Biotranscendence: Mysticism Demystified
Understanding Transcendence through Technological Substrates and Human-Machine Synthesis
People who use the word transcendence in everyday parlance associate it with internal states relating to metaphysical experiences. To transcend the body is to “rise above” or “move beyond” the flesh. The person who is “transcending” — is by virtue of their internal state — becoming closer to God or Spirit. They are having what enlightened masters call a “mystical experience.”
Many secular thinkers would categorize the term as fundamentally religious or handwave it away as drivel. They would suggest achieving transcendence is a subjective modality of mind that cannot be measured. They would apply negativity or opprobriousness to the word.
Immanuel Kant, who introduced the word to modern philosophy, used the term in scathing metaphysical fashion. He denoted that a human could experience a transcendent mental state a priori, or prior to any kind of lived, objective experience.
In other words, the transcendent state is a floating abstraction or ephemeral will-o’-the-wisp, existing in the marsh of the mind, poised to flicker into nonbeing. Kant said this of the “transcendent freedom,” or what I interpret as “transcendent spiritualism”:
“There is no freedom, but everything in the world takes place entirely according to nature....Transcendental freedom is therefore opposed to the law of causality, and represents such a connection of successive states of effective causes, that no unity of experience is possible with it. It is therefore an empty fiction of the mind, and not to be met with in any experience.”
To this day, the term evokes a spiritual intimation of meaning — or “fiction of the mind,” as Kant said — but that perspective is shifting as secularized thinkers embrace philosophies such as extropianism and transhumanism, which offer novel interpretations of “mysticism” and measurable methods of transcendence in the world of carbon, silicon, and blood.
Prior to examining this secularized transcendence or what we call, biotranscendence, we must explore the implications of mystical transcendence.
The Utility of MDMA Mysticism
I have had several experiences I can only deem as “spiritual” and “transcendent.” Some of those states were plant or chemical induced. For instance, I swallowed a tablet of MDMA that elicited one of these episodes.
I remember taking that first-ever pill and feeling a voluminous sense of unease while coming up. After an hour of jitteriness that came on like a butterfly boogaloo in my belly, the full effect took sway. Lightning bolts of pitched ecstasy raced through my neural circuitry and carved a path through to my center. I became animated and energetic. My eyes rolled around in my head, akin to loosely attached buttons on a blouse.
William Blake, is his poem, “The Auguries of Innocence” perfectly describes the MDMA trip:
To see a World in a Grain of Sand
And a Heaven in a Wild Flower
Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand
And Eternity in an hour
During the experience, I recalled what Zen Masters refer to as the Satori moment; that flash of insight that shakes a person out of the “consensus trance,” as psychologist Charles Tart eloquently dubbed it. This specific "flash of insight” rolled off of my tongue in the form of a mantra:
”I am smarter than anyone ever told me I am.”
“I am smarter than everyone ever told me I am..”
I repeated the self-affirmation ad nauseum.
At the end of the experience — during the “comedown” — my consciousness and perceptual awareness returned to normalcy. I felt the “afterglow” hours into the next day.
The content of the experience was subjective, personal, and introspective. It was like a virtual reality disco reel or festival of lights in the spirit of a Studio Ghibli production, but the “transcendent” element of the experience was undeniably present.
I believed I had “learned something” or felt as if I had “awoken from a long slumber,” not unlike Rip Van Winkle, except I had not physically aged. Instead, I gained knowledge about myself and my life’s journey…self-knowledge I would not have otherwise acquired. I had managed to undo latent trauma by psychoanalyzing myself. I had cleared the cobwebs of mind and discarded years of systemic abuse, indoctrination, and counterproductive thinking.
In the final analysis, the idea of transcendence is not merely a clever metaphor to describe humans hopped-up on mind-states riddled with synchronicities, excess sensuality, and heightened self-awareness. In the throes of the experience, a person genuinely feels like they traveled somewhere wholly different than “earth” or “here.”
The notion of “traveling somewhere” implies something intrinsically true about the idea, which will play out in the material, extrinsic world too.
