The Transcendental
Published 2017-01-19 on MindsClarifying misconceptions, and some metaphysical cynicism.
Transcendence.
The character of the transcendental is a breaking of rules and systems, a distinct separation from the effects and predicates present in most other affairs. It is irrational, illogical, defies encapsulation and description, is uncaused and uncausing, and is a metaphysical null element in every respect.
Anyone who tries to sell you a 'path to transcendence', writes out a long schpeel and qualitatively describes the end-state, is not only a liar but is contradicting the essential nature of the thing. Transcendence is not and cannot be bound up in rules or operating boundaries, with thresholds and mantles, or it immediately loses its particular character and becomes reified to a defined element. This is one of the fundamental revelations of Buddhist thought: definition by characteristics materializes a thing, and effectively makes it play the game. The transcendental explicitly doesn't play the game; it breaks the game. It looks on the game, its closed system of casual chains and operant interactions, and steps immediately outside them. A truly transcendental experience is one which bypasses dichotomies, escapes the touch of either element, and persists apart. Most tellingly, it surpasses the struggle of the sacred and the profane, and escapes the marring of perversion that we feel contaminate everything else we hold dear. Our ideas and pathologies do not stick to it, an academic cannot comprehend it, it cannot be categorized or serialized; it is like quicksilver to the mind. IF YOU CAN UNDERSTAND IT, IT ISN'T TRANSCENDENTAL.
Enlightenment.
It is very easy to believe under the constant saturation of woo these false ideas about liberation and attainment through meditation and applied consciousness, but if you pay attention to what those exercises actually teach and manifest, it isn't any of the propaganda. It's directly contrary, in most cases. Enlightenment delivers freedom, yes, but it isn't a happy thing. As a process, it's purely destructive, what in the West we could call deconstructive because we're pedantic fucks, and to a normal ego-intact person an extremely painful one characterized by separation and fear. It's a freedom that comes at the severe cost of all comfort, and there is no magical rainbow once you're there. What there is is actually a whole lot of emptiness. One learns through meditation to realize essential formlessness, nothingness, the ineffable nature of reality. Even the Buddhists themselves largely fail to reflect this fundamental understanding in their rhetoric; they talk about happiness and euphoria, but these are empty concepts that they don't believe in. What is more honest is perhaps to talk about peace, contentment, tranquility and liberation, things which might be felt upon apprehending the endless expanse of formlessness. Sadness, fear, pain, all of these would also be sensible emotions in light of the preceding destruction. But happiness? Only an idiot really believes the truth will pleasant. At best, it will be neutral and indifferent.
But this is the furthest point that can be reached by practice, by thought and dedicated meditation; this unmaking, blanking of the canvas. It is the last place we can reach logically, and the one we will always return to through any application of sufficient thought. Ask enough questions about anything, and it dissipates, becomes empty and nebulous; look too hard at an atom, and it becomes an inscrutable cloud. Time and time again, we come to the final horizon of formlessness, emptiness, omnipresent gray suspended indifferently between being and non-being, matter and void, light and dark, presence and absence. To picture it mentally involves an inherent license, but the closest we can get is to imagine a world of one sound, one colour, one touch and one name. To me, the ice plain, almost entirely white in ground and sky, with only the sound of the wind and the touch of the ground, is the best inadequate replica. It is a place which can be envisioned as the end to any journey, any path. Calm, empty, devoid of significance or meaning; it is the last place we can walk. If there is anything beyond, anything that emerges from the ice and cloud, in that state of boundless stillness, we cannot reach it logically; we cannot force its emergence or describe its nature. If there is something beyond the point where all characteristic and essence have been dissipated, then it must inherently be beyond these things too. There are no rules, no paths or guides to it, no guarantee of its presence or marker for its absence; if it exists it is unknowable. Perhaps it can be experienced sub-intellectually, but it cannot be retained, cannot be encoded into image and sound and language without sacrificing its transcendental character. It is, if it is, a definite phenomena of the present, which can exist in no other space. As it is impossible to demonstrate such a possibility, it is equivalently and reciprocally impossible to bar it. So perhaps such a thing exists, at the final extent. Perhaps it makes the enlightened masters happy, euphoric and kind. But it is impossible for them to understand that emotion, to attribute it, analyze it, or communicate it, and thus they shouldn't talk about it, as it may mislead novitiates. The fundamental realization, the metaphysical core, of Buddhism is emptiness, empty of moral character or ethics, no matter how high up the meditative ladder you go. Even if there is a legitimately transcendental core, some transcendental experience beyond transcending emptiness, it is certainly beyond distillation back to a knowable essence, let alone ethical precepts. So at the end of the day, Buddhist mores are simply a matter of opinion, of preference on most counts. A very palatable one, but not fundamentally apart.
Rules, schemes, systems, deliver to you nothing. If followed enough, resolved to their precepts, those precepts can be dissolved and the articles become empty. And what you're left with is capital-n Nothing. That's how you do meditative analysis. And that's what it gives you. If there's anything beyond that, there's no path to it.
Ineffability.
Let me repeat the words 'a definite phenomena of the present'. Foremost I urged against believing anyone who offers to sell a transcendental experience to you, or a map to one, as the transcendental exists in no definite relation to the mental, ordered realm; similarly, to position it as a future contigent is folly. The transcendental cannot be approached or approximated; it is a binary presence limited to the immediate experience. It arises spontaneously, instantaneously, persists for an uncertain span, then vanishes into the ether without regard for our intents or our designs. So intrinsically bound to the present is it that following any path, any direction, is immaterial to its occurence; anyone may feel it. It is not limited to the enlightened masters, or those who have internalized the formlessness of reality, and the most profane of men may chance upon its touch like blind lightning. To understand its separation, its nature in relation to the rest, requires wisdom, but such wisdom has no mark upon the experience itself, which is and must be intrinsically ungraspable, beyond knowledge or wisdom or any other affect of the mind. It is within the domain of no man to control or regulate, to host or to bar, least of all the prideful gnostics who cannot put aside their particular knowledge. It is one of the few legacies, the few ennoblers, common and open to all humanity, unique and exceptional in its own indefinite nature, its super-mental shadow.
There seems few greater farces than to believe something that exists inherently and definitively as a mystery, as an unknowable, is in some way bound up inside this or that riddle, a specific password or method. We know from the Buddhists that a process of transcendence is achievable through practice, in the negative sensation of the mind, but ultimately reaches only a world of indifference. The positive sensation of transcendence, if it exists, cannot be so achieved by any manner, occuring as an unpredictable phenomena, and unable to be placed even in retrospect. Equally empty of description, intellectual reality, as the negative sensation, formlessness, but with a tangible sensation upon the emotions, the sublimer tremors of man's unstructured faculties. To call something transcendental is to tacitly admit the impossibilty of description, knowledge of any sort, and to shrug at one's own place, and to perhaps exist in awareness of something truly beyond. Beyond language, beyond limitation, beyond time, beyond us. Beyond form.
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