Self Transcendence Quotes

“Looking into her eyes, I see the emptiness of my mind reflected in the vibration of my heart—love without the presence of 'Me.”
― Raz Mihal, Just Love Her

“I cannot withdraw into myself. I exist, outside myself and everywhere in the world. There is not an inch of my path which does not encroach on the path of another: there is no way of being that can prevent me from overflowing myself at every moment. This life that I weave with my own substance, it offers other men a thousand unknown faces, it crosses impetuously their fate.”
― Simone de Beauvoir, The Blood of Others

“Can a person crave to destroy himself and at the same time wish to transmute himself into a fuller being? Is destruction of a central part of us necessary in order to transform ourselves? How do perceptive people fend off their destructive impulses, through insensibility or with greatness of mind? How can an ordinary person such as me, deficient in natural talent and ignorant in the ways of the world, blunt the self-doubt and the fear that nips at my heels? How does a vegetative character such as me express the vivacity of life while counterbalancing the immutable sorrows that accompany our struggles to glean meaning in life? How does anyone function rationally knowing that his or her life will ruefully end with death?”
― Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls

“If he stays inside himself, if he is contained within his nature as he is participant in the larger force, he will be able to listen, and his hearing through himself will give him secrets objects share.”
― Charles Olson

“The root of faults is nothing other than your ego-clinging, the attitude of deluded fixation, so cut the ties of ego-clinging! Cast away the fixation on enemy and friend! Forsake worldly concerns! Abandon materialistic pursuits! Engage in nothing but the Dharma from the core of your heart! Just as a seedling doesn't grow on a stone, there will be no enhancement without removing the fault of ego-clinging. You should therefore abandon the root of all evils, ego-clinging. (p. 90)”
― Padmasambhava, Advice from the Lotus-Born: A Collection of Padmasambhava's Advice to the Dakini Yeshe Tsogyal and Other Close Disciples

“Movement offers us pleasure, identity, belonging and hope. It puts us in places that are good for us, whether that's outdoors in nature, in an environment that challenges us, or with a supportive community. It allows us to redefine ourselves and reimagine what is possible. It makes social connection easier and self-transcendence possible.
Each of these benefits can be realized through other means. There are multiple paths to discovery and many ways to build community. Happiness can be found in any number of roles and pastimes; solace can be taken in poetry, prayer or art. Exercise need not replace any of these other sources of meaning and joy.
Yet physical activity stands out in its ability to fulfill so many human needs, and that makes it worth considering as a fundamentally valuable endeavour. It is as if what is good in us is most easily activated or accessed through movement. As rower Kimberley Sogge put it, when she described to me why the Head of the Charles Regatta was such a peak experience, "The highest spirit of humanity gets to come out." Ethicist Sigmund Loland came to a similar conclusion, declaring that an exercise pill would be a poor substitute for physical activity. As he wrote, "Rejecting exercise means rejecting significant experiences of being human.”
― Kelly McGonigal, The Joy of Movement: How exercise helps us find happiness, hope, connection, and courage

“The quality of interpersonal relationships that we forge when purposefully engaging in work that advances the interest of the multitudes is the shining endorsement to a life well lived. Within the corners of each person’s private and public canvas lies his or her masterpiece. Each person’s matchless artistry provides an indelible testament to how he or she lived. A person’s lifetime body of work unequivocally expresses a road map to their innermost salvation. Only by actualizing our innate natural mind can any of us funnel our motivational forces into directional inspiration that leads us to peacefulness and wisdom. All efforts to achieve meaningful tributes to a life well lived are noisy affairs that clang in our hearts. Only through death can any of us attain a state of soundless perfection.”
― Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls

“Do people who love more suffer more? Is love merely a tinted simile for accepting ourselves and unequivocally embracing other people’s ululating heart songs? Is hate the failure to love? Is evil merely the absence of good? Alternatively, is the root of hate and evil more than the lack of love and absence off goodness? Is darkness the absence of light, or does darkness encapsulate its own dynamism? Does the interaction of piousness and sinfulness along with the intermingling of knowledge and ignorance shadow our souls similar to how darkness interferes with light to create shades of opaqueness? What is self-love? Is it important to love oneself? Alternatively, is no self the ultimate test?”
― Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls

“It is important to apprehend the full gamut of emotions that are available to all thinking, feeling, and compassionate human beings? Does self-love open a person’s gracious heart and mind enabling them generously to love and genially to care for other people? Without self-love, does a person lack the emotional quotient necessary to feel both genuine affection and empathy for our brethren? Must I commence a fundamental transformation of the self by eliminating a toxic dosage of self-hatred? Will newly discovered self-respect place me on the path towards obtaining personal enlightenment? Alternatively, is eliminating any concept of the self the fundamental charter that I must devote all days and nights to achieve?”
― Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls

