The Transcendence Institute

With one loop around the spiral complete, the first lap done, it seems a good time to look back and try to see how far we’ve come. Try to spend a while taking stock of progress, measuring improvement. Comparing how you feel now with how you felt a while ago when you started.

The first topic we attempted was Perception, your ability to pay attention to your senses. Take the time to look away from these words at something in the room around you and let it sink into your consciousness, really view it. Can you remember if you were able to do that before this course started? Did you ever take the time to examine things closely? Do you actually do that more or less often than before you spent a while listening to our first meditation?

How about memory? Have you been listening to the memory meditation often enough? Going over the things stored there again and again? If you have then you’ve likely managed to fill up your Loci-map with all sorts of strange curiosities, each one of them filled with meaning, triggering a memory. Maybe you’ve even moved away from the first ten locations and started filling up another group of ten? Has it improved your life to remember these things?

You should find by now that you are more able to control your mood, to be happier (assuming that’s what you want) and focus your attention more on things which push your mood in the direction you want it pushed rather than things which annoy and irritate you. Have you spent the time since you started using the Mood meditation in a happier mood? Are you more able to shift towards a desired mood by thinking of your key, your word or phrase to help you travel there? If you have no key, have you actually been doing the meditation?

Over the last few months you have also started to take control of your diet. You probably like “healthy” foods more than you used to. There should by now be some food which you’ve advertised at yourself enough to find you want it over a nasty greasy fast-food burger. Ask yourself, are you healthier than you were a few months back? Are you eating better?

Before you started listening to the Imagination Meditation did you consider yourself imaginative? It’s only been a short while, does it feel like your imagination is beginning to improve already? If you need to use that imagination, think of a solution for something, do you think you’d know where to start?

You’ve been practising lowering your credibility filters for longer than you’ve known what they are, letting yourself drift into that trance-like suggestible state. If there’s one skill that all our meditations should improve it’s your ability to slide down into that relaxed mindset. More recently, you’ll have been learning to use other filters to pay particular attention to given details, voices, threads and aspects of your world. Has your ability to do these things improved?

You’ve been listening to the Social Perception Meditation only for a few weeks, most likely. Yet it’s probably already started to effect the way you listen to other people, the range of signals you pay attention to, the focus, concentration and attention you can give to your conversational partners. Have you, already, noticed yourself pay attention to these things?

It’s only very recently that you’ve begun to improve your Love for the world, to care more about more things, to widen the limits of your interest, see and love more of the universe. Yet already you’re no doubt beginning to find yourself smiling at things more often. To feel your heart beginning to open up.

What may be more relevent than the improvements in any of these skills is the understanding, not just on an intellectual level but in a visceral, solid, concrete and gut level, of how these skills mesh together like gears, each of them feeding advantages into the others as they improve. While your concentration and perception attention improves it enables better focus on the details that your improved social-perception skills can tell your to focus on. Your improved memory both reminds you of the skills you need to learn and also of how to shift your mind towards the mood you want it to be in. Each of the skills gives a leg-up to the others, all sitting on each other’s lap, climbing on each other’s backs to reach heights which are higher than even their combined height. The total is more than a sum of the parts.

Finally, you can look into the future, see the list of skills you’ll be approaching in the next few laps around the spiral, understand the methods you’ve used to reach these heights and see how applying those same methods to the other skills in the spiral will push yet more height, and yet more height-gaining-combinations, into your internal mental experience and capabilities. You can see how you can use imaginative methods of applying those same methods yourself to any problem you are likely to come across that fits into the interstices between the areas of the universal mind-space which we’re poorly mapping with the spiral and it’s exercises.

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.

The Transcendence Institute’s spiral course is coming to an end, so now is a good time for you to look back over the last three years or so of learning and meditation and consider what benefits and gains you have achieved over that time, to see if you have in fact become more transcended over that time. To judge if you are more aware of your environment and your mind, to see if you have gained any control over your body or your thoughts.

