“TRANSCENDENCE IS INCLUDED”

When it comes to human beings, transcendence is part of the package. You don’t have to go to school to learn it. You don’t have to hire a coach or consultant so that you can learn how to do it. You don’t need to apply for a scholarship so that you can take off a few years and develop it as a spiritual quality to add to all of your human qualities. It’s not like that. Not at all.

When it comes to the experience and capacity for transcendence, it is part and parcel of being human. This is so much true that you could not turn it off even if you wanted to. It is inevitable, inescapable, and innate. Now true enough, it is not there at birth, but it is there as a potential and it doesn’t take long and Pow! there it is.

What am I talking about? What is this transcendence? Transcendence is the mechanism of consciousness whereby you become aware of your awareness. In other words, it is the first meta- state which we all experience. But again, not at first. At first, we are in the Garden of Bliss or to use the biblical story, the Garden of Eden. We are conscious— sentient— aware, but we’re not aware of our awareness. We live in the World of Attentions. Whatever catches our attention leads our thinking and emoting. We’re not even aware of ourselves.

Then it happens. Like the biblical story of the beginning, it is like eating of the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil in that as we grow and develop, as our mind develops, we become aware of “knowing” (knowledge) that some things are good for us and some things are not. And with this awareness, we begin to become conscious of being conscious. We become self-conscious. Suddenly we know that we’re naked. So while a four-year old may joyfully jump out of the bathtub and run through the house and out into the yard buck naked, at five or six years of age we have a more developed consciousness. We are self-conscious, conscious of being seen, being exposed. And so the age of shyness deepens.

Now begins the age of self-consciousness and given that we live in a world of giants who are so smart, so big, so strong, and so much in control, we become aware that we are not. We become aware that we lack the ability to do so many things and so we feel the lack of self-confidence and the lack of self-assurance. This is transcendence. It is as if we can stand aside from ourselves and be aware of ourselves. And as this power or capacity develops, it is as if we can stand aside from our awareness of others and become aware of what they are thinking of us. Little children cannot do this. Cognitive development takes some time before this occurs.

Then again, with the maturing of the brain during adolescence when new chemical are pouring into the brain and bringing it to higher levels of formal logic, transcendence also develops and we are

able to as it were step aside from our mortality, temporality, fallibility, and dozens of other concepts to become philosophical about these mysterious aspects of human life.

How our brains create the sense of transcendence is a mystery; we simply do not know. We have guesses and we might assume that it might or could or probably arises due to the complexity of the processing neural systems within us, but in the end, all we have are guesses. We certainly have not been able to model it and replicate it in a computer. Nor do other biological creatures have this sense of transcendence as far as we can tell.

In his work with dolphins in Hawaii Bateson noted the ability to “jump at least one logical level,” that is, to move beyond a certainly classification of information to the frame of that classification and to then create a higher level understanding. You can read about that in his classic, Toward an Ecology of Mind (1972). Yet jumping one logical level or even two, that’s all that the most intelligent animals can do. Yet a child can jump many and then into the teenage years, we humans have no limit to the number of logical level jumps that we can make. No limit!

The reflexivity of our minds seems to be the mechanism by which the sense of transcendence arises. And since the Meta-States Model is a model of reflexive consciousness, transcendence is built into the core of the Meta-States Model and hence the Neuro-Semantic approach to NLP. Over the years this has enabled us to model higher level and more complex states of consciousness than what we could do with old classic NLP. The Meta-States Model emerged from my modeling project on resilience as told in the book, Meta-States (2007). But that was just the beginning. Then we modeled out the structure of the subjective experience of proactivity, responsibility, self-esteem, magnanimity, forgiveness, seeing and seizing opportunities, and a hundred others.

So far we have not been able to create any final definitions of the sense of transcendence, we are still in our infancy in being able to model that. Currently we are working on those rich complex states that entail and encompass the sense of transcendence. That is, in certain states almost everybody has “a sense” of rising above oneself, stepping outside oneself, taking a higher perceptual position than first or second position, even beyond third and fourth and having a system perception of the whole. We are also modeling out more fully “the peak experience” of Abraham Maslow, beginning where he ended in his incredibly insightful work about the mystical “peak experiences.” He knew they were special, that there was something “other-worldly” about them, but he could only map out with broad strokes the mysterious realm that he had identified.

Transcendence— it is built into us, it comes with the package, it is innate and inevitable. And it is a mystery. It seems to lie at the heart of what it means to be human. And the study of transcendence, going meta, and using our self-reflexive consciousness lies at the heart of Neuro-Semantics.