Every climb begins below the transcendental tree line. Enclosed by rich canopies of interweaving needles and wandering clouds and with nowhere to look except forward, early stages of character development involve following one’s heart and keeping a keen eye on the dim path ahead.
Plenty of treasures lie near the foot of the mountain, yet we refrained from indulging; sure, we want treasure, but our hearts yearn for something richer. And so we've brought only what is needed, carefully disentangled wants from needs since needs are so often conflated with wants. Shedding material riches lightens our load, enabling us to reach new heights.
Higher up, as the air becomes thinner, the heavy tree cover and wandering clouds are left behind. Overlapping columns of brown bark make way for vivid collisions of blue sky with the adjacent rocky peaks, and green needled blankets and grey clouds make way for a magnificent glowing sun.
And while the trees are left behind, we can carry on. Our lightened load reveals the possibility of rising above the transcendental tree line, where more profound and meaningful nonmaterial riches can be found.
Eventually we transcend above the tree line. Below, awareness was centered on oneself and the task at hand; above lies an opportunity to attend to something greater. This expansive recognition is the key feature of the last consilient virtue in the Cultivating Character series: transcendence.
We close the series with a discussion surrounding the transcendental character strengths. Transcendence itself is a sort of ethereal and vague term, so it helps to define it. Maslow referred to transcendence as the highest, most inclusive, and holistic level of human awareness, ranging from an awareness of oneself, to significant others, to other humans, to other species, to nature, and to the cosmos1. The greater the breadth and depth of this awareness, the more one can be said to have transcended. This entire time, what we’ve been climbing beyond is a narrow sense of self. We spend our lives identifying with this and that, but to transcend involves shedding the with, gaining altitude, looking down with warmth and simply identifying.
From the higher vantage point afforded to us by the other virtues (courage, love, justice, temperance, wisdom), we gain the gifts of profound recognition that form the basis of the transcendental character strengths. Above the transcendental tree line, we gain an appreciation of the beauty and excellence that envelopes us. We look back with gratitude, thankful for all that brought us here. We look forward with hope, our journey being evidence that difficulties can be overcome, which feeds our faith that the future can overcome theirs as well. We look below with humor, the world which so often seems large and serious now, from this perspective, seeming small and ridiculous. Finally, the higher we go, the more freely the winds flow, so that gusts of spirited wind—breaths of life that source spirituality—flow through us, connecting us to the whole we inhabit.
Appreciation of Beauty and Excellence
Expand and Contract
In pursuit of knowledge, every day something is added.
In the practice of the Tao [the Way], every day something is dropped.
— Tao Te Ching, Verse 48 (translation by Stephen Mitchell, 1995)
In the high country of the mind one has to become adjusted to the thinner air of uncertainty, and to the enormous magnitude of the questions asked and the proposed answers.
— Robert Pirsig
When the transcendental tree line is crossed, the surrounding beauty and wonder overflows awareness. In reality, however, achieving transcendence is not as simple as a gradual climb marked with a definitive finish line. Instead, transcending involves ebbs and flows and sinks and floats and contractions and expansions. It involves taking breaths of life.
A terrain of experience sits before each of us. To help navigate this terrain, all life builds maps to represent it. Since the terrain is unbelievably vast and profound, the maps we create can only be crude reconstructions of it.
Our maps improve in accuracy when we learn. Learning is what occurs during the inhalation phase of the breath of life. When we learn, attention narrows and the channels of understanding are deepened. Our map develops more details, fitting closer to the terrain we’re trying to describe. Its during inhalations when we get familiar with the extraordinary scope of the terrain and the limitations of our maps.
During the exhalation phase of the breaths of life, our attention relaxes. As this happens, relaxed attention and a warm love flows through the deepened channels of our mind. It's during this relaxation where new channels are discovered; love broadens our map, allowing us to attend to more. This process brings us closer to the terrain, and the feelings that this union produces are magical. The most profound moments of life are experienced downstream of this gliding attention: the laughter of friends, a twinkling night sky, the sweet smell of flowers. Life is richer when we slowly exhale breaths of life.
Deep inhalations develop more profound understanding of the terrain. Deep exhalations relax attention, break pre-existing boundaries, and enlighten oneself to the benefits of deepened grooves. Inhalations of knowledge bring our maps closer to the terrain; exhalations of love bring the terrain closer to our maps.
If life is spent taking shallow breaths, one's experience of life will be shallow. Less will be understood and less will be felt. This is one reason why, for instance, meditation practices are so keen on honing attention. Centering one's mind on thoughts and sensations deepens the experiential grooves related to those thoughts and sensations, so that when it comes time to relax, we're flooded with feelings that weren't available prior to the deepening. The laughter of friends, the twinkling night sky, the smell of flowers all reach deeper within us and provoke a more profound appreciation.
