I believe that the world will be a better place when more people practice ST rather than the egotistic pursuit of material success. Here is a general portrait of ST personified: In his daily interactions, he consistently places his concern for others above self-interest. He is willing to forfeit his rights for the common good. He works tirelessly and cheerfully because he loves what he does and believes that his work is consistent with his end-value and life purpose.
I admit that ST is a hard sell in an individualistic society. But the intensive competition to achieve the American Dream can take a toll for individuals and society Whippman, , and the alternative path of ST may result in better mental health for individuals and a more sustainable development for society.
I challenge researchers to systematically investigate the adaptive benefits of ST. Meanwhile, I want to leave these thoughts with you for your reflection:. A paradoxical way to become your best. International Journal of Existential Psychology and Psychotherapy, 6 1.
Transcendence (religion)
Introduction I propose that the way to become your best self is, paradoxically, to become more selfless. May I suggest that you entertain the following ideas, which represent an alternative way for personal growth: You need to lose yourself in order to find yourself. It is more blessed to give than to receive. Do not ask what you can get from life, but ask what you can give to You must be willing to deny yourself in order to serve something greater than yourself.
Viktor Frankl that convey the same idea regarding ST: A Dramatic Example of Self-Transcendence A Korean drama began with the main character complaining to his best friend in prison on the day of their release: In short, his best friend challenged him with the following questions: The Crowning Achievement of Evolution Haidt, In other words, there is some scientific evidence that ST is a part of our genetic heritage More importantly, Haidt also argues that ST provides the path of experiencing ecstasy and awe.
Figure 1 Staircase to self-transcendence. A Personality Trait Cloninger et al. Spiritual Care for Dying Patients Reed, ST represents the reality of individuals who enter the end-of-life stage, when the physical world fades away and the transcendental spiritual reality looms large for dying patients.
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A Value Orientation Schwartz, , Through his extensive cross-cultural research, Schwartz , discovered that there are ten types of universal values: These ten values can be organized into four broader value categories according to two bi-polar dimensions openness to change vs. A Primary Motivation Frankl, Frankl conceptualizes ST as a primary spiritual motivation that stems from our spiritual nature; it seeks to express itself through our striving towards something greater than ourselves.
Concluding Discussion The above brief review provides empirical support for the adaptive advantages of ST and, at the same time, challenges the misconception of the self as an isolated entity closed in skin. Meanwhile, I want to leave these thoughts with you for your reflection: The paradoxical way of ST offers the best chance to survive and prosper as an individual and society. Take care good care of yourself and develop your potential for the common good. The toughest mind is equipped with a meaning mindset because it can remain positive and hopeful even when everything seems bleak. There is no failure or defeat when you are willing to lose everything in order to achieve a worthy life calling.
The spirit of man: The contribution of traits, values, and self-efficacy beliefs. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology , 6 , The development and implementation of life education in Taiwan: A meaning-centered positive education. A psychobiological model of temperament and character.
Jonathan Haidt: Religion, evolution, and the ecstasy of self-transcendence | TED Talk
Archives of general psychiatry , 50 12 , Religion, evolution, and the ecstasy of self-transcendence. How faith is hardwired into our genes. The farther reaches of human nature. The role of self-transcendence: Research in Gerontological Nursing , 6 3 , The structure of interpersonal traits: Journal of Personality and Social Psychology , 56 4 , The biology of transcendence: A blueprint of the human spirit. Preferences for spiritually related nursing interventions among terminally ill and nonterminally ill hospitalized adults and well adults. Applied Nursing Research , 4 3 , Universals in the content and structure of values: Theoretical advances and empirical tests in 20 countries.
Advances in Experimental Social Psychology , 25 , Are there universal aspects in the structure and contents of human values?
Journal of Social Issues , 50 4 , Theory of basic human values [Image]. Cumulatively, the name implies wonder at the Divine Light eliminating spiritual darkness. It might also imply, "Hail the Lord whose name eliminates spiritual darkness. Sikh doctrine identifies one panentheistic god Ek Onkar who is omnipresent and has infinite qualities, whose name is true Satnam , can do anything Karta purkh , has no fear Nirb hau , is not the enemy of anyone Nirvair , is beyond time Akaal , has no image Murat , is beyond birth and death circulation Ajunee , is self-existent Sai Bhang and possesses the grace of word guru eternal light we can meet him Gurprasaad.
