In order for the transcendent to be transcendent, it must be ‘outside’, but the self-evident self-sufficiency of the mundane world precludes this. Still, there are persistent traditions about and often personal longings for some ‘outside’ we can break out into or that breaks in on us. How should we think about this?
If there is a transcendent realm, it must be independent of the mundane; it must be different and not just in degree; and it must be separate, but not completely. The transcendent and mundane must be two realms in one universe, not a multiverse.
It won’t do to populate the transcendent with extrapolations of the mundane exemplars: hero to god; , or to derive the mundane from transcendent abstractions: archetypes to humans.
If both realms exist, then each must be other to the other, a persistent source of otherness, yet still matter to the other in some way, but not through uninvited or unwelcome interference. What the mundane lacks is point; what the transcendent lacks is particularity.
Pursuing what it is that is intrinsically worth wanting, what is its own point, has point. The mundane acknowledges nothing of non-relative, non-transitory value, so its landscape of meaning, considered on the broadest scale, is flat and featureless, no destinations more worth wanting, no directions more worth going in, than any others, beyond the commonly compelling ones which address our needs for survival, comfort and dignity, and their enabling agendas.
Particularity, the this-here-now-ness of things constrained by space, time and number, allows the creation of 1. contexts for by which possibilities can become potentialities, 2. contours, contents and configurations, 3. appreciations and appraisals, and 4. nothing, that is emptiness, essential for any change to happen. The transcendent, even though cosmic in scale and ever-continuing, and constrained only by considerations of hospitality, friendship and exploration, is short on local concreteness, and as result, its relationships can be indefinite and indistinct.
Where the mundane and the transcendent come together in joint venture, one ‘parent’ providing point and other particularity, is in the encounter, an occasion of one making common cause with the livingness of an other, addressed as you. We, folks of the mundane, and freshness of the transcendent, are its co-creators. Each encounter is a new and good creation, unique, enduring, and worthwhile in and of itself, producing viable seeds, perhaps sown in the mundane right away in things we do, make or say today, or saved, as ‘heritage’ seeds, for freshness to sow in the transcendent when our last todays have gone away.
There is nothing here about the history or the prospects of the relationship between the two realms. This is a personal reading, and perhaps provocative, but my only aim is to persuade you to entertain the possible existence of the transcendent (the mundane almost never in doubt), and for me to make better sense of my own existence.