Profound appreciation is what the first transcendental character strength--appreciation of beauty and excellence--is all about. Those with this strength notice and appreciate excellence, whether it be towards a physical beauty or wonder, a talented display, or in witness to an uplifting virtuous act.
Appreciation of beauty and excellence can be elevated in two ways: by amplifying beauty and excellence or by amplifying appreciation.
The first is an approach that religions and nations leverage with their music, architecture, festivals, rituals, and stories. There are also natural settings that are so vast and wonderous that amplification comes as a given; think the view of a mountain range or a sparkling night sky.
The enormous magnitude of an elaborate human production or a grand landscape floods us with the feeling of awe. Keltner and Haidt (2003) noticed that two central features provoke awe: the perceived vastness of the stimulus and a difficulty of accommodating the stimulus into one's knowledge base. Awe fills us when our maps are overwhelmed by the terrain, a belittling and overpowering reminder that our maps are feeble and finite relative to the world they attempt to describe. When we contemplate the vastness of space or the sheer amount of practice an acrobat needs to invest to perfect a routine, the difficulty with imagining the answers to these questions floors us and demands appreciation.
The second approach to enhancing appreciation of beauty and excellence is to emphasize appreciation itself. Grand performances and vast landscapes have the luxury of demanding attention and flooding the grooves of our maps by force. The wonderful benefit of elevating appreciation is that deep appreciation can be attained without expensive and infrequent experiences. Cultivating this appreciation, however, is tough work--it requires deepening and broadening channels.
Confucius once said that the common man marvels at the uncommon, while the wise man marvels at the commonplace. This may seem snobby, but it reaches deep into our discussion here. When our channels of understanding are deepened and our maps are broadened, the interconnectedness of the world becomes more apparent and the commonplace becomes more interesting. A leaf no longer becomes just a leaf. It becomes a solar panel and a source of life for insects that munch on them; insects are a source of life for the birds that eat them; birds grace us with their lovely songs and aerial shows; and so on. There is an endless chain of causality lying latent within each and everything we attend to, waiting to be discovered. These chains of causality are discovered by taking deep breaths of life.
Along with shallow breaths, there is another inhibitor of awe: excessive self-absorption. In a study measuring self-transcendence in participants, researchers found that high scorers were more wise and patient; creative and self-forgetful; and united with the universe. Low scorers, on the other hand, were described as impatient; unimaginative and self-conscious; and proud and lacking humility.
When we're too self-involved, our maps involve too much of ourselves so that the terrain we yearn to connect to is obscured. Channels relevant only to ourselves are made available and awesome things have a harder time making their way past our self-infatuation; if we're too busy admiring ourselves, we're less able to admire whatever attractions we flock to and miss them altogether. Using genuine attractions to further ourselves misses the whole point of them and leaves us shallow and empty. When we're self-absorbed we're also more vulnerable to being lured into meaningless attractions that fill the ego and drain joy.
Gratitude
Relax and Receive
How can I be sad? Am I blind? The Sun shines on me. This very instant have I won brilliance for my wealth.
— Ramayana (translation by William Buck, 1976)
A common theme in this discussion, and in the series as a whole, will be that self-absorption, this prideful sense of “I am more important,” obstructs truth and tends to leave us lost. Our spiritual climb has required shedding the sticky illusions that emerge from the slime of pride. Spiritual enlightenment requires lightening.
Pride, at its essence, builds boundaries around something and proceeds to call that something everything. When we feel proud, the underlying thrust behind that feeling is that we accomplished something alone. Sure, we may have some awareness of whatever helped us, but generally the surges of pleasant feelings are brought to a boil by belief of ownership. We take ownership of an accomplishment or an idea or an identity, and because we believe it is ours there is no reason to be thankful for it.
Pride implies entitlement. Those who serve only themselves will thus find it difficult to be grateful. If one is entitled to everything, then one is thankful for nothing. Despite what advertisers may want you to otherwise believe, you can't give yourself gifts.
The antidote to pride is humility, which gradually erases the more in the “I am more important.” And as that more fades away, the importance of everything else around us is revealed. We begin to see how our importance is fed by something important here, and how our importance feeds something else important there. Fostering this recognition of interdependence, these inhalations and exhalations of importance, replenishes the wells of gratitude. This revealing of the whole—this revelation—reveals much more to be thankful for.
Fostering thankfulness plays a role into why spiritual institutions have ritualized humility. Some rituals include prostration (bowing before something greater), feet washing (honor and humiliation), and confession (acknowledgment of mistakes). Spiritual scriptures often refer to objects of worship as a mother or father, the parental reference implying worship of something forever older and wiser than we. These are themes that dial back self-importance, force us to acknowledge our mortal limitations, and remind you that there is more to life than just you.
