We Need Post-Church Spaces, Part 8: Let’s Nurture Modern Transcendence

The Illuminated Dance Party, by Patricia Arroyo

In last week’s installment, I argued that Post-Church Spaces (PCSs) in addition to community, transcendence, and growth, need to:

• be physically embedded in communities similar to regular churches;

• take a page from contemporary megachurches and offer amenities like restaurants, coffee shops, and concerts that have nothing to do with its central purpose; and

• be thoroughly post-religious.

The reason for these requisites is that PCSs are not “retreats” from modern life, but must rather be integrated into modern life. With these requisites in mind, I described what I thought would be the backbone of flexible and diverse community in PCSs: Authentic Relating. This week, I’ll describe what I think should be the backbone of the second pillar of PCSs: non-religious experiential moments of transcendence.

As I argued in part 5 of this series, the modern world has become disenchanted. OLD world humans had the wind at their back when it came to experiencing transcendence because for them the world was infused with spirit. Myths were not fictional but were descriptions of how things came to be, the way things are, and, most importantly, the way things should be. Angels and demons, gods and anti-gods were everywhere and potentially responsible for every occurrence, action, thought, and feeling.

If transcendence involves a sense of being lifted out of one’s ordinary, mundane consciousness then humans were much closer to transcendence in the OLD, pre-modern, mythical world. (When I re-write this in longer form I want to put a section here about the cognitive anthropologist Merlin Donald who proposed a theory about human cultural evolution that describes how we passed from an oral, mythic culture into a writing-based theoretic culture. This move, now thousands of years old, laid the groundwork for the modern disenchantment under which we all live.)

Three reasons why experiences of transcendence have become much harder to come by for anyone sucked into the vortex of WEIRD modernity:

1. We no longer live under a “sacred canopy,” as Peter Berger described, in which every aspect of our lives is connected to a sacred, transcendent order;

2. Every conventional aspect of modern daily life has a materialist explanation, from an astronomical explanation of the lights we see in the sky to meteorological explanations of the weather, down to neurotransmitter explanations of our highest and lowest subjective experiences;

3. Because most transcendent experiences for humans in the past came in groups, the loss of community leads to a loss of potential transcendent experiences.

Three reasons why modern WEIRDos like you and me need to bring transcendence back into our lives:

1. Transcendence is mentally, emotionally, and physically therapeutic insofar as it helps us get out of our heads into our bodies;

2. Transcendence is communal in that when we do practices of transcendence together, we experience connection with others in ways beyond words;

3. Transcendence, as a break from everyday consciousness, helps us grow as people by showing us new things about ourselves.

So, yes, it would be lovely to have some of this transcendence in our lives, but perhaps the most important reason transcendence is so hard to come by in the WEIRD world is that we don’t have the conceptual framework or social containers for them. Providing such frameworks and containers would be one of the most important services PCSs can provide us.

By conceptual framework, I mean a way for a diverse, flexible, and dynamic community to access and make sense of experiences of transcendence.

Six ways PCSs can provide a framework for transcendence that fits into modern, diverse, flexible, and dynamic communities:

1. PCSs would provide and support practices that reliably produce transcendence AND also do not require any prior belief system (such as ecstatic dance, group singing, and holotropic-style breathwork, which I’ll outline below).

2. PCSs would discourage reifying visions, messages, and feelings from transcendent experiences (that is, we wouldn’t try to turn visions, messages, and feelings into objective reality or the way things “actually are”).

3. PCSs would encourage visions, messages, and feelings from transcendent experiences to be treated as personal and provisional, as experiences to be processed, examined, and held with care.

4. PCSs would differentiate practices of transcendence from their historical traditions so that these practices can be integrated into diverse, dynamic modern contexts (I can already imagine the resistance by many who get a lot out of connecting transcendent practices back to their historical heritage).

5. PCSs would aim for transcendent experiences that produce greater individuation, maturity, and more complex communal ties, rather than a simplistic enmeshment in a communal whole.

6. PCSs would recognize that transcendence has levels—“mild” transcendence (like nature, singing, or art) can be experienced everyday and easily integrated into our lives; moderate transcendence (like a big group ecstatic dance or breathwork) needs more time to integrate and so weekly or several times a month might be more appropriate; and big transcendence (like an intense holotropic breathwork or psychedelic experience) will need even more time to process and integrate and so might be more appropriate to do it quarterly.

This conceptual framework would support the Post-Church “social container.” A container refers to culture and relationships, and the container a PCS provides would normalize practices of transcendence and also help process and hold space for such experiences.

So what are these practices that can reliably produce experiences of transcendence? Recall that I defined a transcendent experience as one that lifts us out of our mundane, ordinary consciousness and into an experience of something greater than our individual existence. In part 6, I mentioned a few of the ways we touch transcendence in modern life: at concerts and sporting events, and in nature and art. One problem with these is that insofar as they are communal, they lack power, and insofar as they have power, they lack community.

I believe that there are practices available to us that can give us both community and power, while also fulfilling all of the requisites I laid out above.

