“I believe that if an individual is not on the path to transcending his society and seeing in what way it furthers or impedes the development of human potential, he cannot enter into intimate contact with his humanity.”
—Erich Fromm
As the world spirals deeper into its manufactured frenzy, as war, chaos, and superficiality reign supreme, as the technocratic elite pull tighter on the reins, while Flock Cameras track our every movement and AI Data Centers litter the land and strain the grid, I head out to where the people are scarce, and the deer and the wild boars roam, and the archaic river runs at ease, and the hawks fly free, and I climb an old wooden tower in the predawn hours, suspended above a canopy of trees, to greet the sun.
"All things that love the sun are out of doors;
The sky rejoices in the morning's birth."
I love most those hours that carry the fragrance of resurrection. Born again, the sun reminds us of the source from which all life prospers. A world of light and warmth, where every joule of energy flowing through every living system traces back to the nuclear fusion at the Sun's core.
The Sun's total energy output in a single second could power Earth for over 500,000 years. Or so I’ve read. In the time it took you to drink your coffee in the morning light, the Sun gifted us more energy than the entire human population uses in a whole year. What glory.
Out here, I’m far from the asphalt and sidewalks that radiate the sadness of the souls who tread upon them, far from a frantic civilization bent on speed, productivity, and submission, far from the bureaucratic web that has us all entangled in its red-tape demands.
A brief moment of transcendence in the mayhem of an ebbing culture, I stand alone, my face toward the sky, the warm southern wind on my face.
I seem to harbor an inexhaustible ache for the unimaginable, though the particulars are lost to me. It’s not possessions or status that stirs my blood, not the trinkets of luxury or decor of prosperity, but rather the sublime experience of being alive, close to the earth, with all my senses heightened and receptive.
It’s moments of transcendence that I try to let guide my life, these beautiful moments of self-forgetting where the soul breaks free from the metaphysical chains of finitude, and rises above the muck of materialism and the superficial confusion that passes for reality.
Transcendence is what we moderns have lost touch with. Many of us today suffer from attention fatigue, squandering the brief light of our awareness and letting ourselves get trapped in an algorithmic panopticon that triggers dopamine release in exchange for data, privacy, and attention.
With this digitalized stupor, unending conveniences, and chronic stimulation, we moderns have lost any real reference to the sacred and transcendent.
We’ve become addicts of the artificial, completely sucked into a disenchanted world. Existence has been reduced to itself in a flat, two-dimensional phenomenon that induces a limited view of the whole. And we’ve grown used to it, comfortably numb in our little culture of convenience, blind to the higher realms of reality.
“The real meaning of initiation is that this visible world we live in is a symbol and a shadow, that this life we know through the senses is a death and a sleep, or, in other words, that what we see is an illusion. Initiation is the dispelling.”
- Fernando Pessoa
Vaclav Havel understood this many decades ago when he wrote: “Human beings are compelled to live within a lie, but they can be compelled to do so only because they are in fact capable of living in this way. Therefore, not only does the system alienate humanity, but at the same time alienated humanity supports this system as its own involuntary masterplan, as a degenerate image of its own degeneration, as a record of people’s own failure.”
In this profane wasteland we all now inhabit, we’ve erected social idols in a desperate attempt to fill the “meaninglessness” void that defines much of our lives. Careerism, endless ideologies, an unhealthy obsession with politics and media, rampant consumerism, wealth-worshipping, notoriety-seeking, status-chasing, causes, scientism, and celebrity (influencer) infatuation, just to name a few.
Is it any wonder the world is looking more and more like a cybernetic madhouse than a life-nourishing community?
Is it any wonder that in a world where people spend the majority of the day looking at screens, our attention spans have been blown to smithereens, so much so that we’re at the point of losing all understanding of consciousness and its relation to the world?
Modern mass culture, aimed at the “consumer,” the civilisation of prosthetics, is crippling people’s souls, setting up barriers between man and the crucial questions of his existence, his consciousness of himself as a spiritual being.