So, given this emphasis on humility, religiosity and spirituality unsurprisingly tend to correlate with gratitude, which also correlates positively with favorable traits such as life satisfaction and a belief that one's actions make a difference. Gratitude is also inversely correlated with negative traits such as depression, narcissism, hostility, and extrinsic religiosity2 (p. 561), a trait that describes those who tend to use religion or religious affiliation for ends rather than means. That is, the extrinsically religious ask what their religion can do for them rather what they can do for their religion. More on this later.
Since gratitude evidences a lack of pride, and pride fuels all other sin, where you find gratitude you will be pressed to find greed and gluttony, anger and enviousness, and lust and laziness. For instance, grateful people tend to place less importance on material goods (greed and gluttony) and are less envious of wealthy persons3. Those rated high in gratitude are also able to recollect more positive memories when prompted, suggesting the mind makes for a more pleasant place to be when ego is absent.
Lastly, to fully appreciate one’s blessings it helps to have an awareness of what life would be like without them. A mild spring is cherished after a miserable winter, and a meal turns technicolor after a long fast. If we never endure hardship, there is nothing to measure our gratitude against. The good (or bad?) news is, everyone will endure hardship at some point. So, might as well make that hardship voluntary. Exercise, for instance, is a voluntary hardship that makes us more grateful of rest and relaxation. If we don't exercise, however, we'll be more prone to involuntary hardships such as illness and disease, which disturbs our rest and relaxation! In the former, we feel a sense of control and default to gratitude. In the latter, we feel less safe and it becomes difficult to be grateful—What if it happens again? If you’re going to suffer, and you will, try your best to make it happen on your own terms.
Hope
Fostering Faith
Just as gratitude comes more easily when challenges have been overcome, so do hope and optimism. When we’re hopeful or optimistic about the future, we have a belief that goals will be achieved despite the difficulties along the way.
Since hope requires us to project into the future, we can never know exactly what the outcome will be. Hope is therefore a belief, and all beliefs are constructed from building blocks of prior experience.
This makes prior experience crucial to how we believe the future will unfold. If we never build the competence to endure and overcome hardship, what makes us think that we’d be able to overcome them in the future? This doubt inevitably bleeds into our view of others, as people lacking courage and motivation will struggle to see a world in which others overcome their obstacles because they have failed to overcome their own.
When we lack experience, we naturally become unsure of ourselves and how problems will be faced in the future. The unease associated with facing this unbearable uncertainty manifests as anxiety. “If so and so happens, what will I do?” If you've never done anything, of course you won’t know what you'll do! Faced with an overwhelming wave of “what ifs,” we drown in uncertainty.
Uncertainty is unbearable; therefore, often times negativity bias will lead us to desperately cling to the worst “what if” to take refuge in a false sense of certainty. This clinging to negativity manifests as depression. We’d rather suffer with certainty than rest calmly in chaos.
Unfortunately, despair doesn’t stop the fact that we’re still wading through pools of “what ifs”. The only way to reduce uncertainty, to free yourself from the grips of anxiety and despair, is to prove to yourself that everything will work itself out regardless of outcome. And the only way to foster that feeling is to gain experience and develop competence. Hope and optimism are associated with “achievement in all sorts of domains (academic, athletic, military, political, and vocational); freedom from anxiety and depression; good social relationships; and physical well-being.”4 Well-being, whether it be physical, mental, social, or occupational, depends on well-developed maps.
Gaining some control and surfing waves of “what ifs” requires knowing some of their answers. “What if I fail?” can be answered with "Well, I've failed before, and I learned something from it and became better.” Do difficult things. Fail, dust yourself off, and move forward. Cowards will remain fragile, they will see others as fragile, and they will see the future as fragile. Dystopias—a sort of blind pessimism—are created by cowards. Utopias too—a sort of blind optimism—lack the realism that comes from a grounding in legitimate experience. Cowardice leads to blind, incomplete maps.
So be courageous and you will realize how resilient you really are. You’ll see others as resilient, and the future as resilient and capable of adapting to whatever difficulties they may face. Courage brought us up this mountain, and it’s why we’ve managed to surge past the transcendental tree line. From up here, we’re not necessarily granted the ability to predict the future; instead, we’re granted a clearer sense of life’s ability to face whatever challenges await.
Humor
Laugh and Love
It may seem odd seeing humor as a strength in character. But a humorless list of virtues would be a list of virtue that thinks much of itself, which would make it a deficient list of virtues.
Given the vast and overwhelming complexity of the world around us, things often don’t line up in ways we expect. The perspective we take towards this crazy, confusing, and incongruent world dictates whether we’re able to make light of it or not.
Transcending is impossible when we’re too preoccupied with pride; we take ourselves, our groups, or our situations too seriously. We take ownership of these identities and grasp them tightly. The turbulent world then becomes a threat to these objects of seriousness. This seriousness has no place above the transcendental tree line, the high winds blowing up there would wrestle these objects of seriousness out from our hands and send us scrambling back down the mountain to retrieve them.
