Seek Out Transcendent Experiences Every Day
Long before I ever heard of American Transcendentalism, and much longer before I ever taught it to college students, my formative years were filled with transcendent experiences:
Singing worship songs in the woods with my old church youth group as a teenager
Standing atop Mount Dana in Yosemite after hiking to the summit
Making love with with youthful abandon and enrapturement
Singing Mozart’s Requiem with the Solano Choral Society
Being fully immersed in conversation with friends at the coffeehouse I once worked at
My first ride in an airplane
Seeing trout emerging from the stillness of the morning water while fishing in Yosemite or Hermit Valley
The post-sex feeling of physical oneness with various lovers
Staying up all night to watch the Perseids meteor shower
Writing a poem or a love letter (or reading one!)
Learning Latin and communing with long-dead ancient Roman authors through their living written words
Playing Rachmaninoff’s Prelude in C Sharp Minor on my grandmother’s Bechstein grand piano
These are just a few of the many, many transcendent experiences that I count as formative in my own life. Each of them, in some sense, was a different mode of experience from my day-to-day life: a sense being out of body or sometimes completely at home within my own physical body, feeling fully immersed in and one with nature, the feeling of unity with another person mentally or physically (or both), heightened and multi-sensory awareness, paradigm-shifting enlightenment, and so on. These qualities, to me, are the heart of what transcendentalism refers to as “the sublime” and “the ineffable”—those things that are illuminating and beyond the realm of ordinary experience—those things that cannot, even in principle, be described or conveyed in words. They must be lived and experienced and sought out.
A passage from Henry David Thoreau’s Walden comes to mind as a classic example of a transcendental experience of nature:
Every morning was a cheerful invitation to make my life of equal simplicity, and I may say innocence, with Nature herself. I have been as sincere a worshipper of Aurora as the Greeks. I got up early and bathed in the pond; that was a religious exercise, and one of the best things which I did. They say that characters were engraven on the bathing tub of king Tching-thang to this effect: “Renew thyself completely each day; do it again, and again, and forever again.” I can understand that. Morning brings back the heroic ages. I was as much affected by the faint hum of a mosquito making its invisible and unimaginable tour through my apartment at earliest dawn, when I was sitting with door and windows open, as I could be by any trumpet that ever sang of fame. It was Homer’s requiem; itself an Iliad and Odyssey in the air, singing its own wrath and wanderings. There was something cosmical about it; a standing advertisement, till forbidden, of the everlasting vigor and fertility of the world. The morning, which is the most memorable season of the day, is the awakening hour. Then there is least somnolence in us; and for an hour, at least, some part of us awakes which slumbers all the rest of the day and night. Little is to be expected of that day, if it can be called a day, to which we are not awakened by our Genius, but by the mechanical nudgings of some servitor, are not awakened by our own newly-acquired force and aspirations from within, accompanied by the undulations of celestial music, instead of factory bells, and a fragrance filling the air—to a higher life than we fell asleep from; and thus the darkness bear its fruit, and prove itself to be good, no less than the light. That man who does not believe that each day contains an earlier, more sacred, and auroral hour than he has yet profaned, has despaired of life, and is pursuing a descending and darkening way. After a partial cessation of his sensuous life, the soul of man, or its organs rather, are reinvigorated each day, and his Genius tries again what noble life it can make. All memorable events, I should say, transpire in morning time and in a morning atmosphere. The Vedas say, “All intelligences awake with the morning.” Poetry and art, and the fairest and most memorable of the actions of men, date from such an hour. All poets and heroes, like Memnon, are the children of Aurora, and emit their music at sunrise. To him whose elastic and vigorous thought keeps pace with the sun, the day is a perpetual morning. It matters not what the clocks say or the attitudes and labors of men. Morning is when I am awake and there is a dawn in me. Moral reform is the effort to throw off sleep. Why is it that men give so poor an account of their day if they have not been slumbering? They are not such poor calculators. If they had not been overcome with drowsiness, they would have performed something. The millions are awake enough for physical labor; but only one in a million is awake enough for effective intellectual exertion, only one in a hundred millions to a poetic or divine life. To be awake is to be alive. I have never yet met a man who was quite awake. How could I have looked him in the face? (Thoreau, Walden, “Where I Lived and What I Lived For”)
The grandeur and sublimity of experiences such as the one (and many others) Thoreau described in Walden, and the ones I listed above (note that my experiences of transcendence may be different than yours, which are different than Thoreau’s), must be sought out deliberately; they are so far removed from the concerns of ordinary, day-to-day life, which serves only to obscure, to mask, and be an obstacle to transcendent experiences. This says to me that if transcendent experiences are an important and genuinely distinct mode of human experience (which, to me, they are), then transcendent experiences must be sought out intentionally, cultivated, and made room for among and between the other important but more mundane modes of experience in life.