—Andrei Tarkovsky
Despite our bleak predicament, deep down we’re still human, and our hunger for transcendence remains. It’s still voracious as ever, despite its ignored cries. We desperately long to break free from the crudeness of our worldly conditioning, to revolt against the abstractions and deadness of a curated life.
As the great poet T.S. Eliot asks:
Where is the Life we have lost in living?
Here, the 20th-century poet captures the existential emptiness of modern life and how our feverish activity, information overload, and worldly antics can crowd out an authentic, meaningful existence. We lose our lives in living them — “martyrs of modern progress.”
However, beyond our lethargic existence in this digitalized dungeon, we deeply yearn for moments that catapult us above the everyday consciousness of our trivial lives into the higher realms of reality that underlie the self-reinforcing representation of the material universe.
And what are these “higher realms” of reality I’m speaking of?
Moments of profound awe that lift us beyond the ordinary self and its immediate concerns. It’s a feeling of unity, numinous presence, and radical insight, usually out of reach in the everyday activity of modern civilization. The conditions of modern life keep us from seeing beyond the veil of productivity, consumption, and constant stimulation, beyond the illusions and abstractions of our makeshift reality.
We’re walled in and have grown used to pacing in the prison yard.
Our world today honors the superficial and the quantifiable while neglecting contemplation, tradition, and transcendence. As Dr. Alexander Lowen writes: “When wealth occupies a higher position than wisdom, when notoriety is admired more than dignity, when success is more important than self-respect, the culture itself overvalues ‘image’ and must be regarded as narcissistic.”
Wordsworth, writing a century before Eliot, started out a poem with these poignant lines:
The world is too much with us; late and soon, Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers.
Like Eliot, Wordsworth understood that when the fabricated world of consumption, status, cheap entertainment, clock-time, and manufactured appetites becomes the dominant rhythm of our lives, it eats up the very faculties that would allow us to live more fully. We lose the most fundamental aspects of Being—attention, wonder, and the capacity to feel the presence of what is not useful or ownable.
A systematized life organized primarily around accumulation and expenditure leaves us unable to receive what the earth and the cosmos are still offering.
“Modern man lives under the illusion that he knows what he wants, while he actually wants what he is supposed to want.”
~ Erich Fromm
In this epoch of dissolution, we still have the capacity to see through the facade of human-centered reality. Beyond the screens, soulless buildings, advertisements, schedules, algorithms, alarm clocks, news, and entertainment, there’s a larger reality than what we can measure. And the most profound experiences of life occur when our ordinary sense of ourselves as separate individuals briefly falls away and we encounter the mystery of existence directly.
Awe, Mystery, Beauty. These are the hidden doors into “the sublime wonder of living.” Once you strip away all the distractions, artificiality, stimulation, and excess, a deeper experience of reality takes hold.
A sunset mountain range, a springtime meadow, the Milky Way in the midnight sky, sipping wine in the dark while serenaded by the soaring melodies of Tchaikovsky, the paintings of Rembrandt, or simply the sunlight falling through trees in the early morning can suddenly interrupt the ordinary machinery of consciousness.
Beauty and mystery have this uncanny ability to arrest us, and for a few seconds, we stop wanting something from the world and simply behold it.
This vital shift is what Abraham Joshua Heschel called radical amazement, “a way of going beyond what is given in thing and thought, refusing to take anything for granted, to regard anything as final. It is our honest response to the grandeur and mystery of reality.”
I’d like to end with the beautiful words of Joseph Campbell, who I think captures the essence of it all.
“Anyone who has had an experience of mystery knows that there is a dimension of the universe that is not that which is available to his senses.
There is a pertinent saying in one of the Upanishads: When before the beauty of a sunset or of a mountain you pause and exclaim, ‘Ah,’ you are participating in divinity. Such a moment of participation involves a realization of the wonder and sheer beauty of existence.
People living in the world of nature experience such moments every day. They live in the recognition of something there that is much greater than the human dimension.”
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