The following is a Beezone article composited from various talks and essays by Adi Da Samraj remixed.
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.
Transcend is an act and Transcendence is a state and together their true meaning cannot 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 orseek 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 withyour self. 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 seek stranscendence 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.T ranscendence 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.
“Adherence to this principle of transcendence is the firm conclusion of my life”
Your self-possession is your own concern. It cannot be relieved magically. Thus, the ultimate gesture of transcendence is necessarily yours. Graceattracts you to Itself with great force, but if you arerepelled, if you do not surrender, then you will take agreat deal of time to become free. And that ‘long time’ iseternal dissatisfaction, is the “I” within “me,”. It isfear, sorrow, desire, and anger. Separate, alone,unfinished, incomplete, and threatened forever.
The confrontation with experience isinherently binding, self-limiting, or stress-inducing, andthis indicates that the process wherein we realize freedomis not in the realm or pursuit of experience itself but inthe dimension of the transcendence of experience.This fruitless adventure in search for ultimatesatisfaction, union, and release is the necessary destiny ofthe relentless ego. “I” is Narcissus, the self-centeredbody-mind. “I” is inherently committed to the failure of itsown search, to separation from all relations, beings,things, and events. The commitment or will to release viaexperience and knowledge is a sham. It is idol worship. Itis nothing more than self-embrace. Its results are nevermore than frustration, tension, and bewilderment.
We must understand experience itselfand ourselves, or else we will never be truly free. And ifwe observe and understand experience and ourselves, we seethat stress, tension, the sense of suppression, or alimiting compressive force on the being is always anessential component of every moment of psycho-physicalexperience. There is no experience that can be attained thatis inherently free of the limiting conditional force that weidentify as painful stress. We may pursue and attain anexperience that temporarily distracts us from some presentcondition of painful stress, but in another moment the veryexperience that was first felt as relief becomes alimitation.
Attention and Mind
Prison of Fascination and Doubt
The search for release (or the act of attention) is a ritual automaticity in the Radiant Transcendental Being. The self contraction actually seek srelease 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 processis 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 experientialand 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. 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.