What I've learned about transformation design thus far #34

Transcendent experiences share certain characteristics across cultures, contexts, and traditions.

There is expansion: the sense that boundaries have widened, that the self now includes more than it did before. This can be spatial, feeling at one with a landscape, a building, the cosmos itself. It can be temporal, sensing connection to ancestors, to future generations, to the eternal. It can be relational, experiencing profound unity with another person, a group, or all beings.

There is dissolution: the sense that the boundary separating self from not-self has become permeable or has disappeared altogether. The ordinary sense of being a separate observer, looking out at a world, gives way to something more immediate. Subject and object merge. The watcher and the watched become one.