Study of Transcendence

What
does transcendence (n) or transcend (v) mean? Does
transcendence or transcend mean to go beyond the
limits of, to triumph, overcome or be prior to or be beyond
and above something? I beleive these are the common
understandings and unfortunately limited as to their true
meaning.

Transcend is an act and
Transcendence is a state and together their true meaning can
not be found in any manipulation of mind, language, thought,
feeling or body. All these attempts to define and understand
(so as to act) represent a matter of seeking. An attempt to
abandon or to merge experience, seek higher knowledge, or be
released from temptations of pleasures, avoidance of pain or
seek some form of release or union.

Transcendence does not mean
to become the enemy of Life or to merge into something
greater than life. Self-transcendence
is not the effort of getting outside yourself or beyond
yourself or working on yourself and struggling with
yourself. Most of all it does not mean going somewhere else.
All of these are abusive passions, an unliberated craving,
in which the primary effect of that self-possession,
seeking, fear, anger, and despair is the only certain
attainment.

Self-transcendence is the
natural force of Life, it is inherent in the nature of the
world. Transcendence, self-transcendence, is
to reside without effort, freely, in the Condition of
Existence or Free Being. To transcend this world and
it’s limitations you do not leave it, and you certainly do
not try to escape from it in the fearful and self-possessed
manner of yogis, saints and mystics. Transcendence is
not the goal to be attained. There is
no way to self-transcendence, since all
progress or change is only a modification or that which is
seeking or wanting transcendence. That which seeks
transcendence is a continuation of confinement to
separation, limitation, and the unsolvable dilemma of
craving for union or release. Experience or knowledge cannot
satisfy or release the self from itself. Only
self-transcendence is release from self. And, because
the self is created, defined, and limited by the composite
of mind/body experience and knowledge, the secret of
self-transcendence is founded upon insight into the
necessary egoic-confinement that is the inherent result of
psycho-physical experiencing and knowing, high and low.

Transcendence is in your awareness, in
consciousness, in your feeling-awareness.
Transcendence is inherent in this Present moment and
condition. God, Truth and Reality is the only Fact of the
world and the body-mind of Man and Woman. We rest in the in
that Condition in which the entire domain of experience,
high and low, is transparent to the Transcendental Reality.
Whatever arises is completely transparent in God, Truth and
Reality. And there is only one thing preventing this from
being realized, in any moment. And I hope you can get hip to
what that is!

The actual process of
transcendence and insight reveals the factuality of
reactive self-confinement and the fruitlessness of the
search for salvation, release, or perfect fulfillment. True
transcendence is the radical insight in itself, in
the very moment of self-transcendence.

Your self-possession is your own
concern. It cannot be relieved magically. Thus, the ultimate
gesture of transcendence is necessarily yours. Grace
attracts you to Itself with great force, but if you are
repelled, if you do not surrender, then you will take a
great deal of time to become free. And that ‘long time’ is
eternal dissatisfaction, is the “I” within “me,”. It is
fear, sorrow, desire, and anger. Separate, alone,
unfinished, incomplete, and threatened forever.

The confrontation with experience is
inherently binding, self-limiting, or stress-inducing, and
this indicates that the process wherein we realize freedom
is not in the realm or pursuit of experience itself but in
the dimension of the transcendence of experience.
This fruitless adventure in search for ultimate
satisfaction, union, and release is the necessary destiny of
the relentless ego. “I” is Narcissus, the self-centered
body-mind. “I” is inherently committed to the failure of its
own search, to separation from all relations, beings,
things, and events. The commitment or will to release via
experience and knowledge is a sham. It is idol worship. It
is nothing more than self-embrace. Its results are never
more than frustration, tension, and bewilderment.

We must understand experience itself
and ourselves, or else we will never be truly free. And if
we observe and understand experience and ourselves, we see
that stress, tension, the sense of suppression, or a
limiting compressive force on the being is always an
essential component of every moment of psycho-physical
experience. There is no experience that can be attained that
is inherently free of the limiting conditional force that we
identify as painful stress. We may pursue and attain an
experience that temporarily distracts us from some present
condition of painful stress, but in another moment the very
experience that was first felt as relief becomes a
limitation.

Attention and
Mind

The search for release (or the act
of attention) is a ritual automaticity in the Radiant
Transcendental Being. The self contraction actually seeks
release from itself as a means or method of re-attaining the
Happiness that its own existence has caused it to Forget.
Such Is. the paradoxical futility of attention, desire,
seeking, and all conditional knowledge or experience. No
independent act of attention arises to associate with
phenomena or to cause experience in the unnecessary and
changing Realm of Nature.

