2025-03-25

Transcendence is such a tough idea to crack. I match this desire to know and define it on my own terms first then looking at the available philosophies that already exist. This method allows me to present my own biases to myself, to examine first what my line of thinking tells me about myself, what I want to know, and the possible reasons why I want to know them. It helps me to better align myself first with my own relationship with the concept before I actually engage with how the world has defined it. It may be considered as the inverse tabula rasa method of learning where it would require me to understand what the world has said before I interpret what I want to know about what the world says to make my own definition.

Doing my own process of understanding concepts has allowed me to better situate them within the following aspects of my life: who I am, who I've been, who I want to be, and what these things tell me about who I am now. Admittedly, this is a truly self-centric approach because I take on the things that I know to be the starting point. Perhaps this is not the way for the initial attempt to philosophize the world. I can say that I am operating under the assumption that I am trying to unlearn what I know and unravel more clearly the underlying thoughts, motivations, and possible insecurities that surround my psyche.

Lately, all these ramblings about transcendence, transformation, human nature, and selfhood is triggered by my own relationship with my partner, my family, and with my relationship with God and godhood itself. I am going back once again to re-examine all these things in an attempt to grapple with the idea of freedom that surmounts my desire to break through my current understanding of all these relationships that I have established so far. I know that there is an interconnectedness among all these things that I am still blinded by.

Yet, as what yesterday's thought has told me, I am most likely dissatisfied by the definition of humanity as only being a transformative being within its own definition. A human can be various things but being trapped by that definition, it will still remain to be human. The path to transcendence reconciles this deadlock. But I am still unsure of the prerequisites and the outcomes that would entail that a transcendence has happened. The Christian cosmology is one that is founded on transcendence as God is separate from the World. The creator being separated from what is created. Transcendence lies in between those elements: between the creator and the created. My only hint in what must constitute transcendence to be a fact in this worldview is the occurrence of Jesus as the Incarnation. This entails that God has a process that enables Him to accomplish this transit: from divine to human. There must be a path, that is not a clear one but is most likely spiritual in nature, that allows humans to become god, or a part of god as well.

In the Scriptures, it is evident that this path is Jesus himself. And this path that we are talking about is a way of life by being Christlike. This encapsulates a particular way of living that covers ethical and philosophical grounds that must be practiced in the world and compounded by faith. This narrow path requires immense sacrifice of the self, emphasizing more of an individual's spiritual maturity, preceded by the mental and the physical. Yet, Christianity, as far as I am aware has provided this path. Buddhism's Nirvana opens a type of projection towards a "divine self" that one encounters through meditation that may show similarities with the Christian way of transcendence. With all of these mentioned, I think I might need to step back and evaluate these thoughts as I might lead myself astray. I must first validate these thoughts to see which align with the actual sources and then return with a better understanding of how transcendence, in this level works.