“Do I live out the remainder of my life striving to increase a mental storehouse of intellectual knowledge or by expanding a state of conscious awareness? Should my ultimate goal be to decode all the paradoxes in life or nurture a state of cognitive awareness? Should I strive to develop internal peace, silence, and tranquility? Must I rely upon the intuitive self to reconnect innate root structure and link myself to the essential means of living life deeply? By courageously striving to conquer illicit personal desires, can I develop a state of mirror-like purity of consciousness that allows a person to serve as a gracious and unbiased witness to the surrounding world?”
― Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls

“The greatest gift that one generation bestows on its successors is striving valiantly to make every day of a person’s life count by working to enhance human knowledge and teaching what we learn to willing learners. Every generation of human beings owes a debt of immense gratitude to the forerunning generations who worked to solve problems that bedevil humanity and for exhibiting a profound reverence for all forms of life.”
― Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls

“There is no communication possible between men any longer, now that the codes have been destroyed, including even the code of exchange in repetition. We are all condemned to silence - unless we create our own relation with the world and try to tie other people into the meaning we thus create. That is what composing is. Doing solely for the sake of doing, without trying artificially to recreate the old codes in order to reinsert communication into them. Inventing new codes, inventing the message at the same time as the language. Playing for one's own pleasure, which alone can create the conditions for new communication. A concept such as this seems natural in the context of music. But it reaches far beyond that; it relates to the emergence of the free act, self-transcendence, pleasure of being instead of having.”
― Jacques Attali, Noise: The Political Economy of Music

“Self-improvement begins by recognizing personal faults.”
― Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls

“Can the act of narrative writing alter the writer’s mental alignment and will an honest chronicle and extended effort at seeking answers to a vexatious series of pending personal questions eventually place the author on an even keel? What other motive, good or evil, could possibly cause an essayist to write in such a torrid manner? With each line that I write, I beg to stop. The lines just keep tumbling out. Is there no end to this nightmarish experience of examination and reexamination? Is there no relief in sight to this modest attempt to form my storyline into an intelligible quest? Many days of writing go nowhere; blank pages replicate the blandness of life, whereas other days I sense progress towards an indiscernible and undefinable goal. If I write long enough, what will I finally discover gazing back at me?”
― Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls

“Each day I attempt to establish a conjugated ring of reasons to rise tomorrow. Each day I seek to engage in some audible act of faith reaffirming a spiritual warrior’s commitment to living. Each day when engaged in investigative writing, I seek to perform some testimonial act that will lead me towards achieving desirable, premeditated change. Each day that I dabble with writing a deliberative memoir requires a scathing examination of how I lived. It also demands scrupulous assessment of how I want to live the remainder of an unspooling life.”
― Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls

“Without the fervor to taste life’s bewitching fruit and in absence of a keenness to gain personal knowledge gained through exploring, probing, surveillance, and self-scrutiny, I risk apathy, befuddlement, and lethargy overwhelming me.”
― Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls

“What does a person do when life crushes them? Is it absurd to want a different life? Alternatively, are personal dreams the only facet of life that we exclusively possess that can sustain us in time of distress?”
― Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls

“The Intelligence Supernova wouldn't happen simultaneously for everyone at once, though. Some people may choose to stay in their biological form longer than others who would choose to 'migrate' to the Metaverse. For individual human minds, this 'Novacene' event would basically signify a 'pseudo-death,' i.e., self-transcendence. It's when you suddenly become 'someone bigger.”
― Alex M. Vikoulov, The Intelligence Supernova: Essays on Cybernetic Transhumanism, The Simulation Singularity & The Syntellect Emergence

“Our brains do not generate consciousness since our minds are embedded into the larger consciousness system. We humans are deep down information technology running on genetic, neural and societal codes. Self-transcendence from a bio-human or cyberhuman into a higher-dimensional info-being might be closer than you think.”
― Alex M. Vikoulov, The Syntellect Hypothesis: Five Paradigms of the Mind's Evolution

“People have been willing to alter their perceptions of reality for as long as there have been people, and now, the newest and oldest tools to explore ways for self-transcendence are coming together: Biohacking is on the rise and psychedelics are now oftentimes used to enhance experience in virtual reality.”
― Alex M. Vikoulov, The Intelligence Supernova: Essays on Cybernetic Transhumanism, The Simulation Singularity & The Syntellect Emergence

“By contemplating the full spectrum of scenarios of the coming technological singularities many can place their bets in favor of the Cybernetic Singularity which is the surest path to cybernetic immortality and engineered godhood as opposed to the AI Singularity when Homo sapiens is hastily retired as a senescent parent. This meta-system transition from the networked Global Brain to the Gaian Mind is all about evolution of our own individual minds, it’s all about our own Self-Transcendence.”
― Alex M. Vikoulov, The Syntellect Hypothesis: Five Paradigms of the Mind's Evolution

