Freedom - That's what transcendence is. It is also the true human nature.
Transcendence is what defines a human being and what separates humans from animals.
Transcendence is the unique human ability to rise above automatic reactions to external factors and find causality inside. I am not talking about reason here or will control by reason, which in most cases is just a more complex form of conditioned reaction to the exterior, but about a completely inner source of motivation. I am not talking about "high ideals" either, which would be used to artificially "transcend" lower passions. I am talking about the fundamental principle of inner causality in relation to all contents, feelings and energies.
Transcendence is the emancipated consciousness which has reached such level of developpement that it can see itself as the cause and doesn't serve as a simple relay to conditioning anymore.
Transcendence is the Real Self. Not the self defined by relationships with the exterior, but the self defined by the fully conscious principle animating the psychophysical system. It is the union between the consciousness and the energy, the active principle animating this system, it is not just conditioned reactions to the exterior.
Many, if not most people define themselves in relation to the exterior, they are defined by their reactiveness to the exterior. Our true transcendent nature is the consciousness of ourselves as completely free from such external definitions.
The transcendent principle, and this is very important, is acting as the source of ANY activity, even the conditioned ones (in that case, just as a relay). This principle is the VERY NATURE of the human nervous system, as a system of information that has reached such level that that it can become aware of itself, emancipated from the usual externally related CONTENTS conditioning its reactions.
Transcendence is not something remote, it is natural to humans, their most basic nature.
Humans are naturally in search of a "meaning" - which is the attempt to define themselves at a deeper level than just animal reactions to the external world (even if they tend to project that "meaning" outside of themselves). It is the attempt of the nervous system posessing a transcendent capacity and nature to realise that potential and position itself above all the contents, stimuli and energies felt inside the system.
This attempt is natural to human beings simply because of the level reached by the system of information represented by the nervous system. It has this ability and tendency to rise above its contents and observe levels of contents and relationships from above, from the position of supremacy of the transcendent consciousness in relation to its contents.
Transcendence is biologically given to humans. It is simply the consequence of the level of developpement.
As the biological nature of our nervous system, transcendence tends naturally to realise itself. It is the principle behind all the attempts by the nervous system to "make sense" of the world and particularly of itself in relation to the stimuli of the world.
What is called "realisation" is the realisation of the freedom of causality INSIDE the nervous system, that it has its own causality, not just serving as a relay to conditioned reactions like before. It is the realisation of oneself as freedom of our nervous system from conditioning contents and from the conditioned energies by these contents (our "animal" side). These conditioned energies, this reactive self is what developped before the full conscious realisation of the True Self and Priciple. They must be eventually integrated, reapsorbed in the transcendent self, once it is realised. This "residual Karma" must be integrated by the realised sooner or later.
In practice, the attempts of the nervous system to realise its transcendent potential are manifested in a search for "meaning". Unfortunately, for various reasons (that could be discussed but are inessential for the purpose of this text), in most cases "meaning" is connected to external things, situations, conditions. People find "meaning" in their work, family, children, beliefs etc.
There is nothing wrong with that, as it is a way to rise above the animal self, the purely reactional conditioned structure and create a transcendent consiousness that rises above concrete physical reactivity and gives an integrated perspective and "meaning" to concrete aspects of life. Such "meanings" are in effect in contact with the True Self as their motivation comes (unconsciously) from the Self percieved by itself, not petty conditionings. It is an idiosyncratic way, the nervous system has found to rise above this feeling af claustrophobia inside a network of conditioned reactivity, to escape its narrow animal prison.
To put it simply, causality has rised to a higher level, not the level of desintegrated conditioned reactions but an abstract inner causality that governs all concrete aspects of life, as a "meaning".
Still, the full realisation of the transcendent self, the dinamic principle behind and above all contents, reactions and energies, is not realated to any content. It is the realisation of the essential ability of the system itself to be free in relation to its contents. It is the awareness of the true free creative neture of the system in relation to any of its contents.
It is said that God governs his creation, which means that the True Transcendent Self - the realised, self aware principle of the system is the master of all of its contents and that no content has the power to define it or condition it.
This doesn't mean of course that the realised cannot work, have a family, love etc. It simply means that all of his or her activities are recognised to come from the true meaning inside, the True Transcendent Principle, and meaning is not created by the activities themselves.
