Self Transcendence

Transcend is from Latin trans- “across” and scandere “to climb.” Literally, to climb across. The same verb gives English ascend (climb up), descend (climb down), condescend (climb down with), and escalator (etymologically just “ladder”). The Greek skandalon — the stumbling-block over which one fails to climb — is the same root. From it English gets scandal. The obstacle and the going-over are the same word.

The Daoist Daodejing, chapter 48: in learning, daily add; in the Way, daily subtract; subtract and again subtract, until you reach non-action. The path is via subtraction. Every other tradition that names something to acquire is, on the Daoist account, going the wrong way.

Abraham Maslow (1908–1970), born in Brooklyn to Russian Jewish immigrants, founded humanistic psychology in the 1950s. The five-tier hierarchy of needs — physiological, safety, love, esteem, self-actualization — appeared in his 1943 paper “A Theory of Human Motivation” in Psychological Review. It is the version everyone has seen.

Viktor Frankl (1905–1997), born in Vienna three years earlier, was a Jewish psychiatrist when the Nazis arrived. He was deported to Theresienstadt in 1942, then Auschwitz, then Kaufering, then Türkheim. His pregnant wife Tilly died at Bergen-Belsen. His parents died in the camps. His brother died at Auschwitz. Frankl survived, returned to Vienna in 1945, and wrote Ein Psycholog erlebt das Konzentrationslager in nine days — published in 1946, translated into English in 1959 as Man’s Search for Meaning. He founded logotherapy on a single claim: the central drive of the human being is the will to meaning, not the will to pleasure (Freud) or the will to power (Adler). Meaning is found by giving oneself to a cause or to another person — that is, in self-transcendence.

Frankl’s argument directly contradicted Maslow’s pyramid. The hierarchy said self-actualization was the peak. Frankl said self-actualization was not even an attainable goal; it was a side-effect of aiming elsewhere. The two men corresponded. They met. Maslow read Frankl closely. By the late 1960s — Maslow’s 1969 paper “The Farther Reaches of Human Nature” sketches it — Maslow was preparing a revision: self-transcendence placed above self-actualization at the top of the hierarchy. He died of a heart attack on June 8, 1970, in Menlo Park, California, at sixty-two. The revision was incomplete.

On January 16, 2001, Marcus Raichle and colleagues at Washington University in St. Louis published “A default mode of brain function” in PNAS. The discovery was accidental. The group had been studying which brain regions activate during cognitive tasks. They kept finding regions that consistently deactivated during tasks — and that those regions were the most metabolically active at baseline. The brain’s resting state was not rest at all. It was a different kind of work.

The set of regions they named the Default Mode Network — medial prefrontal cortex, posterior cingulate / precuneus, angular gyrus, hippocampus — corresponds approximately to mind-wandering, autobiographical memory, simulation of other minds, and what philosophers call the narrative self. When you are doing nothing, the DMN is running. The work the brain does at idle is the work of being a self.

Eleven years later, Robin Carhart-Harris and colleagues at Imperial College London put psilocybin in volunteers’ bloodstreams while the subjects were in an fMRI scanner. The Default Mode Network suppressed. Blood flow and oxygen consumption dropped specifically in the DMN regions. Subjects reported ego dissolution: the felt boundary between self and world collapsed. The suppression correlated with the subjective reports — the stronger the felt dissolution, the deeper the DMN drop.

Long-term meditation produces the same suppression (Judson Brewer et al., PNAS, 2011). Flow does the same (Arne Dietrich’s transient hypofrontality, 2003). Athletic in the zone, contemplative samādhi, and chemically-occasioned ego dissolution all turn down the same network. Three idioms — performance, devotion, intoxication — for one neural protocol.

On Good Friday — April 20, 1962 — Walter Pahnke, a Harvard PhD student supervised by Timothy Leary, conducted what would become the most-cited single experiment in the psychology of religious experience. Twenty graduate students from Andover Newton Theological School attended the Good Friday service at Marsh Chapel, Boston University. Ten received 30 milligrams of psilocybin in a gelatin capsule. Ten received nicotinic acid as placebo, which produces a faint flush. The service proceeded normally. The students were not told which capsule they had received.

Pahnke had derived a nine-category scale from William James’s 1902 Varieties of Religious Experience — ineffability, noetic quality, transiency, passivity, unity, transcendence of time and space, deeply positive mood, sacredness, paradoxicality. Subjects completed the scale immediately after the service and again a week later. Of the ten psilocybin recipients, eight met criteria for a complete mystical experience. None of the controls did. When the transcripts were read blind by external graders, they could not be distinguished from canonical accounts by Meister Eckhart, Teresa of Ávila, or the anonymous author of the Cloud of Unknowing. A divinity student in 1962 Boston, given a chemical at a religious service, produced a report indistinguishable from a 14th-century Carmelite.

