Transcendence
So, as we begin our love affair, we will eventually need to understand how one moves past infatuation. If we don’t understand how to deepen the relationship beyond mere ‘awe and wonder’, then the novelty wears off and we may be left with what has been called the dark night of the soul1.
Infatuation is distinguished from love in that it is selfish and, as such, ultimately about service to the needs of the ego. When we experience the rush and the thrill of awe and wonder, we are beholding something outside the ego - something larger than ourselves. But our desire for, and attraction to, that thrill is as ego-based as lust for sex, money, power, fame, or cake.
Awe and wonder is not a bad thing. It should never be absent from our spirituality because it is an accurate perception of profound truths that should be moving. It is also an important source of epiphany and encouragement toward further exploration and practice. But it is simply not synonymous, necessarily, with making the kind of informed spiritual progress that will be ultimately transformative.
While infatuation is selfish, true love is selfless. It should be no surprise then that the key to extending spirituality beyond awe and wonder is in expanding beyond the concerns of the mere ego. In the Mulberry Path, this expansion is called transcendence.
Another way to describe the ego is your concept of self. Consider the drives of self preservation that emerge within a ‘self’. This powerful drive forms the foundation or trunk of an entire tree of goals and subgoals upon which organisms act in, and respond to, the world.
As a sentient being, you are capable of understanding that these instinctive and deep-seated drives evolved over time. They are so powerful because, generation after generation, those organisms that did not have survival as a goal simply died off. After billions of years, the only organisms left are those which placed survival at the most powerful core of their operating systems.
Unfortunately, simple intellectual knowledge of this truth isn’t enough to escape the power of its spell upon us. We feel the hunger, the craving, and desire for everything that is perceived to contribute to our self preservation. And we also feel the pleasure, delight, and satiation of obeying it. This is the ever-present lizard brain we carry with us2.
But nearly all of us have also witnessed, in others or perhaps even ourselves, times when these drives have been transcended. Simple willpower can overcome them for a time, but asceticism is not the way of the Mulberry Path3. True transcendence of these ego drives is when no brute force of will is required to suppress or overpower them. Rather, we have entered into a place - a state of mind - where we simply felt something else instead. There was an ease and calm to it.
Part of the Mulberry Path approach to transcendence is inspired by what the ancient Stoics called oikeiôsis. This has been translated as affiliation, appropriation, or affinity among other terms. It is the association of something as one’s own.
Remember earlier in Virtue & Vice the idea of the moral-rational being. It was the survival of the moral-rational being, rather than mere biological survival, which was the aim. Rather than fight the powerful instinct of self-preservation, the Stoics sought to recenter our idea of what the ‘self’ is.
Imagine a series of concentric circles, like the target board on a game of darts. The innermost circle is the most common/basic idea of self. The next circle out from there is our closest family and loved ones. The next layer out contains acquaintances we admire or like. Further out are strangers, enemies, and all other beings. As our sense of self expands, we incorporate others under our tent such that the survival imperative begins to apply to their well-being too4.
But how does this concept of the moral-rational being or expanding self co-exist with the Aggregate Self, where we described the very notion of self as illusory? How can we expand that which doesn’t even exist in the first place? Is the path to enlightenment dissolution of the self, or expansion of the self? What may seem to be incompatible approaches to self between Buddhism and Stoicism, are actually two complementary aspects that reinforce and make possible each part of this process.
If the Buddhist concept of no-self (the Aggregate Self) were not true - if the self were a concrete existing thing - then it would not be possible to consider the self to be something else: a moral-rational being rather than simply an animal. It would not be possible to expand our sense of self.
It is the very subsisting nature of the Aggregate Self, and the very fact that its solid unchanging and centralized character is illusory, which makes it possible to consider a new concept of self. Not only a concept but, through applied practice over time, a new deeply and intuitively accepted perspective on self, which transforms the kind of being we are and makes flourishing possible.
In this way, that seat of “who and what I am” begins to shift. My sense of self is reseated further and further from the lizard brain, into higher brain areas where larger concepts can be related to and identified with more intimately. This is the path to transcendence.
Thus, transcendence is not a single miraculous event. It is a flux of experiences we move into and out of at times we are ready. We get small occasional glimpses of it, and sometimes overwhelming profound experience of it. Over time, with spiritual practice, we can more often experience transcendence more consistently. An extreme few of us will ever transcend the ego with perfection - if that is even possible. But fortunately, perfection in transcendence is not a requirement of the Mulberry Path. Transcending the ego is simply an element that helps us in the journey.
I have been teasing the ways many of these concepts can transform by saying the methods will be explained later. An outline of many Spiritual Naturalist practices has been reserved for the last part of this book for a reason. If one does not understand why the practices are structured as they are, why we do them, or what effects they are designed to have, then they will only feel like more ‘empty theater’. And, indeed, without full understanding and ‘buy-in’ to those ends, the practices and rituals would actually be empty and ineffectual. That is why so much of the theory comes first.
There is still a little more important theory to cover before we get to the practices so bear with me. In the rest of this part we will go into what ethics means in this practice, as well as the role and nature of compassion. We will also examine what spiritual transformation should look like. And then, before beginning on practice specifics, we will wrap up with an explanation of spiritual community and how all of this connects to the world.