What is Transcendence? the term covers a wide range imprecisely defined and overlapping believes, feelings, attitudes and states, including religious faith, mysticism, exaltation and joy, ecstasy, jest and delight, on down to humble enthusiasm and absorption, and then right down to drinking a pitcher of margaritas and dancing on the table on Saturday night.
The common factor in various forms of the feeling is escape from the self - and this can range from a spiritual desire to loose yourself in God to a more materialistic desire to get out of your head at weekends. The paradox is that the most intense experience of the self is loose of the self. This is why transcendence states have to be short lived. Being out of your head is fun but not practical - and the longer you stay out of the harder it is to get back in. So, the more intense the experience, the shorter the duration low level loss of self in absorption can last for hours. Ecstasy is sadly brief, proponents of tantric sex may disagree.
Transcendence is important because it seems to be necessary to escape every now and then from the burden of self consciousness. Even the earliest cultures sort to escape. In "Primitive" societies around the world there were remarkably similar rituals involving face painting and group dancing to rhythmic accompaniment. Complicated circle and line dances were specially common - and it is heartening to know that, when my in laws have one of their "big nights" culminating in the hokey-cokey and a conga, I am participating in a ritual at least 10000 years old. Western observers of the primitive dances were often alarmed by what they interpreted as abandonment and frenzy intended to work up a mood for orgeies but most of the rituals were carefully planned, tightly disciplined, chaste and took place only at certain periods in the calendar as a reward for community endeavour. Primitive cultures understood that there were no easy, free highs. The ecstatic that is to be learned and earned.
In Europe this ritual ecstasy persisted into the carnivals of the middle ages but was ruthlessly suppressed by both calvinism and counter - reformation. Dancing, originally a group practice, diminished to an activity for couples in the nineteenth century and by the late twentieth century was almost entirely a solo performance. Now you have to become your own shaman and invent your own shamanic dance.
In the modern world theistic religion became the acceptable form of transcendency - and when this faded in the twentieth century there was the secular religion of international socialism but it has become increasingly difficult to believe in a paradise above the world or a Utopia ahead of it,
