Transcendence – Transcendence Mountain
by pre.
Over the course of the fourth loop around the Transcendence Spiral, we have shown how each of the spiral skills is related to all the others. Most of them couldn’t exist without the others. Each of them is built from the other skills, and in turn helps to build all the rest. One skill supports the next, which in turn supports the rest. Gradual improvement in each of those skills is brought about by a gradual improvement in all the others, interlocking skills which can ratchet up the level of consciousness of a creature, enabling it to better perceive, be aware, be in control of it’s own life and it’s relationships with others.
This has been the central message of our walking meditations, having you out in the world really looking at it and striving to improve all of the skills with each and every meditation. We hope we’ve enabled you to understand how each of the mental abilities you’ve been training and developing helps improve all of the others, why improvement in any one area results in improvements in all the others and how deficiencies in any one area can diminish your progress in all of the others.
You can imagine the spiral as a mountain, with transcendence at it’s peak and all of our spiral skills arranged around the circumference. Your mind, as a newborn, has already developed rudimentary abilities in the eight segments: awareness, memory, consciousness, body control and awareness, cognition, bio-programming, social skills, even ethics. It’s free to wonder around the base of the mountain, and to practice any of the skills there.
As your growing mind practices each skill, it learns to move higher up Transcendence Mountain. To inch that particular skill upwards. Your infant mind wonders fairly haphazardly around Transcendence Mountain, learning to see, to listen, to remember, to become aware of it’s body and it’s senses, to think, to communicate with others. Each time you practised these skills, the neural networks in your growing mind bound together more closely, each improvement mapping out yet more of that mountain, tracking it to higher peaks.
As your consciousness, cognition and bio-programming skills grow, you are able to take more and more conscious and deliberate control over the mapping of this mountain, with each extra bit of height gained adding to the speed, efficiency and control of further mapping. An exponential explosion of transcendence, pushing your mind to ever greater heights.
Is there a peak?
It’s a reasonable question. Certainly the Transcendence Institute is unaware of anyone who has mapped the entire Transcendence Mountain, though there are likely some mystics who claim to have reached enlightenment. The suspicion is that anyone unprepared to admit there is room for more improvement in their skills could do with developing their cognition, logical thinking and scientific knowledge. Perhaps, they may have found a local peak, but until they explore more deeply into those areas, they can’t be sure there’s no way higher.
It’s doubtful that there is really a top to this mountain. If a human has gone as high as humans can, there is likely some technology which can help them climb higher, just as the technologies of language, writing, mathematics, printing, computation and the improvement in indexing and searching technologies have. Perhaps eventually even further, with implants and genetic engineering.
If it existed, the peak of the Transcendence Mountain would be a state of complete awareness and control of everything in the universe along with an awareness of yourself having that experience. Our understanding of physics suggests this is impossible, even in theory.
Yet still there is much to gain from the further exploration of the Mountain. However far up it you have climbed, there will be benefits both material and mental to using the height you have gained to climb yet further, to become even better, to practise and improve your skills to the best of your current abilities, until those abilities themselves grow.