A transcendental experience, from the Latin word transcendere meaning to go beyond, denotes a brief, uncommon, ecstatic and revelatory period in which we’re able to loosen our hold on our characteristically narrow, ego-specific concerns and can identify with a totality that is larger, older, greater and deeper than we are and feel intensely unburdened and liberated.
We might have a transcendental experience early on a summer’s morning looking at the mist starting to burn up in the valley below us, or late at night with the galaxies above us. We might go through one in a plane crossing the ice fields of Northern Canada, or at 3am alone in a foreign hotel bedroom contemplating matters from a new, unbound perspective.
Nature is especially good at prompting transcendental moments, as are nights of solitude, the sounds of flutes, sitars and harps, airplanes, fevers, William Blake, roomy mountains, and psilocybin and mescaline.
In the grip of a transcendental experience, it matters very slightly less who we are, the mistakes we have made and how halting and uncertain our trajectory has been. We willingly let go of the compromised eye and all its often petty and mean-spirited obsessions, in order to become, for a privileged while, a part of the timeless, beatific whole. We are the clouds, the rocks, the beetle climbing arduously up the bark of a tree, a baby being born on another continent, a nonagenarian breathing their last, a line in a poem and a star expiring in a distant galaxy.
We don’t care that we’ve been betrayed in love, we’re defeated at work and roughly handled in childhood - our own death becomes a matter of utter indifference. We feel honored to be occupying such a small space in the order of things, and that we will soon disappear without a trace. We let go of it all in the name of an identification with the totality of existence; we willingly exchange ourselves for engulfment in otherness.
No, we’ve not gone mad - we’ll be doing the school run or the accounts again in a few hours - but what counts is that we’ve accessed, and can now bookmark, a kind of experience that will always be on hand in memory as a rebuke to our most frantic, frightened or vain moments. It’s the greatest privilege accorded to us by our complicated minds, that we don’t always have to be simply and punishingly ourselves.