Though a religious message may be false, it may acquire gravity and reverberation by the aesthetically pleasing manner of its deliverance. Over time, its influence is enhanced as generation supplants generation and augments the manipulative effectiveness of its intonations—an instance of cumulative cultural evolution (see Caldwell and Millen 2008). This approach explains that people appreciate quality through a process of sustained exposure. However, this approach is not practical when viewed from the perspective of management. Of course, it is hard to draw strong conclusions just based on a correlational field study like this.
Some theologians and metaphysicians of various religious traditions affirm that a god is both within and beyond the universe (panentheism); in it, but not of it; simultaneously pervading it and surpassing it. In contrast to quality as absolute, the value-based approach regards what is transcendent-based quality quality as relative to price. According to this view, the buyer’s perception of value represents a mental trade-off between the quality or benefits perceived relative to price paid. As you may realize in the following, quality has many facets and is more complex than it seems.
The Evolution of Transcendence
Many times, such knowledge is self-generated, as when individuals figure things out on their own. Other times, knowledge is proffered by supposed experts, be they experts in practical or in spiritual matters. The benefits to the receiver of the spiritual message sent out by the sender may come in the form of ingroup-directed affection, which may be useful in generating mutual cooperation.
This reflects an apparent paradox in that individuals who invest in or are motivated by the development of their potential, in becoming a healthy and strong “ego,” in turn then seek to let go of this state to merge with causes and the need for support of other individuals or causes (Maslow, 1971). Kaufman (2020) proposes that self-actualisation acts as a “bridge” to self-transcendent states, values, and motivation. Maslow (1964) proposed that, in transcending polarities and dichotomies in life experience, we open to a broader and more accepting perception of ourselves and the world around us.
Exploitation of Group-Directed Transcendence
That is, much like genes replicate themselves by enabling their phenotypes’ survival and reproduction, religious rituals, doctrines, and ideas induce transcendence in human minds as a way of replicating themselves in the meme pool (i.e., the cultural analog to the gene pool). Although this is plausible, the amorphous nature of the meme and its relative lack of replicative fidelity (Atran 2002, pp. 236–262) cast doubt on its suitability as a potential locus of evolved exploitation. In any case, even if units of culture are capable of inducing transcendence and benefiting from the said induction, human exploiters’ indisputable presence in the marketplace of religion and spirituality limits my current focus to the parasitic effects of humans on one another.
- When we speak of the transcendent importance of an issue such as climate change, we may mean that everything else on earth actually depends on it.
- Wong identifies characteristics of self-transcendence as a shift in focus from self to other, a shift in our values from extrinsic to intrinsic, an increase in moral concern, and the experience of elevated emotions such as awe or ecstasy.
- Wong has further modeled self-transcendence, building directly on the work of Frankl (e.g., Wong, 2016).
- Note that, albeit grounded in research, I include some speculations that might open up avenues for further theoretical and empirical exploration.
Added to this is the very real possibility that there are a lot more contexts, psychological systems, and experiences of transcendence that are still undiscovered. It is my intention that, in the future, scholars and scientists formulate a more complete taxonomy of the different types of transcendence, their activating cues, their neurocognitive signatures, their complex interactions, and their evolutionary origins. Perhaps the formulation of such a taxonomy might itself be a product of the transcendent acquisition and synthesis of knowledge by scholars and scientists from across the disciplinary spectrum. Part of what makes someone an exceptional exploiter of other individuals and groups is the ability to make others passionately acquiesce to manipulation. Religious and political ceremonies that involve drugs, passionate oratory, music, dancing, and other modes of transcendence elicitation, may function as venues for social integration, and sometimes, exploitation. Hitler, for example, perfected his theatrical gestures by practicing them while listening to recordings of his own speeches (Newton 2014), suggesting an explicit awareness of the manipulative power of body language and aesthetically pleasing oratory.
Download 3 Meaning & Valued Living Exercises (PDF)
This manipulation was most effective for the students with the lowest GPA before the intervention was done. Since the dawn of our species, people have been losing themselves in ritualistic prayer, song, and dance. Even so, for a long time, the prevailing consensus in psychology was that such experiences were pathological rather than natural. Freud believed that “oceanic feelings of oneness” were neurotic memories of the womb and the signs of a deranged mind. Wong (2016) suggests that self-transcendence at each of these levels will involve a continuous process of personal improvement in order to expand our potential. He emphasizes that this improvement process is not based on self-reference, but based on service to others.
The increased production and storage of harvests demanded a population-wide system of morality that promoted cooperation, labor division, and the reduction of stealing and free riding. The cultural invention of gods and goddesses with parental qualities can help to sustain such a moral system. Parental deities are compelling and memorable because they induce the same fear, guilt, and love that a parent would induce, in addition to counterintuitive properties such as omnipotence, omnipresence, and omniscience. The punishing and rewarding properties of such supernatural agents are what helped sustain cooperation within growing ancestral populations of genetically unrelated individuals who, in turn, acquired the status of fictive kin. Especially in the Christian tradition (wherein kinship terms are used to describe one’s relationship with the divine, as in “God the Father” in relation to His “children,” who are all “brethren”), transcendent states typified by filial piety are quite common.
Likewise, religious beliefs and theological doctrines are often divorced from transcendent states. Religion and transcendence should therefore be viewed as overlapping, though not necessarily congruent, phenomena. Note, however, that I will occasionally submit to past authors’ use of “religious” as being synonymous with “transcendent,” a use that is best exemplified by William James’s Varieties of Religious Experience.
There are, however, cases of religious authorities who have issued transcendence-inducing knowledge at a cost to receivers of that knowledge. The transcendent experience, often described as an ego-dissolving encounter with something greater than one’s self, is cross-cultural and pan-historical. I present a model describing the evolution and function of various evolved modes of transcendence, such as group-directed transcendence, theory of mind (ToM)-evoking transcendence, aesthetic transcendence, and epistemic transcendence. I then discuss the vulnerability of these modes of transcendence to costly exploitation by selfish individuals who activate the transcendent state in others for their own reproductive benefit.