Activities are a manifestation of the meaning inside, the True Self. Love is the creation, the manifestation of our deepest human nature, our true human spirit.
SOCIAL DIMENSIONS
In the modern society, the idea of a real meaning, existing independently from personal beliefs and perceptions of individuals is not very popular. Such idea of objectively existing meaning or Truth is rejected by dominant liberalist, postmodernist intellectual streams.
The reason is that the idea of "Truth" is historically connected to religions, which for these intellectuals seem to be idiosyncratic, culturally, socially, economically... defined sets of rules, not something representing any kind of objective truth or meaning of life.
Religions are idiosyncratic, but what are they? Are they just more or less arbitrary socially conditioned sets of rules and beliefs?
Not at all. What is in the real core of religions is a cultural attempt to articulate our inner transcendent human nature!
The objective TRUTH of religions is in US, in our biological nature, in the transcendent principle of the human nervous system!
This truth is not relative, it is simply a level of developpement in a system of information that has reached the treshold from which animality (as defined previously) is transcended. Human cultures have always attempted to define, to articulate this true fundamental human nature, but have done so by projecting it into the external world. Because of that, such attempts were idiosyncratic in the sense that they got many characteristics related to the external world at the time they appeared and were therefore often perverted in various ways.
Unfortunately, because the fundamental core behind all religions totally escaped to present days intelligentsia, they are rejected.
The hidden dimensions of those systems of beliefs and values, which are prescientific attempts to articulate our transcendent biological nature passed way above the heads of modern intellectuals.
By rejecting the idea of truth itself, because of nonfundamental prescientific relative elements of the systems (religions) promoting the idea of a truth, those intellectuals have metaphorically "thrown away the baby with the water".
Some would probably say that transcendence is not our basic nature, just a function of the intellect, a superstructure standing on a "lizard's brain". They would say that our real nature i underneath and made of instincts.
Not so, The nature of of the psychophysical system is the level that it has reached as a whole.
The nature of the system is the structure of organisation that it has achieved, not the elements that were used.
It is the general structural organisation of the whole that determines the meaning and the nature of the subfunctions incorporated in the whole.
For an animal, we say that its nature is instinctual, but not because instincts would be some discrete components amalgamated together and that we would have also inherited as such, unchanged. The animal nature is instinctual because of the level of developpement of the whole of their psychophysical systems. Their functions of relationship with the exterior can only be instinctual and conditioned more or less automatic reactive responses because the whole of their system is not capable of more. The system is not sufficiently developped for much more than reactive functions, it is unable to integrate functions of relation into an inner causality of the system transcending concrete relations.
For Humans, the biological potential of integration is such that it allows the system to integrate all of its functions into a causality proper to the system as a whole, therefore transcending the reactive, conditioned causality of animal responses. This potential is our nature because it represents a structural jump in comparison to the purely reactive systems and it changes the meanig of all the reactive functions present in lowers systems.
The potential of a being is its nature. If we develop ourselves at a level that is beneath our true structural potential, we didn't realise our nature.
Those who think that our nature is still instinctual and animal think statically. Like in the simple case of a triangle where when one changes the value of one angle, it necessarily changes the value of another angle, the change in the level of developpement of the wholeness of the nervous system changes the nature of the components/functions of that system. In fact those functions take their causality from the basic causality underlying the whole itself.
In the case of humans this causality is transcendent in relation to the functions it has under its control, it transcends them.
In an animal these functions are reactive and conditioned because it is the best the system as a whole can do, their reactiveness corresponds to the level of developement of their systems and we call those functions instincts. They cannot be integrated into something higher because there is nothing higher. In a system where there is a higher general integration, functions recieve their nature from that higher organisation of the whole, they are not just the same old components inherited from animals.
Critics may ask why, if human nature is transcendent, so many people demonstrate conditioned and reactive behaviour, animal behaviour.
Indeed it seems that many people just follow "instincts", so many in fact that it would seem reasonable to assume that our very nature is still instinctual.
To understand that, it is necessary to remember that in humans almost all potentials need the cultural factor to develop and manifest. Without the cultural factor they just remain potentials. For example the function of speach and more generally language. No one would say that it is not in our biological nature, however if they are not taught language, humans don't develop it by their own.