Awareness

You have spent time meditating on your awareness of your perception, focusing intently on the images, sounds, smells and feelings which your body experiences, attempting to grow neural connections in your brain to improve your ability to pay attention to these things. Have you noticed any results? If you look at a painting, or a sky, or anything around you in your environment are you better able to really focus and enjoy the experience of seeing it, of noting how the sight is composed, what it’s made up of? Perhaps you’ve become more keenly aware of colours, or of background sounds, or just of the fact that you are seeing, touching, hearing, feeling.

You also worked on building awareness of yourself, of your emotional states and thoughts and confidence. Visualising yourself exhibiting some trait to prime your mind to notice more often when you actually perform according to that trait later, to help your mind grow towards a more positive self image. Not by bending your self perception, not by lying to yourself about who you are, but by actually tending towards improvement. Noticing it. Practising it. Becoming it. Consider your self image now, compare it to the way it was two years ago. Are you more aware of your image? Have you improved it? Are you better able to control your moods, simply as a result of being more aware of them?

One of our meditations was designed to make you more aware of the fact you do not directly experience the world at all, that you are locked away inside your own virtual reality, hallucinating a world behind your eyes. You have been trying to become more aware of this fact while simultaneously improving the match between the virtual model which you exist in and the physical universe outside your mind. Have you been successful in this? How often have you wondered if you are mistaken and checked? Have you had lucid dreams in which your hallucinated virtual world is almost completely disconnected from the physical universe and compared that with your waking experience? Do you think you have managed to understand, on a gut level, your place in the universe in your mind, and the universe outside your skin?

Does your increased awareness of your perceptions, your self, and your model of reality improve your life at all? Have you been able to use this improvement as a base from which to improve the other spiral skills?

Memory

You should have been practising using simple visualisation and mnemonic techniques to improve your memory. Do you have a nice loci system, an imaginary path of at least ten locations filled with treasured memories, reminders, todo tasks? If you’ve been practising associating numbers with letters and words and characters and stories you should have a much richer network of associations and semantics for dealing with numbers, remembering them, identifying with them. Has this improved your memory? Are you more, or less, likely to be able to chunk, encode, and recall something now than a few years back?

Not only should you have been using deep visualisation techniques to learn to burn your initial memories deeper, but you should have also been practising refreshing those important memories often. Keeping them alive longer. Focusing on the memories you want to keep, and trying to ignore those you find less pleasant. Directing your memory, taking conscious control over it. Has this practise helped? Have you improved? If you want to, do you know how to remember things for longer, recall them more easily?

Dream recall has also been practised, trying to exercise those memory circuits by giving them a good workout. Are you better able to recall your dreams, or even use your lucid dreams to refresh and relive memories on demand? How does having this improved memory affect the rest of your life? The rest of the skills in the spiral?

Consciousness

You have been becoming more conscious of your emotional reactions to the world, to events. Using memory and your awareness of those reactions to gain better control over your mood, by recalling events which put you into some desired mind-state. Ponder how that’s been working. Are you becoming closer to your ideal mood? Are you more aware of the things which provoke emotional reactions, are you getting more control over those reactions? Either to heighten, or to dampen, them?

In exploring the manifestation of sentience and sapience in your own life you have been learning to see how a mind turned to study itself can push consciousness up from basic reaction through awareness to full experience, even on to understanding and beyond to higher levels of consciousness. How far along this path do you think you are? How far have you come in the last couple of years? Has the experience of meditating on these things, directing your neural networks to form semantic relationships between the concepts, helped you to grow into a higher state of consciousness?

You worked on trying to take some conscious control of your body, to become conscious of your immune system, even to guide it, direct it and encourage it to focus and use the placebo effect to your advantage. Has there been an improvement in your general health? Are you more aware of your body’s needs, the way it communicates with your consciousness?

If you have raised your consciousness, how has this affected your abilities in life? Has it also enabled you to improve the other spiral skills? Does it seem to you that conscious thinking about a mental skill helps you to understand and so improve upon it? Helps your mind to grow more flexible?

