Transcedence from Person to Human

How do you go from being a reactive person to a conscious, reflective human?  That is the subject of this post.

We live in an objective world and our senses allow us to navigate around, in, and through the objects we encounter every day. This is our normal way of life as a person.  However, without subjective consciousness there is a lot we are missing.

We can tie subjectivity into the objective world because we have a choice. And that choice has to do with transcendence and moving beyond objective consciousness. Transcendence brings understanding to a person about oneself in relation to the objective order of reality. Transcendence is the act of consciously turning toward reflecting on one's thoughts, emotions, feelings, and values. It revises and recasts reality.

Vertical Transcendence

In normal life we experience events happening all the time and react according to our thoughts, values, feelings, and emotions.  An event happens and we observe it. By observing I mean we sense it in some way through our seeing, hearing, smelling, touching, and tasting. We observe an event happen and almost immediately a thought occurs. And then usually some kind of emotion is produced. For example if you see people being slaughtered, or smell rotting flesh, or hear missiles screaming overhead, the thinking process turns almost instantly into an emotion.  You can use your imagination here.

The process of event, observation, thought, and emotion is normal and there is no way to get out of it except go hide in a cave somewhere. Once an emotion is elicited the next thing usually entails some sort of action. Normally what happens is a reaction. A reaction is a reflexive act that causes one to react to a situation automatically, as in reflex action. Because there is no reflective thought in a reaction the result can be devastating to the reactor or the recipient or both. This is why people hit people, shoot people, go to war, ad infinitum.

There is a solution to this madness. It is called vertical transcendence or intrapersonal reflection.  Rather than taking the course of reacting (reflex action) to a situation unconsciously you can immediately observe your thought before the emotion manifests itself thereby short-circuiting the cascading process that leads to the devastating outcome. Whether to react or reflect is an act of conscious awareness. The ability to do this is constituted through one's own choice and results in self growth toward a higher Self.

Continued on next post.