As a teacher and as a mentor, a major concern of mine about the formative experiences of younger people today—students and otherwise—is that they may not be getting exposure to genuine transcendence in their formative experiences, in this highly practical and pragmatic 21st-century age. When teaching Thoreau recently to my introductory philosophy students at College of Eastern Idaho in Idaho Falls (a place relatively close to nature compared to more urban environments in other parts of the United States), I asked them to recount their most transcendent experiences in life. I was taken aback by the degree to which students didn’t even seem to understand the question, and by the mundaneness of the experiences they recounted as supposedly transcendent. It was if many of them had never had a single genuinely transcendent experience, much less think of those experiences as a special or important mode of being or of their own life experience. Many of them had never had a feeling of oneness, of heightened awareness, of enrapturement, of sublimity, of the divine in nature, and so on. It was if I was speaking Ancient Greek to them—as Thoreau seems tempted to do in the passage above while bathing in Walden Pond.
With this concern in mind—that younger people are not being taught the value of transcendence and of transcendent experiences—what practical advice can I offer to help alleviate that concern and pave the way for the full realization of the human experience of transcendence for future generations? My advice is simple and twofold:
Find out what transcendence means for you—which experiences make you feel most enlightened, most enraptured, connected with nature or with the divine or with others, most in awe, and so on.
Make room for—and seek out—some form of transcendent experience for yourself (or with others) every day.
I stress that transcendence means different things to different people. For you it may be hiking in the woods, climbing a mountain, or bathing in a pond (as it was for Thoreau). Or it may be the experience of transcendence and physical connection through sex or through altered states of consciousness such as dropping acid—LSD—as it was for Timothy Leary and many others in the 1960s—or through various psychological techniques such as hypnosis or meditation (transcendental meditation or otherwise). If you are religious, it could be prayer or worship or communion or communal singing. If you are a social person, it could be a dinner party if you are an extrovert, or a glass of wine or a cup of coffee and some conversation with a friend if you are an introvert. It could be fishing or hunting or birdwatching if you are a nature lover (although even Thoreau feels some guilt about fishing, after the fact—at having destroyed some of the natural and semi-divine objects of his own transcendence). It could be as simple as being in the zone reading a book if you are a reader. The point is that there are myriad activities and experiences that could be genuinely transcendent, if they are purposefully sought out and seen in that light—above and beyond the ordinary modes of experience in day-to-day life.
Let’s be careful not to forget the experience and discovery of transcendence as an important mode of being in contemporary life—perhaps now more than ever. Even Thoreau, however, both lamented the qualities of modern life and also found a type of perverse beauty and transcendence in the way the (then new) railroad cut across the landscape so harshly in the distance, much in the way that modern cities scar and foul the landscape while also containing their own charm and new forms of transcendence to be found within them. Don’t let our modern and contemporary lifestyle and concerns be a barrier to finding true transcendence. Either find time away from modern distractions and cares to find time for genuinely transcendent experiences on the outskirts of life (in which there is a danger of mere escapism, which would missing the point of seeking out genuinely transcendent experiences) or somehow manage to cultivate transcendence and transcendent experiences within and among your day-to-day routine (as Thoreau does in planting, growing, and cooking his own food). But, most importantly, if you have never yet experienced transcendence, find it at all costs! If you have never experienced anything you would describe as genuinely transcendent, you are missing out on one of the true marvels of human awareness and experience.
Let’s not breed transcendence out of ourselves and deprive our descendants of the experience of transcendence in these practical and data-driven times. The most important experiences of life—of nature, of reality, and of each other—defy description and quantification; they are experienced, either alone (as in the woods or in your own meditations) or with others (as in great sex or great conversation), and they cannot be adequately described or verbalized. But they can be cultivated and sought out purposefully, deliberately, and intentionally, as Thoreau suggests:
I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived. I did not wish to live what was not life, living is so dear; nor did I wish to practise resignation, unless it was quite necessary. I wanted to live deep and suck out all the marrow of life, to live so sturdily and Spartan-like as to put to rout all that was not life, to cut a broad swath and shave close, to drive life into a corner, and reduce it to its lowest terms, and, if it proved to be mean, why then to get the whole and genuine meanness of it, and publish its meanness to the world; or if it were sublime, to know it by experience, and be able to give a true account of it in my next excursion. (Thoreau, Walden, “Where I Lived and What I Lived For”)
In short, transcendence isn’t just something you learn about or read about; transcendence (and transcendentalism) is something to be lived and experienced—deep down in the marrow of your own life and in your own experiences, deliberately, and in the ways that matter most to you.
For Further Reading:
Walden; Or, Life in the Woods by Henry David Thoreau