Pahnke wrote up the experiment as his PhD thesis. One subject had a psychotic episode mid-service and had to be sedated. Pahnke died young in 1971, in a scuba accident. Rick Doblin’s 25-year follow-up (Journal of Transpersonal Psychology, 1991) found that the surviving subjects still ranked the Good Friday experience as among the most spiritually significant of their lives — a quarter-century later, the chemically-occasioned hour had stayed where ordinary religious experience usually does not.

David Hume, twenty-eight years old, in Book I, Part IV, Section VI of the Treatise — “Of Personal Identity” — conducted an experiment. He went looking for the self by introspection. He could not find it. There was no central observer behind the observations. There was only the bundle.

Twenty-three centuries earlier, in Magadha in northern India, the Buddha had reached the same conclusion by the same method. The Anattalakkhana Sutta — the Discourse on the Mark of Non-Self, delivered to the five ascetics at Isipatana five days after the first sermon — analyzed experience into five skandhas: form, sensation, perception, mental formations, consciousness. No permanent self underlying them. Only the process. Two introspections, twenty-three hundred years apart, in cultures that did not communicate, found the same gap.

Derek Parfit closed the loop in Reasons and Persons (1984), developing the bundle theory in contemporary analytic philosophy with explicit reference to both Hume and the Buddhist sources. He added a first-person report: arriving at the no-self conclusion had changed his felt experience of personal identity for the better. The topic, he said, had ceased to oppress him.

Britta Hölzel and Sara Lazar showed in 2011 that eight weeks of Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction was enough to produce measurable gray-matter density changes in the hippocampus and posterior cingulate. The argument takes centuries to converge; the cortex takes weeks. The same self-modification arrives by two routes — careful skepticism and sustained attention — and the brain that reaches it is not the brain that started.

The race was founded in 1997 by the Bengali spiritual teacher Sri Chinmoy (1931–2007), who had emigrated from East Pakistan to New York in 1964 and developed a teaching in which extreme athletic effort served as a vehicle for going beyond what the body and the self believed to be possible. The course name is literal. The distance is not the obstacle. The self that wants to stop is the obstacle.

The runners — many but not all are practitioners of Sri Chinmoy’s path — describe the race in language that overlaps the contemplative texts. They lose track of who is running. The lap becomes the lap of a different mind. The thing they are running away from cannot be outdistanced; the only direction available is through. They sleep four to six hours; they run eighteen. They dodge double-parked cars, school groups, mail carriers, and one another. Most of them are not professional ultrarunners. They are middle-aged people from many countries who have decided that what they want is to know what is on the other side of fifty-two consecutive days of a thing they cannot finish by trying harder.

The Daoists named the path wuwei: non-doing. Zen built koans on trying-not-to-try. The 14th-century English text The Cloud of Unknowing counsels approaching God by un-knowing. Krishnamurti, in the 20th century, said the observer IS the observed; the seeker IS what is sought. Patañjali’s Yoga Sūtras require both abhyāsa (practice) and vairāgya (non-attachment) — both at once, in opposing directions. Aim too hard at the practice and you miss; aim too hard at the non-attachment and you also miss.

The neurological correlate is exact. Voluntary effort engages the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, the salience network, and parts of the DMN itself — the same circuitry the brain is supposed to quiet for the state to arise. The harder you try to suppress the self-monitor, the more self-monitoring you have just recruited. The beginner meditator concentrating harder is reactivating the network they sat down to quiet. A system whose goal is to be a system without goals is in a state contradiction the brain implements structurally. Frankl’s side-effect formulation, the 14th-century cloud, Patañjali’s two-handed grip, and 21st-century task-network neuroscience all describe one architecture.

A Latin verb that means “climb across.” A Pali word that means “non-self,” from the Buddha’s second sermon. A Sanskrit word that means “release”; a Greek word that means “empty”; an Arabic word that means “annihilate”; a Chinese phrase that means “do not do.” Six vocabularies, pairwise contradictory, naming one destination. A Brooklyn psychologist whose textbook pyramid was published in 1943 and is still in every introductory text. A Viennese psychiatrist whose camps killed his parents, his brother, his pregnant wife, and who wrote in nine days the argument that self-actualization is only a side-effect of self-transcendence. A heart attack in Menlo Park on June 8, 1970, before the revision was published. A brain network discovered accidentally in 2001 because it kept being the thing that turned off when the brain was asked to do something — and that turned out to be the network that runs being a continuous self. Psilocybin in an fMRI scanner in 2012, the network suppressed, the volunteer reporting the boundary between self and world had collapsed. The same suppression in flow, in samādhi, in fifty-two days of running around a Queens city block 5,649 times. Twenty divinity students at Marsh Chapel in 1962. A Scottish philosopher in 1739 who looked for the self and could not find it, finding what the Buddha had found twenty-three centuries earlier. Eight weeks of mindfulness practice that move the hippocampal gray matter. A disorder called DDD whose patients are reporting Eckhart’s experience with the wrong affect. A race named after the obstacle.

Every one of these names the same shape — a workspace the brain runs, and that the brain can quiet, by accident, by drug, by practice, by attention, by exhaustion. The phenomenology converges. The vocabularies don’t. The textbook is still wrong. The thing the textbook describes still climbs.