Transcendence In Religion

Transcendence is “the experience we have in our religious environment to something objectively greater.” This is our constant desire for something more. Spirituality is “the gap between what we are, what we aspire to be, and what we think our potential is.” This is what ultimately creates the gap. When focusing on this gap, it goes all the way back to the Ancient Greek and the Egyptians. They would begin with a theory and move to praxis, and apply it to their everyday life. Today, the praxis is developed first and then comes the theory. The theory is “how the universe is compared to how things were in the world”. This caused them to forcibly live in conjunction with the theory and live in coincidence with creation. Spirituality can be explained …show more content…
The four point methods of transcendence are: “the empirical, intellectual, rational, and responsibility.” The empirical is how “we collect data about the world and about ourselves. We sense, perceive, imagine, and feel.” This is constantly happening because we are always collecting data from what we intake in our everyday lives. The intellectual is how “we come to understand, see patterns, make connections, and take in the context and processes.” The rational is how “we reflect, marshall evidence, pass judgement on the truth or falsity, and the certainty or probability of what we have come to understand.” And lastly, the responsibility is how “we concern ourselves, establish goals, discern action, carry our decisions, and decide whether the truth moves us to goodness and commits us to the good.” Once one reaches the fourth method, the action turns into a imperative. Imperatives leads to what shapes our vision and helps us fully understand our experiences. A transcendental experience is something “you have to pursue and be open to experience, it is a kind of discipline.” So by using the imperatives of “being attentive, being intelligent, being reasonable, and being responsible, ” one can become fully human. By becoming fully human, one “attempts to understand what it means to be fully alive, really engaged, and fully charged on life.” One becomes fully human if one becomes dedicated to completing these processes and acknowledges the universe is “on our side,” and that …show more content…
Rudolph Otto describes the holy as “I am who I am.” The three emotions include the “Mysterium” (mystery), “Tremendum” (the fear), and the “Fascinans” (fascination of God). The experience of the holy is paradigmatic which is “the way you shape your reality and perspectives on life experiences.” For example in class we talked about the home being a special place to be yourself and reflect. This connects to homology because it allows us to “develop our personhood around the experience of the numinous, making us more like Christ.” The experience of the sacred divides reality because you could either have the “same” or the “other.” The “same is the sharing of social boundaries” and the “other are not sharing of social boundaries.” When there is a divide as a result of the “same” and the “other,” that leads to prejudice and hatred because people devalue others based on their experiences. Social boundary is “each description of yourself that isolates other descriptions that the self cannot relate to.” It can also relate to the “sacred” and the “profane.” The sacred are considered the holy people, where the profane is humankind. This can lead to tough boundaries or porous boundaries. Tough boundaries can cause contempt for other people on the other side of the boundary. To contrast, porous boundaries can cause openness and an enriching environment that allows for new social