Transcendence and Mystery for Atheists

In “The Power Of Meaning,” Emily Esfahani Smith presents four “pillars” that she sees as foundational to creating a life that feels meaningful. The pillars are: belonging, purpose, storytelling, and transcendence. Belonging is secular enough. No issue there for atheists who want to feel their lives matter (and who doesn’t want that?). One might say that purpose and storytelling could slide away from secularity if we equate them with destiny or fate, but I think that’s easily avoided. Purpose is the purpose we create for ourselves. Personal narratives are the stories we craft to gain perspective on our lives.

But transcendence. Well, most skeptics will have a visceral response to that word.

Let’s linger on transcendence a moment though. Do transcendent experiences or feelings have to contain elements of religiosity? The Merriam-Webster definition of “transcendent” is exceeding usual limits; extending or lying beyond the limits of ordinary experience; being beyond comprehension. Google offers: surpassing the ordinary; exceptional. Of course, transcendence has historically been claimed by religion, but I think we can wrestle it away from magical thinking. Extraordinary doesn’t mean divine, it only means something that surpasses mundane experience – something amplified by its exceptionality when compared to our usual monotony; something magnificent. By that account, visiting the Grand Canyon, staring up at the Milky Way, being enthralled by a symphony, or attending an immersive art experience are all secular ways to transcend the ordinary – events characterized by their ability to impart sublime emotion.

There’s a variant of transcendence that also interests me, and that’s self-transcendence. I like this definition of self-transcendence in an experimental setting: “transient mental states marked by decreased self-salience [ego death] and increased feelings of connectedness”1. Our sense of self fades away and we feel a heightened sense of oneness. Sam Harris addressed how atheists can accomplish these states through meditation and psychedelics in his book “Waking Up.” God need not apply. Our brains are perfectly capable of the “small self” experience without any divine intervention (unless you consider mushrooms holy, and I may not fault you there). Why am I interested in that? Because self-transcendence (dissolution of the self) is a well-described avenue to ameliorating death anxiety. It explains why psilocybin is increasingly being offered to terminally ill patients, and why meditative states of selflessness are often accompanied by peacefulness, even when reflecting on death.

So, feelings of transcendence are universally accessible.

But why stop there in my crusade of reclamation. I want to talk about awe and wonder. I want to talk about mystery.

“Mystery” has (like transcendence) been contaminated, but if we equate mystery to “that which is beyond comprehension,” there’s secular footing. There are plenty of things that feel so vast or ineffable that we could label them “beyond comprehension.” The scale of the universe or the radical improbability of your existing come instantly to mind. Sure, we could say mystery is the unexplained (which will instantly raise hackles), but could experiences that feel unexplain-able also qualify? If we define mystery as that which is profound, or inexplicable, then certainly our feelings when contemplating the cosmos belong in that category. How a fetus goes from blastula to baby in 9 months is well understood by science, it’s not super-natural or unexplained, but that magnificent process, and the emotions parents feel in the delivery room when marveling at new life, may certainly be called inexplicable.

Can mystery reside not only in the how, or in the why, but also in the what the f*ck how cool is this? Can grand fascination at entirely explainable phenomena still be considered mysterious? Or is “mystery” so polluted that we can never use the term?

Why do I even care? Great question, me. I care because I often find myself listening to atheists who deny (wholly or in part) that those feelings of transcendence, mystery, or wonder are in any way important to the human experience. And now that I’m almost north of 50 books about mortality and meaning reviewed for this blog, I feel confident in saying that’s just not true. Feeling part of something bigger than ourselves, fascination and awe and sublime emotion are central to fuller lives. Emily Esfahani Smith explained why that’s true, as have many other psychologists, existential psychotherapists, philosophers, and death anxiety researchers.

To discount such experiences as inherently religious or magical is a great poverty that nonbelievers visit on themselves. Terms like transcendent or mystical or spiritual can be used by nonbelievers to describe the quality of experience without the implication that they are also statements about the reality of the events that inspire them.

1) https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1037/gpr0000102