Here’s a thing that probably has a better name already; I’d love to know what that is.

how good is life?

People have different answers to that, and sometimes it depends on your circumstances. There’s a common-sense view that life is good if your circumstances are good: you have good family and friends, good food and housing, you’re healthy, you work on engaging things -> life is good. You’re lonely, poor, sick, etc -> life is bad. If your circumstances are +3 good, your life is +3 good. Let’s call this the “worldly view.”

And then there’s the idea that your circumstances don’t matter so much. You can “choose” to be happy, no matter your exterior world. Or, less straw-manned: maybe you can’t be +10 happy if your world is -10 bad, but you can tweak it a couple points. Maybe your world is -2 but you can, through a combination of willpower, smart mental patterns, meditation, idk, maybe you can experience it as +3. Let’s call this the “transcendent view.”

We could even say something like: your “transcendence index” is the maximum N you think it’s possible such that one’s circumstances are M but they experience them as M+N. Full transcendence would be 20 (“you could be at -10 but experience it as +10”); full worldliness is 0. (“your life is exactly as good as your circumstances.")

examples

• most people, most of the time: pretty worldly
• St. Whoever the Ascetic who wrote about how much they love God despite living in a hole in the ground: very transcendent
• Clayton Schwartz, author of Two Arms and a Head (review, but warning, even the review is quite grim): worldly
• cluster headache sufferers: worldly
• Nick C or jhana fans: transcendent
• Shinzen Young¹: transcendent
• A couple of people I know who came down with cancer and lots of horrendous chemo who nevertheless felt even stronger, after that, that they want to live: pretty transcendent
• Many people’s experiences on many substances: transcendent
• Many people’s near-death experiences: transcendent
• Those same people, when they have to go back to their lives, chop wood, and carry water: maybe a step or two more transcendent than before, but pretty worldly again.

so which is it

I don’t know. It certainly feels naive to assume more than, say, 5 points of transcendence is possible. Look at Clayton Schwartz; his life is probably varying between -10 and -7 depending on the day; how could one possibly hope for him to improve to something consistently >0, something worth living?

And yet, some people survived Auschwitz, which seemingly must require transcendent hope. Living transcendently must be possible.

… how does one get there?