Transcendent

The transcendent, a concept perplexing and provocative. I’ve referred to it several times in my posts. Why don’t I say clearly and fully what I’m talking about? Stay with me.  

First, I’m not talking about Transcendence as a quality (a going beyond) nor as a proper name. Rather the transcendent as a realm or world  (for now interchangeable terms) with dimensions and contents and characteristics, as is our physical world and our mundane world of motives and agendas. 

So as we think of the contents of the physical world as matter and movement, and of the mundane as needs and their satisfactions as well as agendas and their attainments, so the transcendent realm is the realm of encounters and consummations (a fresh future forever). 

Satisfactions and attainments are entirely valid types of values but they are relative and fleeting. Encounters, however, are inherently valuable in and of themselves.

Getting satisfactions and attainments is the point (the compelling reason for existence or exertion) what much of what we do day to day but what the point is of the motives and agendas themselves is not so clear. The point of any encounter, however, is the encounter itself, its consummation ever alive within it from very inception. Encounters are the ultimate point. 

As the physical realm has three dimensions or directions of freedom of movement, and the local mundane has three dimensions of need: survival, comfort and dignity, and the global mundane as three dimensions of agenda: profit, power and perpetuation, so the transcendent has three dimensions: hospitality, friendship and exploration. 

Asteroids don’t exist in a space that has all the possible freedom directions, nor does the covid virus, nor do computers, but we human beings live and move and have our being in a space that always has all the dimensions. The transcendent dimensions of hospitality, friendship and exploration are always accessible to us.

The agency of the transcendent realms is through encounters on the mundane and physical realms. Likewise, actions in these become part of the transcendent through encounters. The transcendent has some power, but is not omnipotent (and doesn’t intervene directly in the mundane). It is determined in contour, contents and configuration but this determination is progressive and always adapting to new encounters and their development.

Whereas we can readily see, understand and appreciate the worlds of basketball trajectories, hot tubs and hit songs, what makes the transcendent a realm which is also and other, that is, in addition to and distinct from what’s demanding our attention all around us every day?  Transcendent means going beyond but to where? What’s there? 

The content of the transcendent are encounters, occasions of common cause with the livingness of others. The dimensions are hospitality, friendship and exploration. The characteristics of the transcendent include spontaneity (as when a void generates virtual particles), opportunism (as when a virus seeks out and exploits chances to multiply), and passion (as when a virtuoso longs to make all the music the capabilities of instrument and  musicianship allow.

Ever going forward, never dragged back by the past, never hurried forward by the future, ever more full of encounters each with fresh futures forever, the transcendent is infinitely commodious, endlessly creative and incessantly active. The knowledge of what could have happened but didn’t, what can happen but won’t, and what will happen next is not part of it. The telos (not the same as an agenda) of the transcendent realm (as far as we know it) is always more encountering. Freshness as we sense it in our encounters is the local manifestation of the transcendent realm, always a prompt, always a promise.

This is a long exposition, but if encounters really are portals, the next question is ‘to what or where?’ And if a fresh breeze really does blow through encounters, the natural question is ‘whence?’ It may be, in fact, that the transcendent realm is right now engaged in encountering that mundane and physical realm we find as obvious as water is to a fish. So what question does that raise?