Self-transcendence is a core need for human beings because it performs core functions.

It is
connected to meaning and wisdom. Humans and other intelligent organisms seek to alter their
consciousness. For example, New Caledonian crows tumble down roofs to make themselves
dizzy. Humans have sophisticated processes for generating, harnessing, and interpreting altered
states of consciousness, such as shamanism, ritual, flow states, and psychedelic and mystical
experiences.
A subset of mystical experiences, awakening experiences, cause people to transform their lives.
Research shows people's lives get better after awakening experiences.
Self-transcendence is tied to literacy, abstract symbolic thought, and numeracy because it
allows people to correct their cognition and recognize their self-deception. Putting these
two together, humans begin to change their sense of self, world, and moral responsibility.
Pythagoras was the first person to describe the universe as a cosmos. He believed that music,
mathematics, and altered states of consciousness could allow people to transcend and see the
world as beautiful, an experience similar to those who experience awakening experiences.
Socrates epitomizes the Greek form of the Axial Revolution. Plato combined the ideas of
Socrates and Pythagoras. The grammar of how people understand meaning, wisdom, self, and
self-transcendence comes from Socrates and Plato.
Plato's Myth of the Cave is a myth of enlightenment, self-transcendence, and self-
transformation that illustrates coming into greater contact with reality. In the myth,
individuals confront real patterns, are blinded by them, transform to pick them up, and are unable
to move forward. The Greek word for this ascent is "Anagoge". In the Myth of the Cave,
reason and spirituality are inseparably bound.
Self-transcendence is living up to one's potential, ascending through a hierarchy of actualization
from a plant to an animate thing to a mental thing to a rational thing. To be wise is to cultivate a
character that helps realize a person's capacity for rational self-reflection, take charge of
self-actualization and self-realization, and fulfill their potential for humanity. Foolishness is
not properly cultivating one's character.
Aristotle thought rationality was the way of defining human beings. Rationality is the
capacity to reflectively realize self-deception, illusion, and self-correction.
There are two modes of being, "having" and "being". "Being needs" are met by becoming
something, like maturing. These "being needs" are developmental needs connected to
meaning. When a person is mortally confused, their "being needs" are not met, and they try to
meet them by having more things.
Siddhartha left the "having mode" of the palace and entered the "being mode" by practicing self-
denial. Siddhartha discovered the middle path, which transcends the having mode by
rejecting both self-indulgence and self-denial.
Mindfulness helps people remember the "being mode" and awaken. "Buddha" is a title
that means "the awakened one". Mindfulness addresses the meaning crisis by cultivating
awakening.
Extensive mindfulness practice can lead to a "pure consciousness event". People who
experience altered states of consciousness, mystical experiences, and certain psychedelic
experiences, sometimes report that the experience was more real than everyday life. This is
like Plato's cave, where people leave the sunlight and realize everyday experience is only echoes
and shadows. Most world religions are predicated on the idea of higher states of consciousness,
such as Satori, Sunyata, Moksha, and Tao.
Mystical experiences improve a person's capacity for making sense and optimizing
anagoge. Attention, mindfulness, and the ability to enter higher states of consciousness alleviate
existential distress and improve insight and meaning in life.
Ontonormativity is when higher states of consciousness challenge a person to change by
presenting them with more realness and triggering platonic meta-drives.
The problem with the ontonormativity of higher states of consciousness is that people undergo
transformative experiences based on temporary experiences that do not cohere with other
experiences. These experiences are ineffable and trans-rational. Higher states of consciousness
challenge intelligibility and do not provide viable content but are promoted as real. This is the
core of the axial revolution.
Higher states of consciousness bring about developmental improvement. People's lives
improve after higher states of consciousness.
Being connected to reality is one way in which people find their lives meaningful. People
will radically transform their lives, sense of self, and relationships to maintain a connection to
this deeper reality.
People are less egocentrically oriented and more allocentrically oriented when they
describe higher states of consciousness.
The "continuity hypothesis" states that fluency is enhanced in insight, insight is enhanced
in flow, flow experiences are enhanced into mystical experiences, and mystical experiences
can bring about transformative experiences.
People who experience higher states of consciousness experience a transformation and
intervention in systematic error and see through illusion because of de-centering.
Decentering can be a traumatic experience and is dangerous to pursue without help
because people get into echo chambers of egocentric attunement.
The radical at-oneness of higher states of consciousness brings about a radical kind of
participatory knowing. The world is revealed more deeply, the depths of self are revealed
in a coupled fashion, and self-knowledge is turned onto the world. This is love.
Radical de-centering allows people to turn the massive machinery of the ego onto the
world, resulting in a radical sense of moving into the being mode and remembering who
and what people really are.
Emergent functions come from differentiation and integration. Self-transcendence occurs
as a system complexifies. Psilocybin helps the brain complexify and come up with emergent
abilities, allowing a person to see the world in a grain of sand.
The Cynics believed that people suffer because of what they set their hearts on.
