a
starry sky, a roaring fire, and endless ocean, a vast chasm or a thundering
waterfall. Whatever it takes, allow your mind to soak up the moment and take it
all in, and the more often you do this, the easier it becomes for you to relive
and maintain the sense of perspective it creates.
This perspective is
what my fellow blogger mentioned in the previous post calls step 3. But even
though you reach this level, you can’t live your entire life there. In true determinist
fashion, as I was writing these very pages, my current workplace hassled me
about sending them a passport photo at that very moment, forcing me to stop my
chain of thought. Now, do matters like these mean anything on a cosmic scale?
Are they in any way important to the running of the universal clockwork? Even
considering that is ridiculous. Yet in everyday life, understanding how the
universe works and how insignificant matters as these are in the grand scheme
of things, will not pay the rent. So this is where scale comes in again. Even
though I realize that work and daily life are completely irrelevant in the
grander scheme of things, they matter somewhat to me, because it enables me to
pursue my own personal legend, the direction I want to head on the infinite
freeway. After all, if you only looked at the world on a universal scale, you
would have no interest in preserving your own life, as it has virtually no
meaning. Like Dr. Manhattan in Watchmen,
if you suddenly look at the universe on a cosmic scale, any human life, the very
fate of our planet, becomes utterly irrelevant. This is where micro-universes
come to the fore. As an American war veteran friend-of-a-friend once pointed
out to me, we all carry a micro-universe around with us. Just as we are
completely insignificant in the macro-universe we all inhabit, we are at the
same time masters of our own micro-universe and thus of monumental importance
in that particular setting. This is why I am a scale determinist. In the
micro-universe we have a free will and the power to influence our direction on
the infinite freeway network, the road taken, but in the macro-universe we are
completely powerless to affect anything and we are just cogs in the universal
clockwork, ticking away towards the end of our existence. This sense of, and
importance of scale was perfectly illustrated to me not a fortnight past
(at time of writing) in Concepcion in the Philippines. Walking down a jetty at
the end of a workday, I was as usual whenever I get the opportunity, admiring
the night sky. Stopping for a moment I then looked down into the water and to
my amazement saw almost an exact replica of the night sky under the surface,
only this time the stars were alive and moving, small bioluminescent
micro-organisms roaming around in their personal micro-universes. Glowing suns
burning gases billions and billions of light years away, ghostly lights from a
different time era beyond human grasp, sidestepped and replicated on another infinitely
smaller scale by tiny living organisms dodging each other in a meter of water
under a Filipino jetty. God, I love existence, you can’t write this shit!