Body

Improving your diet gives your body, and thus your brain and so your mind, the elements it needs to function properly. Have you successfully learned to enjoy more healthy foods? Have you increased the range and variety of your culinary adventures? You have at least been learning to associate good foods more directly with good experiences, and so teach your mind to actually enjoy those tastes more. If you have managed to eat better over the last few years, how has this affected the functioning of your brain? Has it also improved your health? Your fitness?

Not only have you been stretching and improving your mind, you should also have been stretching and exercising your muscles, drilling your body both to improve it and to become more in tune with it, more able to listen to it and improve your kinaesthetic senses. Assuming you have been doing the exercise routine on which we based the second lap of the spiral, and even doing more yoga or pilates or alexander technique classes, has this actually improved the shape of your body? Your awareness of how it moves, how it responds. Has even your posture and gait improved?

If your body and your relationship with it have indeed improved, how has this been reflected in the other spiral skills? Does being fit, healthy, and well fed make your feel mentally more agile? Have you improved your gut grasp of the correlations, and thus your very desire to keep in top form?

Cognition

In practising using your imagination, you will have been exercising and thus growing it. Do you feel more imaginative now than you did when you first started working on it? Have you been able to apply techniques like artificial limitation to guide your imaginings? Do you see yourself as more, or less, full of ideas and inspiration than before? If you do have more ideas, more imaginative thoughts, how have these helped you in life?

Your intuition, too, should have been improved by drilling it and focusing on it as you have. Do you get those vague creeping feelings more often now? Are you more able to judge if they are right, wrong, or in need of more investigation? We have often talked about a “gut level understanding” and this is usually perceived as the kind of vague intuitions which most people have. Have you been able to sharpen up those intuitions? To understand them better? How has this helped in your life? How has it helped you improve in other areas?

You have also been working on your reasoning powers. Gaining an intuitive feel for the way information flows around the world, and around your head. You will have improved your reason, your logic, your ability to use things like a pen and paper, or a computer, or mathematics and the study of history or other subjects to improve your reasoning. Does this clear and reasonable way of thinking about the world also work when applied to thinking about yourself? Have you been able to think clearly about the other spiral skills, and how has doing so enabled you to improve them still further?

Bio-programming

In some ways the whole of the Transcendence Spiral course here has been a way of practising self-change, taking some conscious control of the influences on your own mind, learning to program your own brain. You started by simply learning to select perceptions more finely. To tune out the things you don’t need to concentrate on and make your concentration into a sharp focused point. Have you been practising doing this? Using your mental filters more effectively? If so, have they improved? Has their improvement enabled you to program your mind better and thereby improve all the other spiral skills?

You’ve spent much time in many of our meditations learning to become more suggestible, to enter a more trance-like hypnotic state in which your mind seems easier to program with suggestions and visualisation. Has this worked? Are you more able to enter that kind of state at will, and thus to better reprogram your mind? Are you better at finding realistic and true affirmations to say to yourself rather than focusing on your failures and disappointments?

Bio-programming isn’t just about influencing your own mind of course. In life you will inevitably also influence others. Have you been better able to do this when needed? To build a rapport with others, influence them in arguments, tell an emotionally evocative story? Have you been better able to pick those who influence you, to direct your own development by choosing your friends?

Is an ability to program your own mind an advantage in learning to improve all the other spiral skills?

Social Skills

Speaking of other people, you have been trying to improve your abilities at judging their moods, their tells, their body language and social hierarchies. Consider whether you have in fact improved these skills, if your social perception is better than it was back when you began. Consider also if being a better judge of other people’s intent and intentions has enabled you to learn from them more efficiently, and how this might have affected your general transcendence, your ability with each of the spiral skills.

As well as learning to better receive social signals, you have been learning to better send them. To improve your gait, your stance, your posture, your language and tone, the muscles on your face and around your eyes, the glint in your eye. These things are all constantly communicating things about you and helping to build other people’s image of you. Have you been practising improving them? Visualising your increasing ability? How has this affected people’s opinion of you? And indeed your opinion of yourself?

