Fractal Iteration and the Concept of Transcendence

I found this short tutorial on youtube, which can be applied to the concept of UniThou by thinking of ‘Uni’ as the immanent/depth aspect, and Thou as the developmental aspect.
As Thou develops, it becomes broader, and Uni ‘involves’ while becoming deeper.

Those breath-taking moments in which the two aspects are in harmony, are what I refer to as moments of discovery, where the transcendent experience that I term ‘UniThou’ takes place. UniThou is not an experience we can cling to at all, because it’s not a god or an object or anything conceivable. The moment of discovery, itself, is what we truly desire, because of its indescribable uniqueness, for each individual, and for each new time it occurs. Any interpretation of the experience will never do it justice, so we let it go, but the journey goes on. Why? Because the appetite, or curiosity returns, due to the fact that, while we have expanded consciousness, our potential to experience that discovery has also deepened.

The fractal shows us that we aren’t just ‘going around in circles’ on the path of UniThou, but are becoming more multi-dimensional as we spiral into and out of the darkness.

The Problem with Transcendence

These are the definitions of the word “Transcendence” taken from thefreedictionary.com:

1. Surpassing others; preeminent or supreme.
2. Lying beyond the ordinary range of perception: “fails to achieve a transcendent significance in suffering and squalor” (National Review).
3. Philosophy
a. Transcending the Aristotelian categories.
b. In Kant’s theory of knowledge, being beyond the limits of experience and hence unknowable.
4. Being above and independent of the material universe. Used of the Deity

In Unithou, the higher and lower plains exist in our minds, not in some ideal imaginary realm where a deity presides and presumes to judge our actions. This imaginary realm is often thought to be a plateau of sorts, which we’ll reach at some point and won’t have to try any more. Some traditions talk of reincarnation as being a return to the material world, due to one not having earned the privilege yet to reside on the transcendental plateau permanently: thus, they return here, life after life, until they are deemed ready to remain in the transcendental realm.

I once had a talk with a Hare Krishna fellow who was handing out free books about reincarnation to people on the street. He said to me “Do you really want to come back to this world, man? I definitely don’t!”. I tried to encourage him to look further, and feed his mind by reading other philosophies besides the Bhagavad Gita, and he replied “Don’t you think I’ve had time to look, man?”. So then I tried to explain that he was being mislead, and that Krishna was present here and now. He said “Oh, so you’ve seen Krishna have you?”, I said “Yes, I have.” (the word Krishna translates as “all attractive”), he said “So what did he look like?”, to which I replied “You!”. He shook his head and turned his back on me. His belief in a transcendental deity blinds him of his own unique divinity, and has him all the time looking outside of himself for the experience of bliss. His mantras and meditations are designed to help him escape this earthly realm as much as possible in his day-to-day life.

He believes that people are superior to animals, even though they actually do a better job of living in harmony with nature than us. He has a shaved head, with one of those rat’s tails at the back, and follows the teachings of a painted face freak. He’s looked for the truth, and found a bunch of people dressed in old indian garb with a book/doctrine which has simply reprogrammed him into a different kind of subservience. Their greatest trick is to tell us that it is not a religion!

Unithou is a religion of presence and positivity, designed to help us recognise our own unique divinity, and the divinity present within others, as well as to encourage vitality and individual liberation.

“We could say that meditation doesn’t have a reason or doesn’t have a purpose. In this respect it’s unlike almost all other things we do except perhaps making music and dancing. When we make music we don’t do it in order to reach a certain point, such as the end of the composition. If that were the purpose of music then obviously the fastest players would be the best. Also, when we are dancing we are not aiming to arrive at a particular place on the floor as in a journey. When we dance, the journey itself is the point, as when we play music the playing itself is the point. And exactly the same thing is true in meditation. Meditation is the discovery that the point of life is always arrived at in the immediate moment.” (Alan Watts).