How is experience conditioned by the need for transcendence?
Securing the satisfaction of our basic needs only reveals that our sense of well-being is just as clearly connected to our own self-transcendence. We need to feel as though we're growing. If we've become a big fish in a little pond, we'll feel the need to jump into a bigger pond. Stagnation, even at the highest levels of achievement, is rather unsatisfying, for it's not the goal that satisfies us, but the process of growing toward ever-grander goals.
Self-transcendence occurs when we don't simply grow within a domain but break through to a larger domain with a different organizing principle. The shift can often be disorienting even as it's profoundly meaningful. What has been called a religious experience may in fact be the experience of being somehow transported well beyond one's usual domain to a richer, grander reality one can scarcely make sense of. What would it mean if that which is disclosed by a religious experience were ever-present as hidden? How does, or can, that which is hidden in this sense show itself? What are the opportunities we have to break through to new ways of being? How do we experience mystery, even indirectly, such that we may remain linked with it concretely?