Your linguistic skills, the words you pick, their emotional and associative content and affect on others have been worked on over the course of this course. You’ve been thinking about the way words help build that virtual model in your head, the way they allow you to change the state of your brain on demand with mere utterances. How has this helped you? How has it improved your ability to learn to improve the other spiral skills?

Ethics

Any species as deeply social and cooperative as ours simply can’t evolve without developing systems to raise the collective karma of societies. To build systems which ensure people help each other, since then they will each, individually, gain far more than they lose from playing their small part in helping others. Emotional systems have evolved in our species to ensure we in general like each other, and are keen to help. You have tried to develop these emotions, to feel increased love and passion for the world and the other people in it. Have you been successful? Have your visualisations helped? If so, how has that affected your relationships with others, and the help they are willing to give you? Has helping others also helped you to develop your social skills, your perception, the other transcendence abilities?

As your empathy skills have improved, have you found yourself with a deeper understanding of others, a desire to improve the lot of not just yourself but the other people around you. Your friends, your family, your nation, your world? Would spreading these kinds of values make your society, and so your life, better? How would that better life affect your abilities to concentrate on and improve the other spiral skills?

Spiral Support

As you’ve likely seen from your answers to these kinds of questions, each of the spiral skills leads in turn to improvement in the other skills, twisting you around Transcendence Mountain, spiralling upwards towards the heights of transcendence. Since nobody has even reached a point where improvement in those skills is impossible, we can only assume that even as this course ends you are not yet fully transcended, since there is no “fully” in transcendence.

So where do you go from here? We’ll answer that question next week.

As the review last week likely showed, you have expanded your mind considerably over the last few years, become more aware, improved your memory, your consciousness, your body control and awareness, you very ability to think cognitively, to successfully engage with others around you, to treat them ethically and to program your mind to improve these skills still further.

We end the Transcendence Institute’s review of the Transcendence Spiral next week, but of course we’ve shown you only a glimpse of how much more transcended you can become. There is no peak to Transcendence Mountain. Even as our course comes to an end you see better than ever that there is no end to the quest itself.

So where do you go from here?

Firstly, you can always go back and repeat any of the more than thirty meditations you have already done. Concentrate on areas where you feel deficient, where you think you have the most to gain. If that seems not to be working, concentrate instead on the primary things which you think support that skill. For example, body awareness can be increased not only with the body-awareness meditation but also with the general awareness meditation which supports it.

Try to spend at least ten minutes every day going over one of the meditations. Once you’ve done them enough times you may find that you remember them well enough to practise without the backing track. This in invaluable, for often when you have a ten minute break you won’t have access to the physical media or digital files to play the sound track itself. If you are waiting for a bus, or lying in bed waiting for sleep, or just waking up, or walking to work, think of it as an opportunity to go over your loci memory map, or to concentrate on your awareness of your surroundings for a short while.

But these meditations are all very general-purpose beginners level mind exercises. As your bio-programming skills continue to improve, you’ll come to understand your own mind more thoroughly, and need to tailor your process to progress to your own individual mind. Every person is different, every brain different. Each person has their own particular Transcendence Mountain. The only person who can fully explore it, find new routes upwards, turn that spiral tighter and tighter, bind the skills more closely together, is you.

You should begin to constantly examine your own mind, to look for flaws and find ways to correct them through visualisation, practise, suggestion and even self-hypnosis. As your self-awareness and bio-programming skills increase you’ll find you’re able to sit down and make a plan to use these techniques to bend the shape of your own mind.

Initially you may need to record these plans as audio tracks to remind you exactly what images, mantras, tasks and questions you plan to go through. Feel free to use the backing tracks from any of the Transcendence Institute’s meditations to shape your own. Each one is supplied with an empty backing track, without vocals, for you to record your own mediations over. Playing them to remind you and keep you on track as you meditate.

