TRANSCENDENCE AND HAPPINESS

Transcendence is a mystery. Yes, transcendence is included and manifested through the incredible and powerful mechanism of reflexivity by which we can step back from ourselves and be aware of ourselves (#1). And yes, your reflexive self-consciousness is your glory as a human being, it enables you to rise above yourself to direct yourself, the heart and soul of self-leadership. Yet it can also be misused as when you are not kind and gentle with yourself. Then you turn your energies against yourself and create those unresourceful “dragon” states (#2). And yet it this ability to transcend yourself is still an incredible mystery.

At the heart of our ability to transcend our states and our self and to develop higher levels of awareness about this experience that we call “life,” is our ability to make meaning of these higher levels. Making meaning at the lower levels enables us to identify what we are dealing with when we encounter the world and all that it offers (identification). Meaning-making also enables us to figure out how things work, what causes what, what leads to what (causation).

This level of meaning-making has given us the power to control our world. By it we have figured out how to meet all of the lower level needs: survival needs—how to create agricultural industries, manufacturing industries, etc. We have learned how to meet our safety needs— how to be safe, how to stabilize the dimensions in our lives, our economies, work, relationships, etc. We have learned how to meet our social needs for bonding, love, and affection, etc. We have learned how to meet our self needs for importance, competence, worth, etc. Coping well with all these needs makes us successful at this level of need— the animal level.

Yet with all of our prosperity, with the standards of living rising all over the planet, we are still not satisfied. Human life is not just about meeting our lower needs. There’s a transcendent area within us that remains to be satisfied, an area of need for being fully and truly human, for meeting our self- actualizing needs. Maslow discovered that we are biologically organized with a set of drives that are transcendent drives— the being needs that transcend our doing (achievement) needs. Here we strive to be above and beyond our instrumental doing. And these needs are not instrumental. They are not means to some other end. As non-instrumental needs, we are motivated to be fully human, to transcend our animal needs and to become fully human, fully alive.

What a mystery! We are liberated by our prosperity but we are not fulfilled by it. Beyond all of that is the transcendent mystery of creating even higher level meaning— so that we endow our life with a sense of meaningfulness. It is here that you can hear the call of transcendence: What does it mean to be human, fully human? What is the meaning of our lives?

In a recent article in The Atlantic, the authors of an article “Meaning is Healthier than Happiness” explored a new study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) on “happiness.” In first defining happiness, they distinguished two forms:

1) Happiness as associated with selfish “taking” behavior.

2) Happiness as a sense of meaning associated with selfless “giving” behavior.

The first “happiness” is happiness without meaning and is relatively shallow, self-absorbed or even selfish life. It is focused solely on getting one’s own needs satisfied. This kind of “pure happiness” is about emotion, about “feeling good,” about hedonic well-being or pleasure, and not about helping others in need. The researchers measured happiness by asking subjects questions like: How often did you feel happy? How often did you feel interested in life? How often did you feel satisfied?

The second “happiness” is about contributing to others. This happiness is more like “eudaimonic well-being” rather than an emotion of feeling good. “Partly what we do as human beings is to take care of others and contribute to others. This makes life meaningful, but it does not necessarily make us happy.” This happiness was defined as an orientation to something bigger than oneself. The researchers asked subjects questions like: How often did you feel that your life has a sense of direction or meaning to it? How often did you feel that you had something to contribute to society? How often did you feel that you belonged to a community/ social group?

Now what is even more fascinating in the study is that “Cole and Fredrickson found that people who are happy but have little to no sense of meaning in their lives—proverbially, simply here for the party—have the same gene expression patterns as people who are responding to and enduring chronic adversity. That is, the bodies of these happy people are preparing them for bacterial threats by activating the pro-inflammatory response.” Their conclusion? “‘Empty positive emotions’ – like the kind people experience during manic episodes or artificially euphoria from alcohol and drugs — ‘are about as good for you as adversity.”

Conversely, the other “happiness” pattern, that of well-being through life-meaningfulness had a different gene expression pattern. “On the other hand, if you are doing well and having a lot of healthy social connections, your immune system shifts forward to prepare you for viruses, which you’re more likely to contract if you’re interacting with a lot of people.”

The point? Feeling good is not enough. You and I need meaning to thrive. We need transcendent meaning that enables us to connect to something bigger and larger than ourselves. Feeling good is a by-product of another kind of good— doing and being good as Aristotle contended.