IMMANENT VS. TRANSCENDENT

Transcendent vs. Immanent is a dyad meant to be a contrast binary referring to religion origin.  These two terms are meant to mark a crucial different in the understanding of the worlds by noting that one is about only what can be perceived in the world and the other is about what can only be imagined, perhaps dignified by the claim to be believed.

So I'll try to break up the opposition.  It is all about the boundary between what can be perceived and what cannot.  The trick the world has played on us is that we have extended our perception (both concrete and in terms of proofs that are not sensory) so far that what was only transcendent or simply unimaginable has now extended the immanent world beyond anything that existed in the past when previous religions were framed up.

Merriam Webster:  transcendent

: exceeding usual limits : SURPASSING

: extending or lying beyond the limits of ordinary experience

in Kantian philosophy : being beyond the limits of all possible experience and knowledge

: being beyond comprehension

: transcending the universe or material existence

: universally applicable or significant

Merriam-Webster: immanent

: INDWELLING, INHERENT

: being within the limits of possible experience or knowledge

— compare TRANSCENDENT

This change means we're going to have to invent a new category:  what was once transcendent and is now perceptible, which is what people have dreaded -- making the world ordinary and removing the core "mysterium et facsinanse" that some of us definitely feel when we are with the holy, the sacred, the deeply moving -- whether or not it is blissful or torture.  So now the immanent somehow rises from the transcendent?  The felt coming up out of the unknown?  The immanent felt as a forming source in the transcendent?  

We've been reaching for ultimate knowledge of reality in some ultimate sense the way God is supposed to be an ultimate human who can know everything there is.  In short, we resent and resist our limits.  But when we manage to exceed them, we can be terrified by eternal, ultimate, infinity.  Maybe there is no limit.  Maybe even God is just a mental figure, religious algebra.

I'm ignoring the immanent in my thought, feeling that if the transcendent can't be known, it's not worth thinking about.  I want to know how to create that crossing the boundary imposed by being human into a particular state that can be better described now that we admit that feeling/emotion is a kind of knowledge held in the whole body.  Once a person has felt the sacred, can we remember how to feel it again?  

I've slowly had to admit that many people are not capable of the sacred nor even stepping outside their daily accustomed lives.  It's a puzzle whether this is a incapacity that was lost or never developed or suppressed by society.   I'm tempted to suspect that this is evolutionary capacity that has mutated and persisted in some people but not others.

But what is it?  Certain parts of the brain, when stimulated, can make a person hear voices or have visions.  Certain tumors can make a person think they have personal conversations with God (or even can BE God) and so on, but that's not what I'm talking about.  

Yesterday I posted two photos, one was a human-made depiction bead-by-bead that participates in the living embodiments of creation on a very tiny scale, in a way that indigenous people always depict the world around them.  The other was a photograph that seized a moment in time when the elegant pattern on the sky suggests the order of the cosmos.  Instead of going on-and-on, I'll just re-post them, even though there are an infinite number all around you.