Quotes about Self-transcendence

The sense of being somebody special (a legend in our own mind!) helps immunize “I” against the bare facticity of its own mortality, here-and-now instability, and innate insubstantialness.

Even when “I” dreams of transcending itself - as in those programs that have (or advertise) as their central agenda the eradication of ego - it is still an “I” who has now achieved the incomparable goal of self-transcendence! “Look, Ma, no ego!” we announce as we unicycle past our rapt inner audience, too proud to notice our pride, forgetting that self-conceit persists well into advanced transpersonal stages of development.

In our craving to be somebody special - and don't forget that we may find our specialness through being “nobody” - we bypass exploration of that very craving, committing far more of our passion to fulfilling our dreams than to actually awakening from them.

-Robert Augustus Masters, Darkness Shining Wild, p.58

As always, the illusion of self-transcendence is far more facile and available than self-transcendence itself:  in the vast majority of cases what human consciousness opens up to is merely a more encompassing form of finitude (another captivating illusion or delusion).

Your self-transcendence-goal
Is not something
That you have to achieve.
It was already given to you long ago
By your Beloved Supreme.
You have only to believe it.
You have only to receive it.

KW:  Fred's first criticism had to do with the four drives of any holon.  In SES, I listed these as agency (horizontal individuation) and communion (horizontal linking), and self-transcendence (vertically moving up) and self-dissolution (vertically moving down).  Fred pointed out that the first three drives were, correctly, the healthy version of those drives; but for the fourth drive, I had incorrectly given the pathological version of the descending drive.  The healthy downward drive -- the drive of the higher to embrace and enfold the lower, which I call agape or compassion, or what might be called self-immanence (the dialectical opposite of self-transcendence) -- I actually gave as thanatos, which is not the embrace of the lower by the higher but the dissolution or regression of the higher to the lower.  When it came to vertically moving upward, I had correctly given that as Eros or self-transcendence, seeking out higher and wider wholeness.  The pathological version of Eros is phobos, which is not the transcendence of the lower but the repression of the lower.  But when it came to vertically moving downward, instead of giving the healthy agape -- where the higher embraces, enfolds, and "loves" the lower, as a molecule embraces its atoms -- I inadvertantly gave the pathological thanatos, where the higher merely dissolves into the lower, dies or decomposes (e.g., the molecules dissipate into their constitutive atoms).  So the four drives should be agency and communion, and self-transcendence and self-immanence (not self-dissolution).

This is a brilliant criticism, and of the hundreds of thousands of people who went over those ideas, only Fred spotted it.  (Incidentally, I still sometimes list the fourth drive as self-dissolution, simply because that is so much easier to understand in an introductory statement.  But my actual position should now be clear, thanks to Fred...