Sikhs do not identify a gender for Ek Onkar, nor do they believe it takes a human form. In the Sikh tradition, all human beings are considered equal regardless of their religion, sex, or race. All are sons and daughters of Waheguru, the Almighty. Vahanian argued that modern secular culture had lost all sense of the sacred, lacking any sacramental meaning, no transcendental purpose or sense of providence.
He concluded that for the modern secular mind "God is dead", but he did not mean that God did not exist. In Vahanian's vision a transformed post-Christian and post-modern culture was needed to create a renewed experience of deity. Paul Van Buren and William Hamilton both agreed that the concept of transcendence had lost any meaningful place in modern secular thought. According to the norms of contemporary modern secular thought, God is dead. In responding to this denial of transcendence Van Buren and Hamilton offered secular people the option of Jesus as the model human who acted in love.
The encounter with the Christ of faith would be open in a church-community. Altizer offered a radical theology of the death of God that drew upon William Blake , Hegelian thought and Nietzschean ideas. He conceived of theology as a form of poetry in which the immanence presence of God could be encountered in faith communities. However, he no longer accepted the possibility of affirming his belief in a transcendent God.
Altizer concluded that God had incarnated in Christ and imparted his immanent spirit which remained in the world even though Jesus was dead. It is important that such ideas are understood as socio-cultural developments and not as ontological realities. As Vahanian expressed it in his book, the issue of the denial of God lies in the mind of secular man, not in reality. The school of the theology of the "Requiem of God," not even implementing a "Requiem for Satan," will constitute only a footnote to the history of theology.
This however occurs when God's transcendence is expressed as elevated over the world to the exclusion of his presence in this world; when his independence is expressed by excluding his real relation and reaction to the world; or when we insist upon his unchangeable eternity to the exclusion of his real partnership in human history. From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.
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August Learn how and when to remove this template message. This section needs expansion. You can help by adding to it. The following 'border posts' may be noted in the Christian religion. The cardinal one is the birth of Christ, the opening through which God entered the world to dwell amongst humans.
Later miracles increasingly became openings for communication with God, along with prayer and the working of the Spirit. But cross-border traffic is two-way. Religiously a frontier is an in-between zone 8 where opposing forces meet. It can also be called a zone of revelation, a place of encounter, a causal joint, the between 'zwischen' or the hinge. The revelation is usually described subjectively: God appears in a vision or dream Jacob's ladder linking 'heaven' and 'earth' , a Damascus experience Paul.
The person assigns an 'ordinary' experience extraordinary meaning and expresses the pivotal experience in appropriate images: From the human side of the pivotal point the transcendent or supernatural first has to be revealed, then encountered, understood and interpreted, otherwise no revelation takes place. From the divine side there is self-revelation incarnation of the Godhead, as in a burning bush, historical event, Jesus, the Word Logos or the Spirit.
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But even in incarnate form the deity still has to be 'different' and radically different at that, otherwise it remains a purely human affair. Examples are his flouting of human laws by consorting with social outcasts and showing forgiveness, empathy and love that flew in the face of the conventions of his day.
These are perfectly ordinary responses, whose rarity displays transcendent features. It implies that ordinary human thought and behaviour can accommodate the transcendent. The divine manifests itself in and through love, hope, faith, compassion, forgiveness, vision, interaction with others.
Consequently, transcendence does not fall flat when it manifests itself in normal human guise but offers a 'different' dimension. In fact, transcendence wholly divorced from humanness is inconceivable. Yet to modern people God's 'traditional way' of revealing himself and encountering humans is problematic: Nowadays many people want these frontiers of encounter to be shifted.
We now turn to theological attempts to do justice to the transcendent side of immanent theophanies and experiences of the divine. The Old Testament world view saw humans as restricted beings, as is evident in the creation stories. Hence they did not have the 'offensive' character they have today and were simply signs of the presence of God's love and his faithfulness to his people. The Old Testament contains numerous examples of how God manifests himself in normal human events, giving them new meaning. He is a god of promises who gives his word covenant to humankind.
He is the god of history who journeys with them through life. Although in essence he remains transcendent and no image may be made of him, he enters into human life. God is the one source of all transcendence. In his transcendence total otherness he is unknowable. Humans cannot ascend to him: When God reveals himself it is often an overwhelming event that completely stuns human beings. There is an absolute divide between humanity mendax and God verax , which inevitably leads to paradoxes. God's revelation does not divulge the mystery of his being.
