To transcend definition
To transcend means to be capable of seeing things from let us say non-standard, non- conform, surely minority point of view. The connotation of this word, thanks to this movement, acquired additional overtones suggesting ‘radical’ change of one’s beliefs, cutting oneself off from the social norms and standards, freeing oneself from the patterns gained through a process of socialization, reevaluating one’s religious beliefs and, most importantly, discovering a new authority – the authority of the Self. New Agers would use terms such as: to see the bigger picture, to perceive things from a higher perspective, to raise one’s consciousness, to escape from the ‘Matrix’. Surprisingly, these expressions apply to Transcendentalism of the nineteenth century as well as to the New Age movement of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.
To transcend means “to go beyond,” but this need not compel us to adopt an ornate dualist view that regards transcendent levels of reality (such as the spiritual level) to be not of this world. We can “go beyond” the “ordinary” powers of the material world through the power of patterns. It’s through the emergent powers of