When people poke fun at circumstances that feel to us like serious threats, we passionately oppose them and try to impose that seriousness on others. When this heavy atmosphere of seriousness envelopes us, our ability to sense things with lightheartedness vanishes. And this seriousness seriously weighs us down: where psychopathology is found, there’s a good chance a loss of sense of a humor will also be found5 (schizophrenia being a possible exception).
Good humor, on the other hand, is associated with vitality and zest. It serves as a reliable barometer for social warmth and competence, encapsulating the combination of other character strengths such as humility, social intelligence, and creativity. Humor also implies a playful frame of mind. Some people may excel at spotting absurdities and ironies in life, but it is only by being playful that we can find them funny. Humor is a form of play: play with ideas.
It’s no wonder, then, that having a good sense of humor is a quality sought out in romantic partners, friends, and colleagues. Relationships thrive when relational boundaries blend, and a lack of humility decreases the chances that those boundaries can be crossed peacefully. A good way to measure the health of a relationship, whether it be between partners, friends, or a society as a whole, is to see whether humor flows between their relational channels. Too much seriousness and bitterness and superiority dries up these channels and disconnects us.
Spirituality
Breathe in life
I don’t respect the floating borders of Earth,
I travel where I will,
I love everyone.
My friend the Moon has known this for long lifetimes,
I am the Sun,
All the same.
Ancient stories.
Ancient Sunpoems.
Ramayana (translation by William Buck 1976)
The secret of happiness is: Find something more important than you are and dedicate your life to it.
— Daniel Dennett
Dharma leads to happiness, but happiness cannot lead to Dharma.
— Ramayana (translation by William Buck, 1976)
Seated above the transcendental tree line, our conception of past, present, and future are enlightened and made more coherent. The air is thinner up here, which clarifies things. The thin air also demands deeper breaths, which etch and extend our maps. It’s here where we get most intimate with the breath of life.
The word spirituality is derived from the Latin spiritus, which itself means breath of life. Having a strong sense of spirituality refers to having coherent beliefs about a higher purpose and meaning of the universe and one’s place within it, and is typically associated with wisdom and the soul (or equivalently, love).
When it comes to coherence, humans have the luxury of profiting off the spiritual labor of their forefathers. Religious institutions, their rituals, and their stories are the product of the gradual development, refinement, and maintenance of a value system that promoted coherent within-group order. At the expense of some personal pride, members of religion can blend in and benefit from the security offered by the group and the clear moral frame and sense of purpose provided by the religion’s theological framework.
One’s relationship to religion can be separated into intrinsic and extrinsic components. The former refers to more private aspects of one’s faith and a personal striving to maintain behavior that aligns with their creed; the latter refers to more public aspects such as involvement public rituals of worship. Both have benefits. Intrinsic religiousness implies adherence to the value system and being truly humble, that is, doing the right thing when nobody from the public is looking. Extrinsic religiousness provides a tangible connection to community members that can reinvigorate social commitments and personal accountability.
As we learned in our discussion about temperance, too much of anything can produce issues. Excessive intrinsic religiousness distances us from the communities upon which we depend, which can paradoxically lead to spiritual isolation. Excessive extrinsic religiousness may cause us to simply go through the motions of the ritual and use the religion merely for its social benefits.
While religion can make navigating life and meaning easier, it isn’t necessary to embark on a spiritual pursuit. One relevant example is the work of Christopher Peterson and Martin E.P. Seligman, whose research served as the backbone of the Cultivating Character series. Casting a wide net upon the world’s major traditions, they, along with a diverse team of researchers, surfaced the shared virtues that everyone seemed to agree upon: courage, humanity, justice, temperance, wisdom, and transcendence. These virtues are consilient, meaning they transcend the fictional boundaries erected by separate traditions and bridge them together into a coherent whole. This is spirituality at its core.
And just as separate traditions can be brought together into something coherent and meaningful and wonderful, so can you.
There are strengths within you that could use some cultivating. Take some time to nurture each and climb high.
Maslow, Abraham H. The Farther Reaches of Human Nature. New York, Penguin Compass, 1971.
Peterson, Christopher, and Martin E P Seligman. Character Strengths and Virtues : A Handbook and Classification. Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2004, p. 561
Peterson, Christopher, and Martin E P Seligman. Character Strengths and Virtues : A Handbook and Classification. Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2004, p. 562
Peterson, Christopher, and Martin E P Seligman. Character Strengths and Virtues : A Handbook and Classification. Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2004, p. 576
Peterson, Christopher, and Martin E P Seligman. Character Strengths and Virtues : A Handbook and Classification. Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2004, p. 532