Biology and culture go hand in hand in human beings, they evolve together. What we inherit is biological potentials, and those potentials are our very nature, but they won't develop without the other necessary half of the picture, which is culture. The potentials of a human being are the nature of that human being, the potentials of a dog are the nature of that dog.
So what is the cultural correlate of our transcendent biological potential then? It must exist, since biology and culture go hand in hand...
Well it does, it is present in religions and value systems.
Religions are not, like many seem to think, just some idiosyncratic, irrational beliefs about the universe, they have a much more important function, they contain the cultural correlate of our true nature, of our transcendent biological potential.
Religions are, in what is the most important about them, the prescientific attempt to culturally articulate our true nature. The cultural factor needed to activate and realise the true transcendent nature of our nervous system is hidden in them. They, and any systems of value are the ones that contained the implicit cultural code for being human, the necessary complement of the biological code.
Unfortunately evolution is idiosyncratic, biologically but also culturally. Religions and traditional systems of value project our nature in the outside world, they model our nature into symbols in the external world and because of this the external world and conceptions about it influenced in a large measure the cultural systems (religions) that are the vessels of the compementary cultural factor for the biological transcendent nature.
So the cultural expression of our biology was very often contaminated with elements that were limiting it and even degrading it or perverting it, but somehow, it always managed to survive because it was contained implicitely in certain sets of values corresponding to fundamental biological characteristics. Our highest human values all need transcendence to function even if they are not a pure explicit and scientific articulation of it. They develop the biological potential of transcendence
Unfortunately again, in this new scientific era, some would like us to believe that we don't have a human nature (in the traditional sense of a true "human" being") just because the cultural systems containing references to the idea of human values, morality etc., are idiosyncratic, full of irrational, contradictory elements etc. They reject the fruit because they don't like how it looks. Had they peeled it they would have found its nourishing part.
Such people say that we don't have any fundamental human nature that would determine the value of our acts. They say that we are just glorified animals, different in degree but not in fundamental structural nature. As we have seen, this is completely wrong.
So, back to the original question. Why are so many humans exhibiting animal types of behaviour? Now that we have understood the role of the cultural factor, it becomes clear.
Because the transcendent integrative nature is there as a potential but almost uncapable of realising itself without culture. If culture lacks the necessary elements, the system will not realise its transcendent potential and never realise the transcendence of its causality as a whole, which surpasses automatic reactions to the exterior. If this potential is not developed, then the whole system will be in a very similar situation as in an animal, therefore the causality will fall back on the lower lever of conditioned reactivity, not the free transcendent causality. The system will not develop to be fully human as it is its potential and true nature.
What is the real problem? The problem is that traditional cultural systems are idiosynchratic. They are very limited in their flexibility, they are ossified. The human trenscendent element in them is glued into certain limited nonfundamental external forms. These cultural forms contain the transcendent element implicitely and not explicitely, that is their problem. The transcendent element is hidden in external forms.
So when external conditions change, a cultural form that was more or less achieving its transcendent function becomes obsolete and cannot be used anymore.
These external changes endangering the transcendent element in cultural systems did not appear only once in history, they happen all the time. However because of its implicitness it has managed to always survive in general human values that structurally need a biologically transcendent system.
The last challenge is by far the most important. Modern society doesn't like implicit things. Science is explicit and all things that are idiosynchratic are rejected.
Because of the irrational form of cultural elements representing human values, morality etc. these values themselves tend to be considered as nonfundamental, completely relative and conditioned by historic conditions. Those who think like that failed to see the fundamental core of those cultural systems, the nature they are trying to articulate. They failed to see that values dont have their most fundamental souce in arbitrary historical economic and social conditions and forms of social organisation but that their source is the transcendent biological nature of human beings.
The present most serious degradation of the transcendent content of culture is what is causing such massive fall back to the animal level. It is the far worst because it seems rational, scientific. That's the reason why time has come to finally explicitely articulate our transcendent nature and incorporate it in culture in such explicit scientific form.
CONCLUSION
So, is that all? Is it just the nervous system? Just biology? No ESP? No spirits? No God? No transcendent reality beyond the physical body?
Well... Maybe there is... But whatever the reality may be on those matters, if you do not become aware of yourself, those things can often be counterproductive. Whatever transcendence there is "outside", you can only fully realise it by realising the transcendence you feel in yourself. Then maybe you will realise that it is the same one.