Humans are just piles of jibbly meat, highly derived structures propping up a primordial worm / digestive tract. Our overdeveloped sensory processing node/brain wants something more. In their earliest form, brains would have more basic info to process – dark/light, pain/satiation, things like that. Is the human desire for a transcendant experience a misguided version of some kinda worm drive, wanting to move into the light inside the light?
Sometimes experiences feel like they’re touching on an abstract higher realm, like getting closer to god or transcendance or nirvana, whatever. When I’ve felt this it’s usually from music or film, more rarely from physical experience. It’s kind of like buzzing. Like if your thoughts are all wave forms and they’re peaking. Maybe transcendance is just your mind’s wave form hitting a ceiling, like a mistake in audio editing that causes a loud part of a song to turn into an obnoxious rattle. We don’t like hearing that audio track, but if it had a sense of self, maybe it would feel pretty cool.
Anyway, listening to The Doors veers between wondering why you’re listening to this clownish nonsense and feeling like true magick is about more than just casting spells, maaaan. I put my finger on the veins of the cosmos and find the pulse uncanny, retract. Back to work.
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I wish we atheists had a good word for the emotion you describe, the feeling emotional high that comes from the sense of being part of something larger than yourself. Theists call it spirituality or a mountaintop experience, but anyone can get it from anywhere — nature, music, poetry, art, drugs, dance. Transcendence is also a good word, but it too is messed up with a bunch of supernatural connotations. It’s a real feeling — very hard to describe, though the Romantic poets spilled a lot of ink trying.
Sam Scumbag Harris had some interest in the subject before switching to 24-7 nazi fondling, but he was a lot more comfortable than you just saying “spirituality,” as I recall. I’m undecided on terminology, but definitely in favor of this kind of trippin’.
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“I have felt
A presence that disturbs me with the joy
Of elevated thoughts; a sense sublime
Of something far more deeply interfused,
Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns,
And the round ocean and the living air,
And the blue sky, and in the mind of man”
— William Wordsworth
Billy Wordsworth knows what’s up.
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Experience involves cycles of wave activity.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neural_oscillation
Those alpha-theta… waves might be thought of like electron movement from a brain running cyclic charged phenomena.