Eventually though, as your self control, imagination, memory and concentration improve, you’ll be able to just sit for a while, plan what to do and then do it. You may even eventually be able to spot ways to improve and then simply begin the meditative process. Transcended enough to plan your mental actions as you go, both performing and inventing the meditation at once.

The most important thing is to keep practising for any skills which fall out of use will begin to deteriorate. The human mind is a wonderful learning tool, but it can learn inaction, laziness and lackadaisicalness just as easily as it can learn how to be more aware or alert.

We wish you good luck with this process, it’ll be a never-ending task, but the rewards both mental and physical will continue to urge you onwards, for each and every step up Transcendence Mountain you make will bring you greater control over your mind and your life. It’ll bring you greater tranquillity and happiness through emotional control, bring you deeper relationships and more friends through your social and ethical skills, help you understand what you want to do in life as your self awareness grows and improve your ability to actually do those things as your concentration, cognition and memory improve too.

As a parting gift next week we’ll bring you our final Transcendence Spiral meditation, encouraging you to do all these things, to feel the rewards, to strive to further improve yourself and integrate all your skills towards transcendence.

Today, our trip around the Transcendence Spiral, our course of learning and meditation, comes to an end. From here on out, you’ll need to be finding your own way around your own mind. Learning to understand your self, to lead yourself, to seek out your own paths up Transcendence Mountain.

To help with this, we present our parting gift to you: our final meditation designed to encourage you and teach you how to go about finding your own path, feeling the rewards of doing so and thus increasing the likelihood that you’ll continue. This meditation is designed to help you examine each of the eight main Transcendence Spiral skills, practise them, see if they are lacking, and perhaps think of ways to improve them.

The meditation can be listened to at any time, at any place, walking or dreaming or exercising or falling asleep, so long as you follow the instructions and think as it asks you’ll find yourself practising the Spiral Skills, learning to grasp your own relative strengths in each, and resolving to work on your weakest.

You’ll spend a minute or so, as usual, relaxing into a deeply meditative and suggestive state, relaxing your body to allow your mind to follow. Then you’ll spend around a minute or so in each of the eight major skill groups, practising that skill, observing your abilities, wondering how best you could improve.

First you’ll look hard around you at the things in your world. Pay attention to your awareness, your awareness of your perceptions, of yourself, and how your hallucination of the world differs from the real universe. You’ll consider this for a moment, trying to see where you can improve.

The next minute you’ll think on your memory, scan quickly over your loki maps, recall occasions in which you used those maps, or chunking skills, and ponder new ways to improve your memory still further.

Then you’ll practise your consciousness. Your sentience, self possession and control, thinking about your immune system and looking again for ways to improve.

You’ll spend a minute paying attention to your body, your kinestetic senses and balance, your control over your muscles and your shape and your diet.

You’ll also ponder cognition, your imagination and powers of reason. Your ability to see a logical deduction and to imagine an intuitive solution. You’ll recall examples of you using these skills, or else think of ways to seek them out.

You’ll spend a minute thinking about bio-programming, how well you’ve been learning to control your own mind, filtering the relevent information, seeking out the right imaginative stimulus, influencing, encouraging and helping others. Again, you’ll ponder times when this has happened and resolve to look out for more, and to find ways to improve.

You’ll also consider your set of friends and recent interactions with them and strangers. You’ll ponder your social skills for a minute, your ability to read body language, and to project the desired image. You’ll think about the language you use, finding ways to become more expressive, more interesting to hear.

You’ll think about your ethics, scanning your recent history for evidence of either improvement or need for improvement in your ethical judgements. Consider your love for your friends, and seek ways to make it burn brighter. You’ll look for ways to increase the karma of those around you, and to feel empathy for everyone your meet.

Finally, you’ll spend a minute thinking about how all these skills interact, how they feed upon each other, driving your further up the Transcendence Mountain, closer to transcendence.

Guided Meditation File 34 – Integration – Transcendence Backing Music “Play” By Mic-Tunes