19 January 2015

A taxonomy of transcendence

Russell Brand [has] moved... from the downward ego-transcendence of drug addiction, to the false transcendence of celebrity, to the perennialist transcendence of Transcendental Meditation, and now to a sort of spiritual version of historical materialist transcendence. 
A young Jihadist, by contrast, may move from traditional religious transcendence towards the downward transcendence of extreme violence, mixed with the millenarial utopianism of historical materialist transcendence.
from The Varieties of Transcendent Experience by Jules Evans

Image: Gesture dance by Oskar Schlemmer (1922)

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