The Search for Extraterrestrial
Transcendence
Introduction
Our investigation of the world around us, including our fellow humans makes use of a variety of levels of mental processing. Unconsciously and consciously, cognitively and emotionally, we constantly manipulate ideas and try to fit them within hierarchies of relationships so that they make sense and do not merely exist as a multiplicity of disjointed impressions. New ideas, ambiguities, or problems may be tested by a systematic conscious process or by a random unconscious process and fitted into (classified into) locations in the growing hierarchies of relationships within memory. In some cases the structure of an established hierarchy may have to be changed to maintain a self-consistent set of relationships.
These processes have a profound effect on the way we view the world and ourselves. Of interest here is a sub-conscious process that appears to be active much of the time and plays a part in memory consolidation and dreams as well as providing us with flashes of insight and intuition. Here I consider whether it also plays an essential role in creation and appreciation of different forms of art. I also ask whether it adds to our investigation of the physical world and to our search for resolution of moral dilemmas. That is, does this mental process participate in our appreciation of truth, beauty and goodness. If so, we can ask whether a comparable mental process might also appear in the inhabitants of an extra-terrestrial civilization. The existence of these values in such a civilization would be of significance to a religion that might arise there.
Transcendent Reality
From the unity within the experience of truth, beauty, and goodness, the hierarchical structure of our minds leads us to a higher level of unity beyond normal experience, to a transcendence beyond the reality of our everyday world. Often this comes when we experience a sense of awe and wonder at the majestic beauty of the natural world, the grandeur of the universe, or the rational reach of the universal laws. Such an experience can be so strong as to quieten the busy activity of the unconscious and lead us to an experience of truth beyond what we know or can know, a beauty beyond what we perceive or can perceive, a goodness beyond what we achieve or can achieve.
Transcendence gives rise to feelings at the emotional level associated with the unity of truth, beauty and goodness, when we contemplate the creations of artists, moralists, scientists, and others. A sense of the transcendent also manifests itself in a heightened awareness of the pettiness of personal desires compared with the sublimity and marvelous order revealed in nature and the world of thought. Others find transcendence in an ego-dissolving mystical experience of wholeness, a sensual state of immediacy and pure enjoyment arising from meditation, beyond a world of objects and individuality. It may arise in a perception of aharmonious unity of structure underlying multiple states of mind and psychological perspectives: experience is sublimated and transformed, by a response that elevates knowledge to the level of a universal and necessary truth.
In Einstein’s words, “The most beautiful and deepest experience a man can have is the sense of the mysterious. It is the underlying principle of religion as well as all serious endeavor in art and science. He who never had this experience seems to me, if not dead, then at least blind. To sense that behind anything that can be experienced there is a something that our mind cannot grasp and whose beauty and sublimity reaches us only indirectly and as a feeble reflection, this is religiousness.”
In the absence of conflicts or puzzles at lower levels, conscious attention automatically rises up through the subordinate levels we create as we integrate our actions and experiences, pushing down new cognitive relationships and motor skills into the unconscious as they are learned. Through the unconscious processes of intellection – insight and intuition – our mind constantly tries to resolve discrepancies and distractions at subordinate levels and assemble higher and higher relationships at superordinate levels.
Ultimately this has the potential to lead to a level where every sensory-motor relationship is related to every other that has become stored in memory. This is an unusual situation, because there always seems to be something new that is demanding attention. But certain situations, such as those giving rise to an intense sense of awe or deep meditation, capture the mind and still the search by the unconscious for new relationships, allowing the mind to be flooded with a sense of wonder that removes all distraction. The practice of mediation appears to achieve this state by removing all distractions and removing the goals or aspirations that would otherwise drive the attention process. In this way a sense of the unity of reality can be achieved without external stimulus. The process also has therapeutic value as it calms the unconscious processes underlying anxiety.
Many people choose not to follow this path but to rely on the descriptions of reality brought back by others. And these of course may not be derived only from mediation but may be stimulated by naturally occurring psycho-active drugs, or by the onset of temporal lobe epilepsy. Whatever their origins, these accounts of reality may be accepted by those who do not wish to take the risk of seeking reality themselves but are happy to adopt the account selected by their social group. It is for this reason that organized philosophies or religions are popular, because they offer ready solutions to the difficult puzzles of existence.
But there are some individuals who want to explore for themselves how everything might be related to everything else, to discover for themselves some rational order in the universe. This desire naturally arises from the path of evolution we have followed that makes the mystery of the unknown attractive, and investigating and resolving the unknown rewarding. The outcome of investigation and intellection for such people is a world view that encompasses everything they discover as facts or logical deductions, together with their development of a moral understanding and an appreciation of beauty. From this world view and ethos, such people draw up a conception of order in the universe that steers their perceptions and motivations in directions that appear uniquely suited to the conduct of life.
An approach to this transcendence cannot be made through sense perception, logic, or material investigation. Rather it arises in a mind unrestrained by immediate perceptions, released perhaps by meditation, that has become aware through experience of the unity of truth, beauty, and goodness, and recognizes the universal harmony they point to. From this comes the philosophy that behind our perception of the exuberant variety of life and beyond our vision of the vast stretches of the universe exists an eternal unity, created out of eternity by an intentional act that set in motion evolution of a material world through space and time until intelligence and consciousness capable of reaching transcendence appears.
It is perhaps what Einstein was describing when he wrote
A knowledge of the existence of something we cannot penetrate, of the manifestations of the profoundest reason and the most radiant beauty, which are only accessible to our reason in their most elementary forms--it is this knowledge and this emotion that constitute the truly religious attitude; in this sense, and in this alone, I am a deeply religious man.
The consciousness of transcendence provides the basis for many terrestrial religions. Furthermore, because a sense of transcendence is not specific to specific sense impressions or actions but to a higher level of integration, extracted from common cultural features in the experience of truth, beauty and goodness, this non-specific phenomenon resulting from of evolution of the ability to survive, it is likely to be a common feature of both terrestrial and extraterrestrial religions. This is the subject of the next section.