“Being in love with someone is wanting his or her happiness. It is not wanting to possess him or her for our happiness. That’s possessiveness and desire for control. But when we’re really in love with others, we want only their happiness. We forget about our happiness, and then, therefore, ironically, we get very happy, because we temporarily stop worrying about how happy we are. When we forget about how happy we are, we become happy. That’s why people like to be in love, because when they’re in love, they focus only on the beauty and the happiness of the beloved other. (p. 127)”
― Robert A.F. Thurman, The Jewel Tree of Tibet: The Enlightenment Engine of Tibetan Buddhism

“In the forest canopied with the leafy niche of daily events, a benevolent listener reverberates in the canonical poetry of the ages humming irrepressible visceral contradictions. A squall of tears of bereavement pierces the elegiac sea of a silent night. The red-rimmed eye of sunrise greets us with a torrent of rage spilling over from frontlines of an examined life’s vital quarrels. The flute of life ushers in a welcoming breeze of reassuring resonance.”
― Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls

“Let the games begin. I shall commence an Olympian contest by attempting to conquer my fiendish ego, slay the warty toad that is destroying a peaceful sanctuary, and endeavor to reach a heightened state of personal awareness. The deepest chamber within commands me to either change or die; I can no longer survive as a loathsome creature that is repugnant to every aspect of humanity and civilization. To do or die, because money does not make a man, no one cares when I die or how much money a person banked. I need to resist the endless commercial propaganda and political doggerel spewed by television and social media sites that encourage stifling conformism in order to advance philistine cultural values. I shall honor this moment of intuitive realization by endeavoring to exterminate the toad that unwittingly governs me before this ghastly beast kills me by spewing its contemptible poison.”
― Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls

“The inspiration of a noble cause involving human interests wide and far, enables men to do things they did not dream themselves capable of before, and which they were not capable of alone. The consciousness of belonging, vitally, to something beyond individuality; of being part of a personality that reaches we know not where, in space and in time, greatens the heart to the limits of the soul's ideal.”
― Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain

“-Sic vos non nobis- --not for you yourselves -- says Virgil to his bees and birds building nests and storing up food, mostly for others. Strange shadows fall across the glamour of glory. The law of sharing for the most of mankind seems to be that each shall give his best according to some inner commandment, and receive according to the decree of some far divinity, whose face is of a stranger, and whose heart is alien to the motives and sympathies that animate his own.”
― Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain

“Traditional marriage understood this, and its most enlightened response to this difficulty was to treat these frustrations and disappointments as an opportunity to self-transcend:

"Your wife no longer has sex with you? Excellent! Use your involuntary celibacy as a chance to examine your own carnal attachment. Your kids leave you no time for yourself? Wonderful. Use your maternal responsibility as a means to overcome your residual selfishness. You're no longer satisfied with your relationship?Phenomenal. Use your dissatisfaction as an opportunity to realize you are entitled to absolutely nothing in this life. And this perspective isn't necessarily wrong. Marriage did demand that people self-transcend - at least as long as they couldn't get out of it. And while it may not have been exactly what people wanted - the argument could be made that it might just have been what people needed in order to mature into fully functional adults.

The issue is that willingly entering into difficulty because it can be used as an opportunity for growth is about as appealing to most people as running a marathon on their day off. [ ..] Most people will run a marathon (or at least the point of utter exhaustion) if they are forced to start and prevented from stopping. And among such people will be those able to create a virtue out of necessity and who will helpfully explain to anyone within earshot that running this far is an excellent opportunity to 'grow up.”
― Orion Taraban, The Value of Others

“Traditional marriage understood this, and its most enlightened response to this difficulty was to treat these frustrations and disappointments as an opportunity to self-transcend:

"Your wife no longer has sex with you? Excellent! Use your involuntary celibacy as a chance to examine your own carnal attachment. Your kids leave you no time for yourself? Wonderful. Use your maternal responsibility as a means to overcome your residual selfishness. You're no longer satisfied with your relationship?Phenomenal. Use your dissatisfaction as an opportunity to realize you are entitled to absolutely nothing in this life. And this perspective isn't necessarily wrong. Marriage did demand that people self-transcend - at least as long as they couldn't get out of it. And while it may not have been exactly what people wanted - the argument could be made that it might just have been what people needed in order to mature into fully functional adults.

The issue is that willingly entering into difficulty because it can be used as an opportunity for growth is about as appealing to most people as running a marathon on their day off [...]. Most people will run a marathon (or at least to the point of utter exhaustion) if they are forced to start and prevented from stopping. And among such people will be those able to create a virtue out of necessity and who will helpfully explain to anyone within earshot that running this far is an excellent opportunity to 'grow up.”
― Orion Taraban, The Value of Others

“I have got to make everything that has happened to me good for me. There is not a single degradation of the body which I must not try and make into a spiritualising of the soul.”
― Oscar Wilde, De Profundis and Other Writings

“You don’t graduate earth by dodging the hard stuff. You outgrow the self that buckles under it.”
― David Maze, 9 Analogies of Consciousness