The religious experience
Discussions about transcendence often begin with questions about the origins of religion and that aspect of God’s nature and power that is wholly independent of the world, universe and natural laws. The religious experience somehow overcomes the limits of physical existence.
One suggestion is that religion arose to promote social bonding by positing a God who punishes: the fear of God motivates the social good. But anthropology suggests this is not universal of all religions; and where it’s present, it seems to arise after big societies have formed (to manage complex social groupings) rather than before as a cause of them.
Another suggestion has been that religion arose to explain natural phenomenon that sometimes also happened to provide an evolutionary benefit to surviving their environment. But anthropology also suggests that early societies survived because they were acutely aware of their physical environments rather because of their supernatural beliefs.
Evolving effervescently
An alternative view draws on Emile Durkheim’s concept of effervescence- the buzz that occurs when people come together in synchronised and collective ceremonies and rituals, and is experienced as that aspect of the sum that feels greater than its parts. Individual members become excited and feel a loss of individuality, thereby unifying the group.
The day to day tasks of the group are profane while the rare occasions when the group convenes become sacred. The high energy associated with these events gets directed onto physical objects, people, totems and other symbols or people that also become sacred.
On this view, our evolutionary ancestors experienced effervescence when their endorphins surged when they began to make music, dance and sing together. The shared intensity of these experiences and their neurobiology eased tensions, forged bonds and paved the path for larger social groups.
As human minds became more sophisticated and developed intentionality, some supernatural realm could have been posited to make sense of the buzz that seemed to transcend them individually. Maybe the advent of agriculture, villages and towns made groups more complex, leading to social tensions and so the prosocial effects of transcendent experiences could be drawn on from day to day by institutionalising these experiences into religious rituals, although at the cost of diluting the intensity of these experiences.
The evolutionary tendency to be tribal rests on an evolutionary taste for what surpasses tribal experiences- the transcendence that human glimpsed in altered states of consciousness that enabled them to form tribes in the first place.
Secular effervescence
Since transcendent experiences have tended to be linked to supernatural worlds, they seem to have been side lined with the rise of scientific culture or medicalised- at least negative transcendent experiences, such as psychosis that may include delusions, paranoia, depersonalisation and hallucinations. Moreover, political society has become more disciplinarian and regulated so that the good citizen is to remain under self control rather than valuing opportunities to lose control of theirs selves.
But should there be greater support for studying and facilitating transcendent experiences in contemporary society given that the lack of doing so is historically anomalous, and their appeal endures?
People were having transcendent experiences in 1940s dancehalls, dancing to a big band; now we do it with drum machines and electronic technology- it’s the same concept. Humanity hasn’t changed for 100,000 years, but our technology has.
Blow Minds 