It is at most an emanation of the Absolute Plotinus , which by analogy tells us something about his grandeur or otherness, for revelation does not reveal his essence deus nudus. Revelation is the revelation of hiddenness Berkhof. The transcendent remains a deus absconditus.
In theology the question of God's transcendence has two focuses. Viewed from our side, humans must strive to know and encounter the unknowable which includes the dialectical inversion: Viewed from the other side it is a matter of how God acts in the world. In the history of religions the principal filters have crystallised in language in the form of metaphors, analogies and symbols; 12 exegetical filters in the form of proofs of God's existence and apophatic theologies; experiential filters in the form of rituals, rites and sacraments; the filter of mysticism; Christian dogmatic filters according to which God can only be approached via the faith, Jesus and Mary.
The filters are unavoidably marked by some form of dualism, because the human and the divine are on opposite sides. The human side hinges on the divine side in a process where we look at one reality the earthly one whilst seeing and experiencing something else the transcendent. That is Heidegger's distinction between earth and the world that it opens up Welt und Erde.
From the earth matter of an artwork a meaningful world is born. That is achieved by the metaphor,. Hence the way God is seen, known and encountered is simply one of seeing ourselves and our existence in a new light. All true knowledge about human beings starts with 'knowledge' of God. But all knowledge about God is nothing but 'new' knowledge about human beings. God does not reveal mystery, he sheds light on it. That is why frontiers of encounter and understanding have to be shifted.
When religious conceptions become fossilised because the world view in which they once made sense is now archaic, the medium of encounter between transcendence and immanence must change.
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That is partly attributable to science and the rediscovery of our 'divine' nature, which not only microcosmically mirrors the macrocosm, but in its mortal fragility also carries our consciousness of infinity. Religion based on metaphysical, noumenal attributes of God is vacuous.
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What do we mean by God's omnipresence, omniscience, eternity, omnipotence? These categories are beyond our comprehension and are best avoided. There are many examples of new perceptions of these 'filters' in theology. The accent is on the human incarnated God; the kenotic Jesus; the suffering God who journeys with us through history including the history of natural evolution. The accumulation of metaphysical luggage is to be found in the Christ of religion, not the historical Jesus.
In that way human compassion, concern, forgiveness and prayer acquire a transcendent character. But that transcendent dimension is never guaranteed, or it would no longer be transcendence. The second focus is how to see God's actions in the world. That is particularly problematic in our time, because people are no longer at home with miracles and divine acts that arbitrarily contravene the laws of nature.
All that started changing by the 15th century with the scientific revolution. I shall deal with it in the section on transcendence in the sciences. Ever since Greek antiquity philosophy has played a decisive role in erecting frontiers, whether between gods and humans, between humans and the world, between truth and falsehood or between good and evil. The influence of Plato, 22 neo-Platonism and Gnosticism on Christianity and the early fathers is well known. Philosophy accompanied the scientific revolution and helped to establish modernism and, in our time, postmodernism.
Although the focus eventually shifted to human beings as knowing subjects, the nature of knowledge and of metaphysical and empirical reality, philosophy determined theology throughout. In this section of the article, we concentrate on Kant, Hegel and Heidegger to follow the movement of metaphysics back to the immanent realm. Transcendence in philosophy is usually traced to Plato's realm of ideas, in which pure concepts or truths exist an sich , which we can only experience as imperfect reflections in this world.
His theory of ideas or forms like truth and the good represents an abstract, immutable, transcendent reality as opposed to the historical, earthly reality of mutability and transience. The underlying motive was to focus on the 'essence' of objects, purging them of subjective, human interpretations. Plato's notion of two worlds the ideal and the imperfect, earthly reality is dualistic.
Despite criticism, Kant's Copernican breakthrough was astounding. It established the knowing subject, confined by its mental structures. It is linked to the proposition of pure reason as a transcendent subject i. Kant shifted the focus from metaphysical issues about the nature of things noumenal metaphysics to the nature and limits of human reason. He criticised the metaphysical focus on 'pure objectivity' as dogmatic, for: Today philosophers have come to realise that the transcendent cannot be known, so they are 'redefining' both transcendence and philosophy: From this point of view, philosophy indeed succeeds in going beyond beings, but only in the direction of the 'what' of beings; thus, philosophy can in no way deal with that which absents itself absolutely.