Modern transcendent practice #1: Ecstatic/conscious dance

The first is what is today called “ecstatic” or “conscious” dance. It’s freeform dancing to a DJ set of often organic, tribal, world electronic dance music. Sometimes there is live drumming involved. To me, it’s like a sober rave with way less electro/techno/trance music. The focus is on freely moving one’s body in community to rhythmic beats.

Dancing in groups to rhythmic beats is likely as old as Homo sapiens and played an important role in ritualistic group bonding. Dance also is likely to have pre-dated human language. When we dance together in groups, especially to rhythmic beats, I believe that we tap into something deep in our bodies and hearts. To share a rhythm with others is to connect deeper than our minds. We wordlessly share in something bigger than our individual experience.

PCSs would prioritize ecstatic/conscious dance, holding smaller ones several times throughout the week as connecting, transcendent forms of exercise, but also hold bigger ones each week, and even bigger ones each month.

Modern transcendent practice #2: Sacred karaoke (group singing)

My father was a pastor and I grew up in “the church.” I never had any religious experiences in church EXCEPT for overwhelming emotion a few times, starting in adolescence, when singing hymns alongside other people. I remember, I would choke up and almost cry. I knew it wasn’t the words (which were maudlin and boring to me) and I didn’t feel like it was the holy spirit (the feeling would go away as soon as I stopped singing). It became clear to me that something special happens when humans sing together.

I remember getting a Facebook invite a decade ago to an event called “Beer & Hymns.” It was, unsurprisingly, a gathering of people who drank beer and sang hymns. Although my father was a pastor and I grew up in “the church,” I do not like hymns and beer makes me drowsy, so I never went. But I knew what these people were up to. They saw the power of singing together in groups. The beer likely didn’t hurt.

Like dancing, singing in groups is as old as old as Homo sapiens and likely much older. There is some evidence-informed speculation by scientists that singing played a role in early hominid hunting and group bonding. There’s also good evidence that singing pre-dated and provided the building blocks for language.

When we sing together—and I don’t think it matters exactly what we sing—we tap into a deep, emotional human connection with one another. The feeling is transcendent in the sense that we felt lifted out of our individual selves and brought into something bigger.

I would like to see PCSs develop something like a “sacred karaoke,” where individuals choose songs they love and would also love to sing in a group and they lead other members in song. Beer may be included.

Modern transcendent practice #3: Holotropic-style breathwork

The term breathwork covers a wide variety of conscious, controlled breathing techniques. Some techniques like box breathing or 4-7-8 breathing are designed to create calmness and focus and might last no more than a minute. When I think of breathwork, however, I mean a longer, more intense style of breathing that can cause unusual body sensations and altered states of consciousness. 

There are a lot of different names this more intense style of breathing goes under. But they all have their origin in “holotropic” breathwork, developed by the psychiatrist and transpersonal psychology pioneer Stanislav Grof, MD. What holotropic-style breathwork (HSB) methods have in common is that they involve deep, rapid breathing for an extended amount of time, usually 60 minutes, and it’s done alongside evocative music (which is unique to each facilitator). Breathing like this (also called hyperventilation or overbreathing) for that amount of time causes hypocapnia, a decrease in carbon dioxide in the blood and brain.

The result of just a few minutes of HSB is tingling sensations, dizziness, and numbness. But prolonged HSB can put people into altered states of consciousness. As two researchers write in a 2007 research paper on HSB: 

Manifestations of altered consciousness emerging after approximately 8 minutes of hyperventilation have included ringing/roaring in the ears, clouded vision, and feelings of lightness, astonishment, and/or euphoria. More dramatic changes in consciousness, including perceptual distortions and subjective “visions,” have been reported after periods of hyperventilation exceeding 15 minutes.

That’s right. A transcendent, psychedelic experience is available to us right here and now, for free. All we gotta do is breathe in this particular way. Today, there are HSB facilitators and group sessions available online and, if you live in the right city or know the right people, you can find a group event near you.

In my own experience, doing HSB alone can be powerful. But doing it in a large group, in the presence of energy medicine facilitators and other guides, is a very powerful experience. I could write a lot more about this, but I’ll end this section by saying that I believe HSB should be a cornerstone of PCSs. Perhaps it’s done weekly in small groups and less intensely, and then monthly in large groups and more intensely. Anyway it’s done, HSB fits all the criteria for modern transcendent practice in the PCS.

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To sum up part 8, I argued that transcendence is hard to come by in the modern, WEIRD world.   Nevertheless, we need them because they are therapeutic, connect us more deeply with each other, and help us grow as people. PCSs recognize the challenges of bringing transcendence back into our modern lives by creating a conceptual framework, a social container, and a set of practices that support thoroughly modern, non-religious forms of transcendence. The cornerstone practices of transcendence in PCSs would be ecstatic/conscious dancing, group singing, and holotropic-style breathwork. A key role of PCSs would be to help process and integrate visions, messages, and feelings from these practices in a humble, exploratory, and non-objectifying way.

It’s a bit odd to write so academically about transcendence, but my aim is to clearly justify why we need PCSs that can give us a framework and container of support for modern practices that can bring transcendence back into the lives of us WEIRDos.

I hope you join me next week for the second to last installment of this series. It’s all about personal growth.