People can respond to mortality by realizing that they fear experiencing partial loss and
that a remedy is to set your heart on things constitutive of meaning, such as friendship,
meaningful relationships, and wisdom.
People should focus on the depth of their lives, not the length, and live fully in the "being
mode".
The West has psychotechnologies of self-transcendence and self-transformation.
Jesus represents a "Kairos", a turning point that can be experienced personally through a
"metanoia", a radical transformation of self.
People become persons because of Agape. People internalize other people and their awareness.
Agape transforms people from non-persons into persons.
The metanoia of Agape is going from being egocentric to being centered on someone else,
participating in the Agapic process.
Paul's message is that Agape is the most excellent way to transform and grow. Love is
patient, kind, not envious or boastful, not proud, rude, or self-seeking, not easily angered,
keeps no record of wrongs, does not delight in evil, rejoices with truth, protects, trusts,
hopes, and perseveres.
Sensibility Transcendence is a transformation of the whole framing process. It occurs when
two people simultaneously go through transcendence. The two people open up what each other
can be, resulting in participatory knowing, reciprocal revelation, mutually accelerating
disclosure, knowing by loving, and sensibility transcendence.
Existential inertia occurs when people are stuck in a worldview and cannot achieve
sensibility transcendence to make a worldview viable to them. People in existential inertia
experience a loss of agency and suffer.
Gnosis helps people transform their cognition, consciousness, and character. Psychedelics
can improve therapy because they provide cognitive flexibility and the possibility of higher
states of consciousness.
Gnosis is a transformative, perspectival, participatory knowing that is ritually enframed
and embedded within a sapiential and supportive community.
Spirituality is about transcending the gods, not serving them. The core of spirituality is
self-transcendence, healing, and freeing people from existential entrapment and suffering.
As people make levels of reality livable, they conform to them and change.
People can only know the one by being one.
Neoplatonism and Christianity can be synthesized.
Self-transcendence is the greatest lie the self tells and the greatest instance of pride. The
idea that humans are capable of self-transcendence leads to the shutdown of institutions
such as universities and monasteries and replaces them with the State.
Nietzsche believed that Christianity suppressed self-transcendence.
Hegel proposed epistemic self-transcendence (people come to know how they know) but lost
the ethical self-transcendence of overcoming egocentrism and becoming more capable of
agapic love. Transformative experiences require a leap of faith.
Religion is the only thing that systematically transforms cognition, consciousness,
character, and culture in an interdependent way.
Relevance realization is the ability to make the connections at the core of meaning.
Relevance realization needs to be sub-semantic, sub-categorical, and sub-conceptual.
Relevance realization is autopoietically internal, scale-invariant, self-organizing,
multiscalular, and capable of developmental self-transcendence and self-correction.
The standard grammar of subjective and objective needs to be transcended because it
reifies relevance into a thing with an essence that inheres in either the subject or object.
Relevance realization complexifies, providing emergent abilities and self-transcendence.
Self-transcendence, self-deception, connectedness, perspectival knowing, participatory
knowing, procedural knowing, caring, significance, altered states of consciousness, and
higher states of consciousness are aspects of human spirituality.
Religio is a pre-egoic and post-egoic binding that simultaneously grounds the self and its
world.
Wonder helps people participate in the gestalt, or whole, while curiosity focuses on specific
features.
Sacredness is a high-order opponent process. Worldview attunement is meta-assimilation,
and the numinous is meta-accommodation.
Symbols are ecstatic, allowing people to stand beyond themselves. They are participatory
and integrative in an anagogic sense, integrating a person and a new world together in an
integrated fashion.
Enlightenment is a set of practices that ameliorate the perennial problems and alleviate
distress and suffering.
Self-transcendence regains agency and avoids impulsiveness and self-destruction.
Cognition is inherently developmental; it functions by developing, develops by functioning,
and is qualitatively developmental.
The goal of enlightenment is to give an account of perennial problems in naturalistic terms
that can be scientifically investigated.
Prajna is a self-liberating state of wisdom achieved by simultaneously looking deeply
inward and outward, scaling down to the pure consciousness event, and scaling up to a
resonant at-one-ment with everything, resulting in non-duality.
Gnosis needs an open-ended mythos to cultivate.
People need to be connected to the conditions that afford meaning-making and care about
those conditions.
The mind emerges from the embodied, embedded brain coupled to a living environment.
Self-making things (auto-poietic systems) can become self-identifying things, aware of their
self-making and developmental nature.
Transcendence occurs into the depths of nature, the psyche, and the two integrated and
coordinated together.
Instead of seeking a grand purpose and conforming to reality through narrative, people
can move to a post-narrative way of being and experience a connection to reality like in
higher states of consciousness.
Rationality is the capacity to reliably and systematically overcome self-deception and
afford flourishing.
Wisdom is an ecology of psychotechnologies and cognitive styles that dynamically enhance
relevance realization in inference, insight, intuition, internalization, understanding, gnosis,
transformation, and aspiration. Wisdom is a dynamical system that counteracts self-
deception and affords transformation into a meaningful life of flourishing.