It must be the case that certain 'realities' whatever their exact identity; it may have to do with being, or God, or the Other withdraw from all presence, that they be given only in this withdrawal. That brings us to the role of the negative, which is crucial in Hegel's thinking Nancy The transcendental approach, we all know, is a search for the a priori conditions for knowledge. To Kant the transcendent is that which excludes empirical experience.
Empirical study, as Hume indicated, leads to scepticism. As a rule our causal connections are unprovable. The aim was to put an end to metaphysical speculations e. Cartesian ones and establish philosophy on firm ground by determining what our cognitive structures are capable of and inquiring into their limitations. Often our thoughts exceed our perception.
How can we talk about things that are conceivable but not observable? To this end the transcendental ego has recourse to the brain's ability to create a meaningful picture or world by means of categories of thought or understanding. That makes synthetic, a priori judgment possible without falling prey to Hume's criticism of the causal connections we make. Heidegger puts it as follows: Synthetic judgements a priori are knowledge of this kind.
But for Kant this discovery is not the result of his investigation, but its beginning. How are such judgements possible? The point is that neither our ontological nor our pre-ontological knowledge is written on a blank slate but is bound up with human experiential history that is also implicit in language.
The question is whether in this sense God, too, should be regarded as a Ding an sich , a product of pure reason. Kant's postulate of practical reason God, freedom and immortality is no less a product of the transcendental ego pure reason than that of the Ding an sich. In this regard Janz Space does not permit me to delve more deeply into Kant's thinking, except to mention that he abstracts pure reason from humanness in its entirety, from the influence of language and empirical experience of the world that indirectly affects our ability to come up with noumenal notions.
No less important is his criticism of metaphysics, which seeks to prove truths about transcendent objects. Here we merely note that the operation of our cognitive faculties helps us to form ideas. But we need not, like Kant, abolish reason to make room for faith. That would make faith irrational and irrational faith is superstition. Rational faith does not make religion provable, but it does make it more plausible.
Regardless of criticism of Hegel's idealistic concept of the teleology of Spirit or mind thought , his insight into the dynamic, versatile interactions of the subject are important.
Hegel took on the challenge to 'bridge' the dualism between the transcendent and immanent realms in a unique manner by creatively incorporating negativity the unknown or foreign or transcendent into his thinking. Reason is the highest level of object-thinking. Its false initial assumption of a subject thinking, on one side, and an object alien to it and thought about, on the other side, is an untenable contradiction. In nature spirit is directly present, but it only realises that nature is its own creation when it 'comes home to itself'. Hegel puts it as follows: I am this battle, this living opposition in which the opposites are not external to one another, but are inseparably linked.
I am not only one of the fighters, but I am both and I am also the battle itself. It must mediate its immediacies in order to maintain its balance. The outcome of rationalism the operation of Verstand [intellect] as opposed to Vernunft [reason] is the creation of dualisms: They must be viewed together' Hegel The distinctions are meaningless. Another attribute of rationalism is that it objectifies things, handling metaphysical entities like God, world, spirit 'as if they were object-images Vorstellungen of given finished things' Hegel The faith of those who knew Jesus in the flesh only became active after his death.
Consequently sense perception as an access to reality is elevated to something else 'and the demand is that this latter should be attested' Hegel But this happens in a distinctive way, for now it concerns the senses per se, as well as sensory processes and their relation to the mind. Sensory contents are therefore replaced by mind Hegel What Hegel manages to do is to dispense with the supernatural or transcendent an sich. God becomes immanent in the mind. It remains at an earthly, natural, sensory level, but sensory contents are now marked by the activity and experience of mind in human consciousness.
Insofar as the ultimate Other is God Himself, I should risk the claim that it is the epochal achievement of Christianity to reduce its Otherness to Sameness: God Himself is Man, 'one of us'. If, as Hegel emphasizes, what dies on the Cross is the God of beyond itself, the radical Other, then the identification with Christ 'life in Christ' means precisely the suspension of Otherness. Spirit's mental process is identical with the dialectical dynamics of human thought. Consequently Hegel is able to integrate all dualisms, antitheses and the supernatural with the human mind.
Barth affirms this: It has been regarded as Hegel's greatest achievement that in his concept of reason, which also embraced historical reality, he finally and justifiably overcame the dualism of transcendental and historical-empirical thought, the dualism of the eternal truth of reason and the accidental truths of history, of destiny and the idea.