Notes on Transcendence and the Intellect

©Copyright 2005 by John L. Waters. All Rights Reserved

Traditionally the intellect and the transcendental have been kept isolated, and in many cases the person who became sanctified or inspired didn't become an academic or a professional intellectual. In any case, no prominent intellectual has explained transcendence in precise rational terms, and so to intellectuals and school teachers the transcendent holy has remained "other-worldly." Even today, the wide gap between reason and intuition and "Heaven" and "Earth" remains. No high school or college teaches the way to close or bridge this gap.

What is going to change this is innovative medical research. Today medical science is studying the brain and determining that the sense of transcendence is measurable in terms of altered activity in certain parts of the brain. For example (1) Dr. Michael Persinger has devised an electronic helmet that produces a weak magnetic field through the brain and this produces altered sense in many of the experimental subjects. (2) Buddhist meditators produce low frequency brain waves. Perceptions differ and awareness shifts. Much of what was important to the younger pre-initiate is no longer important to the adept. As with Francis of Assisi and Gustav Theodor Fechner, a different type of person is produced. The new person is farther away from being mediocre or normal and closer to being a saint or a genius.

Those who are concerned about the worsening human situation need to consider the joy and contentment of a meditator who craves much less than an ambitious materialist. With more and more humans and less and less space, energy, and other goods available for each person, competition, starvation, destruction of environments, and deprivation all increase. We see this close to home and we hear it and read it on the news. The holy orders have always taught greater contentment and providence. Monks have cultivated the less destructive altered brain activity now being studied by certain medical scientists. The next step is the clarification and popularization of that which Hindus have long called "The Reservoir of Pleasure."

I for one sometimes felt sanctified as a boy, but no one understood this process. As an older adult I stimulated, developed, cultivated, and demonstrated this sanctification and I lived a more providential, more careful, and more simple life. This simplicity gave me more time to meditate, reflect, and write, as well as help persons whom others couldn't or wouldn't help. Over the years I became wiser. I projected the sense of goodness and simplicity to certain other persons, as have so many other transformed persons.

Now science is backing up the idea that there is an auxiliary intelligence in humans that is "divine." This intelligence works hardest and best when certain brain centers are more active and when the more commonly used brain centers are less active than traditional civilizations teach children to be. The "divine" person is not as ambitious and as competitive as are ambition-driven young achievers and soldiers in combat. The "divine" person is more caring, more considerate, more thrifty, and more provident.

As the future unfolds with more billions of humans and more suffering than ever before, and with less energy and other goods, more billions of humans will need to tap into the "Reservoir of Pleasure" and be more providential. This tapping directly into the pleasure center of the brain will be made more and more possible by the scientific understanding of what is holy and by the intellect in students and other intellectuals who are increasingly mindful of the human situation and the human need.

Please do not assume that a link to a website means that I endorse everything that the website promotes. In the same spirit I don't expect or assume that you accept everything in this article. This article presents no moral judgment or commandment. In fact you are perfectly free to ignore everything in this article. Worsening problems in the world, however, you can't safely or reasonably ignore.

Past mystics have often gone beyond their initial pleasurable experience to concoct some fantastic personal scheme. Legends, myths, and heresies abound! I simply present the proven theories of mathematics as a ways and means for understanding the universal human language and the language of the universe itself. This is the language everyone can use to most readily understand the unity of everything and tap into the Reservoir of Pleasure. History shows that the traditional legends and myths have been too complicated for nearly all persons to understand, cultivate, and regularly employ the divine unitive sense. Mathematics, on the other hand, is used daily by almost everyone.

LINKS

My website at Humboldt State University

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