Our biological nature is to transcend which is the ability to raise and go beyond limitation and constraint. This can be seen in the evolutionary structure of the brain, new structures being added that raise and go beyond limitations and constraints of the previous structure. Most think of transcendence as a etheric spiritual process. We are talking about the very foundation of the life process which expresses during every age and stage of human development, what we call childhood.

Our biological system is designed by nature to transcend.  The dictionary definition of transcendence is to rise and go beyond limitation and constraint.  It’s actually the ability to rise and go beyond limitation and constraint.  We find that the way the evolutionary structures of the brain themselves have formed over the hundreds of millions of years is a constant addition of the new structure of the brain to go beyond the limitations and constraints of the previous structure.  That all is our real heritage, a series of built-in neural capacities to rise above and go beyond whatever the constraints of the previous system might have been. That’s the meaning of the biology of transcendence. 

We consider transcendence an airy-fairy, ethereal, high level, spiritual, process, but we’re talking simply about the intelligence of life itself, always.  When you say transcending itself, always going beyond the limitations, it’s present limitations and constraints.  So when we begin to look at transcendence as a biological process, it makes it very real and tangible, working at something extremely practical and sensible. 

However, the book is based on the fact that either you develop the transcendent capacity to go beyond limitation and constraint or you get violence.  There are only these two possibilities with the human; violence or transcendence.  If you block your transcendence, you’re blocking your ability to rise above limitation and constraint.  So immediately you’re hemmed in by limitation and constraint which drives the human crazy.  He’s not designed for that.  He’s designed to go beyond limitation and constraint.  So if you block that, you’re always going to get violence in some form. 

And so, the book addresses the issue of why is it on the one hand we have all these lofty transcendent ideas, all these beautiful philosophies and religions and so forth, on the other hand we’re tearing each other to pieces and the earth to pieces and our children to pieces and so on and so forth.  This great paradox that has made up human history is from not recognizing transcendence to be a purely biological process and responding on a biological level rather than projecting it off onto cloud nine and ethereal spirits and so on and so forth.