Biotranscendence: The Paradox of Mysticism
Technological breakthroughs will flesh out “transcendence” via computer catalysts — such as uploading the mind into computer or eliding with synthetic material to become more machinelike. Mystical modes of transcendence will thus marry physical ones, birthing a kind of secular mysticism or biotranscendence.
Biotranscendence is the idea mystical experiences can be lived or experienced by transcending biological flesh. The transcendent experience, then, is vindicated in its entirety through silicon substrates. In the simplest terms, the paradox of mysticism may be dissolved by human explorations of the technological and silicon-driven, digital realms.
Video games and ideas surrounding the metaverse anticipate — and somewhat initiate— secular mysticism. These mediums are prerequisites to mind-uploading, the creation of Nick Bostrom’s ancestor simulations, and the nearly-inevitable merger with machines.
The prescient Ray Kurzweil summed up our predicament:
“Most important, the intelligence that will emerge will continue to represent the human civilization, which is already a human-machine civilization. In other words, future machines will be human, even if they are not biological. This will be the next step in evolution, the next high-level paradigm shift...”
Kurzweil’s paradigm shift is under way, but our union with computers has not come to fruition. Present human-machine augmentation offers us a variety of prosthesis for upgrades. These upgrades are limited however in their capacity to enhance the mind; but within a number of years, linking machines to the brain to generate mystical experiences will become reality (Elon Musk’s Neuralink comes to mind).
The question we have to ask is this: how different will the mystically transcendent experience be from the biotranscendent or synthetically, machine generated experience?
Secular mysticism equates to manipulating digital space or cyberspace to enhance experience and promote transcendence. The experience remains superfiically “mystical,” though, because feelings of being “outside the self,” “evolving,” or “traveling somewhere” remain intact throughout contact with silicon-laced domains of activity.
Our Digital Ontology
Indeed, computation exposes itself as the key to unlocking the secrets of mysticism.
The reality is “mystical experience” is just a cognitive state based on perturbing or altering the material or chemical substrate of consciousnesses. But what is the essential difference between the material substrate of consciousness, the brain, and the current material substrate of computers, silicon? Not much. It is all based on the same immaterial edifice: an energy field comprised of a swarm of pixels that scientists call atoms. That is it. The basis of reality implies we exist in some type of tenuous quantum computational superspace.
Ideas around quantum physics and quantum computing requires the activity of subatomic particles and their exotic behavior. Computing — and many technologies by extension — would not exist without our knowledge of quantum mechanics. We could fully dive into the quantum mysteries that underlie our universe, but that is beyond the scope of this piece.
Suffice it to say, all the talk of mysticism and quantum spaces likewise suggests there is a “God” or divine entity or intelligent designer at work. The truth is neither science or transhumanism posits the existence of a creator, nor requires it.
Mysticism — and by virtue a creator or “God” — is demystified through the process of understanding the biological and digital components of biotranscendence. However, even without a de facto God, the path we are paving with artificial intelligence, quantum computing, and synthetic biology, render the situation more alarming, weird, and incredible.
Our lived “spiritual experiences” are nothing but adumbrations of the vibratory nature of the universe, which we are tapping into using sophisticated computing and years of harnessed digital acumen.
Pierre Teilhard de Chardin said it best when he said, “We are not human beings having a spiritual experience. We are spiritual beings having a human experience.” I would only substitute one word: “spiritual” with “digital.”
We are not human beings have a digital experience, we are digital beings having a human experience.
My position is that the only authentic human transcendent experience, is the spiritual one, which speaks of it as sacred, and godly. This alternative fabricated experience being spoken of, is technically not even human anymore.
I don't speak in those terms but I comprehend you. Consciousness is on a sacred evolutionary journey to reduce it's entropy. It is arguable that biotechnologies can enhance it but my analysis is that it curtails it. There may be consciousnesses that can be downloaded into AI, except as we speak, they are unlike anything you can imagine. Also, be careful what you wish for. This sounds more like John Dee conjuring spirits and demons.