Mind and attention are the subtle or
inner subjective personality, made of all of the acquired
tendencies of attention, or urges toward experiences of all
kinds. These tendencies and urges are the results of the
proximity of the soul, or the Eternal Core of the body-mind,
and the Realm of Nature, or Change. Through casual
association with subtle states, the soul becomes distracted,
and differentiates itself from its Eternal Condition. Such
differentiation is the act of attention itself.
Differentiated and differentiating attention is the
fundamental structure of mind. Once it arises, the soul is
projected into an Infinite Spiral of causes and effects,
leading high and low within the structures of possibility.
Therefore, the subjective being acquires tendencies of
attention through irresponsible experience. And that process
is without beginning or end. It is an Eternal Bewilderment,
a Prison of Fascination and Doubt.

Unless the act of attention is
inspected, controlled, and ultimately transcended, our
existence cannot be anything but a sequence of experiential
and conceptual events. Adherence to this principle of
transcendence is the firm conclusion of my life. My
work over these years has been to argue that Principle to
people and to offer them forms of instruction, forms of
practice, forms of association with me that would help them
to realize the certainty of this same Principle in their own
lives.

Our Way is the transcendental Way of
ultimate Realization, of Divine Ignorance or the Eternal
Self, prior to all contraction, and Radiant Love-Bliss prior
to all phenomenal conditioning, limitation, and egoity.
Adherence to this Principle of transcendence is the
firm conclusion of my life. My work over these years has
been to argue that Principle to people and to offer them
forms of instruction, forms of practice, forms of
association with me that would help them to realize the
certainty of this same Principle in their own lives. It is
as clear to me now as it was at the beginning, that the Way
is to transcend phenomenal existence, to understand the
mechanism of attention, the process of contraction, and the
nature of knowledge and experience.

Further Reading:

Then what is the Way? Just as
interest in the Way is founded upon insight into the
necessary egoic-confinement that is the inherent result of
psycho-physical experiencing and knowing, the actual process
of the Way is also a matter of insight, or direct and
immediate intuitive understanding, in every moment. Insight
reveals the factuality of reactive self-confinement and the
fruitlessness of the search for salvation, release, or
perfect fulfillment. And radical insight is itself the very
moment of self-transcendence.

And what is that radical insight
that is itself self-transcendence, or release of the
mood and motivated effort of self-confinement? It is the
native Realization or Intuition that no matter what “I” may
experience, or reflect, or know about the apparent realm or
process of subjective and objective phenomena, “I” do not
know what even a single thing is . “I” am inherently and
eternally Ignorant. What is “I”? What is the world? What is
energy or Life? Neither limited nor complete experience or
knowledge could ever modify or dissolve the inherent
Ignorance that is the fundamental Condition of the
experiential and knowing psycho-physical self. By
maintaining stressful or motivated interest in more and more
experience and knowledge (or subjective reflection of the
world of phenomena), “I” may postpone confrontation with the
ultimate Fact and Consequence of inherent Ignorance. But
this confrontation is both necessary and ultimate, and the
Consequence of that confrontation is immediate and wholly
Liberating.

The
Restoration of Laughter

True wisdom implies a
self-transcending participation in the conditions of
experience. The native motive of self-transcendence
is the law revealed to us by experience itself. Experience
and knowledge are not the basic purpose of our existence.
Rather, we are mysteriously involved in a process of
conditional experience in which we are inherently and
constantly obliged either to transcend ourselves or be
corrupted and destroyed.

Those who will not establish
themselves in the wisdom or true intelligence of the being
are obliged to suffer their lifetime of experience, bound to
the conditional self-limits of their circumstances, and
otherwise striving for release through desperate programs of
degenerative self-indulgence and all the fitful politics
whereby human beings seek to dominate and perfect their
circumstances in the Realm of Nature. But if true wisdom
awakens, then our commitment ceases to be directed merely to
experience itself, but to the process of
self-transcendence (or moment to moment liberation
from experiential confinement) in the midst of the arising
play of conditional experience.

What
is Wisdom

The “consideration” and revelation
of the self-transcending Way of The Heart developed over the
many teaching years on the basis of my response to the needs
and limitations and heart-necessities of those who were
moved by my heart-given word and by the spiritual presence,
transcendental condition, and divine person always
spontaneously revealed in, by, and as my even bodily
heart-company. And the real course and ordeal of
self-transcending practice must not be bypassed in the Way
of The Heart, even though the ego would prefer to do
so.

Dawn
Horse Testament