WHY TRANSCENDENTAL METHOD?

Why Transcendental Method?

If I could tell you what transcendental method (TM) is in a few short sentences so that you would thoroughly understand it, I or others would not need to write books about it. So let us begin.

TM is a theory, where the data of reference for the theory is the human mind; and of course, this includes your mind. Further, TM is something you can explore and know about; you can, and often do, speak of it in common and-or theoretical terms; and you can verify it every time you or someone else thinks, speaks, listens, or writes—this book is about that verification process.

Further, the import of TM is not in the knowing about it, though knowing-about is helpful in a psychological and even theoretical sense. Rather its fullest import is in its call for that rare and satisfying moment of personal illumination that occurs when the theory and the knowing meet the full reality of the datum which, in this case, is the living you.

Such an illumination is a high moment of critical self-knowledge that comes at the end of a self-directed learning process; however, it also begins another process that constitutes a unique kind of self-integration; for the light that illuminates is our object, and if we come to understand it, that light illuminates its own procedural self; and, again, the light and the procedure is in you.

Furthermore, teachers and parents among my readers will recognize the moment of illumination, or the insight that I speak of as the “Aha! moment” —that moment when a child’s face lights up, and we have no doubt that they “got it.”

The differences are that the moment of our own focus has the “Aha!” itself, and its surrounding operations, as its content-in-operation; and that we will refer to this Aha! in its critical form and with this content as the illuminating moments of self-appropriation and self-affirmation. We do so because this Aha constitutes a new and broader self-awareness, a new kind of unity and, consequently, a new beginning, not only for your own self-understanding, but for your unfolding understanding of everything else you can possibly ask about, come to know, create, talk about, or do.

In the briefest of explanations, then, first, you already have transcendental method working within you. TM-the-theory is a clear and technical definition of TM-the-reality where your Aha! moments occur.

Second, then, transcendental method is the structure and complex dynamism of the desire and motivation behind the light—the light that is most obvious to us when we are actually having an insight or set of insights.

And, third, self-appropriation is the discovery of, and self-affirmation is the critical knowledge of transcendental method -the-reality. Both constitute a fully illuminated and conscious embrace of that dynamic and motivating complex where the mind's procedures and the illumination of insight continue to occur in a fashion familiar to all but the comatose among us.