Language Matters - Transcendence or Transformation? by Rev. Dan Granda

  

Transformation and Evolution: We do deep inner personal work of self discovery and healing to reveal the greater truth of our divinity, wholeness, and freedom.

- From “Our Shared Values,” Centers for Spiritual Living Operation Design Model

Language is really important. Everybody wants to be understood, to see, and to be seen. It is part of our soul’s desire to share of ourselves and our experiences with others. However, language can also be inherently complex. How often have you tried to share the true depth of an experience with someone else only to find your words simply fall short? Our words tend not to carry the full energy or feeling of the actual experience we are trying to describe. Add to the fact that every single word we have learned comes with all of the history and story that we have attached to it along the way. To make it even more complex, everyone else has their own history and their own story to every word they know. Can I ever really know what you mean when you say a word? At worst, words can be our greatest assumptions. At best, words are our closest estimate.

Thankfully, there is much more to communicating than just our words but we can save that for another time. Let’s lean into the importance of our words for a little bit here. Part of the challenge in understanding the words we each use comes down to how we learn a language. Whether it is our primary language, a second language, or even the language of a specific school of thought, most of the time we don’t learn language by its definition. We learn it through experience. This seems especially true within a teaching like the Science of Mind where there is a tendency toward a very specific vernacular. It becomes necessary to infuse specific jargon into your vocabulary in order to understand and even “speak” Science of Mind. However, most of this jargon is picked up through reading or in conversation with others who are already using it. Often we are left on our own to decipher meaning through context clues and other the filter of our own experience. This leaves a great deal of room for attaching previous life experiences to words that, outside of that previous context, can mean something very different. Similarly, this also creates opportunities for words that have multiple uses with subtle differences to be greatly misunderstood.

One of the greatest examples — and one with a not-so-subtle impact on what it is we actually believe in the teaching of the Science of Mind — is the word transcendence.

For this example, I am going to say “we” to refer to those who practice the Science of Mind. I recognize this may not be universally true for every individual in that group, but for fun let’s pretend it is OK at this moment to use “we” in the way that we so often use “they” to declare unfair, broad sweeping statements.

Somewhere along the line we bought into this word transcendence but missed out on the very important nuance at play. Yes, the Science of Mind uses the word transcendence but probably not in the way that most people think of the word.

To the general public, the word transcendence when used in a spiritual or religious context tends to refer to a transcendent God; one that is completely separate from its creation. It transcends its creation. Applied to the human experience, transcendence means that humans would do the same; that the goal is transcending and leaving the human experience. Religions that believe in karmic reincarnation believe that transcendence is the goal of human life; to somehow “get it all correct” in order to move on.

The context of transcendence within the Science of Mind, something that might not get clarified nearly enough, however, is not one of transcending the human experience but one of transcending appearances.

We must transcend the appearance, even though we admit it as a fact. We are not so cold-blooded as to say to a person with pain that there is no such thing as pain. That is not our idea or purpose. We admit the fact. IT IS QUITE A DIFFERENT THING TO ADMIT ITS NECESSITY. (Ernest Holmes, The Science of Mind, 1938, p.213.3)

This excerpt from The Science of Mind is one of the most notably clarifying statements when it comes to the Science of Mind perspective on transcendence, as well as our take on life itself. The implications of a misunderstanding of transcendence are actually massive. If God is transcendent and separate from this human experience that changes our whole relationship to the universe we live in — this implies duality, that there must then be God and something else. The inverse, which is what Holmes declared to be universally true, is that God is immanent, within and through all of its creation, and never separate — necessitating an infinite being. Everything then is God — literally everything.

Let us take this a logical step further then. “We must transcend the appearance, even though we admit it as a fact….” Everything we see and experience, even and especially that which is less than desirable, is also part of this same infinite being that we call by many names. This must mean then that there is actually nothing to transcend except our own perception of the thing we don’t like. But even that thing is a part of the whole that is God.

I would like to suggest we begin using a different word rather than transcendence. It is not a new word to the teaching. In fact, it is used throughout the writings of Holmes, yet for some reason, it has not caught our collective attention nearly as much — most likely because it does not have the same type of historically religious lineage as transcendence. Imagine if we shifted our collective misbelief from transcendence to transformation.

We do not change all of the patterns of our thought in a moment. Rather, it takes place little by little, until gradually the old thought patterns become transformed into new ones by some inner alchemy of the mind, the operation of which we do not see but the manifestation of which we do experience. (Ernest Holmes, 365 Science of Mind, 2001, p. 114.1)

Transformation is an empowering belief, one that is rooted in wholeness and oneness. It makes room for the immanent, infinite being that we say we believe in, as well as the whole of our experience, while simultaneously infusing us with the ability to change the situation we find ourselves in. We are not separate from the experience we find ourselves participating in, nor are we separate from the invisible forces behind the scenes that bring change to that experience. Transformation empowers us. It is important that our language back that up.

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Rev. Dan Granda is dedicated to a graceful uncovering of the human soul, imagining a world where it is common and lovingly accepted to bare your soul openly for others to see. Devoted to studying the evolution of human collective awareness, Rev. Dan can regularly be heard speaking to this shift happening in our world, inviting individuals to embrace the responsibility we have to each other and the community around themselves.