Transtheism (Arguing over the wrong shit)

Enter Pandemonium

Imagine yourself being under the age of eight, standing in a room of your peers while a great novice debate of existence takes place.
There in the middle of the room sits the most amazing toy which does the most wondrous accomplishments of bedazzlement. Everyone is in marvelous uproar and excitement; talking to themselves readily. Many are arguing over where that toy came from. Some say that there is a big hero coming to visit and they sent it ahead before they come in later to talk to all of us and sign everything we want. Oh, the excitement is great!

Others, however, are less compelled by this and rather think the teacher just bought another toy for the classroom; granted, a nice addition indeed, but part of the classroom never-the-less.

Because the toy continues its marvelous performance of satisfaction and bewilderment, yet no one else shows up quickly in chase, the two extreme opinions - and all of their relations between them - have time to argue a volley of, "Ya-Huh's!", "Nuh-uh's!", and "Shhhhh's!"

The Great Toy

Now imagine you are there, and all you really care about is how this toy works!
Imagine that the toy itself is just pure amazement; nothing is more engrossing, nothing is more enrapturing, nothing is more.
The toy simply has you confined like a cobra's gaze in the fairy tails. The marvelous trance, except this trance is like those trances the princes have on princesses. You must know everything there is about how this toy works; everything there is to know about this toy.

You want to know how this toy was able to move into this room like it did, even.
And more importantly, imagine that your sole purpose of studying for the entire time is to discern how the toy is able to make you feel the way you do.
And that you quickly turn to studying how it is able to make everyone feel how they feel around you at the moment because of it.

It would strike us as odd, indeed, to think of a world whereby all musicians and composers spent a large amount of their practice proving how music developed to begin with.

Imagine that you try to explain this to the other children in the room that are in heated debate over whether the hero sent the toy in the room, or whether the toy is part of the classroom paraphernalia.
Imagine that you try to explain how you have observed how the toy is able to make you and others feel certain things, yet every time you describe something every other child thinks you are describing a premise for one of their arguments for the hero or for the inheritance of the classroom.

Imagine that you really don't care about either case; that what you really care about is how it all works. That this is what is magical to you as a child. Imagine that how the toy accomplishes making you and others feel what you feel offers no indication of whether the hero preceded himself with this toy, or whether this is a standard piece of the classroom's additions; that regardless of either, the emotional relationship's capacity remains the same.

Now imagine the toy is life, the hero is theism, the inheritance of the classroom is atheism, those children who are unsure of either case are agnosticism, and the child that doesn't care at all about any of these matters, but rather is more interested in the relationship to the toy itself is transtheism.

That is my best description of how it is to be transtheistic.

It is largely the most misunderstood, and little considered perspective in the arena of theological and ontological matters. To a point that stating that itself is a misrepresentation as being concerned with the ontological matters is to not be concerned (at least not inherently) with the theological matters themselves, but only how they reflect what ontology is taking place.

In most cases, when someone mentions transtheism, the concept that is understood is something akin to atheism. Meaning, most consider it to be within the ballpark of not thinking there is a divine metaphysical construct involved.

This doesn't neccesarily stand as true on a gross scale at all. In fact, transtheism can bring about some observations that can be just as radically spiritual and devoted as any theology within theism itself.

It is simply focusing on a different part of existence.
In fact, it is focusing on existing.

Stop there and get more coffee, tea, or smoke if you do. Reflect on that last line.
Focusing on existing; consider what volume of range that incredibly small count of characters entails, and just how far affecting it is in regards to being human.

Who Invented Music?

There is no means of reasonable language to which I could properly convey the full meaning of the term, "focusing on existing", in one article alone.
What I can do, however, is elaborate on the basic foundations of what is explored in focusing on existing.

To do this, I must start with a prelude.
As mentioned previously, many people tend to think that a dismissal takes place when transtheistic discourse begins. That the theistic standing is tossed out and no divinities of any format are accepted.
This is, I assure you, inaccurate. Should someone you meet claim to hold transtheistic views and assert overtly that divinities are errant concepts and beliefs, then they have misrepresented their atheistic standing.

To better explain why transtheism poses absolutely no threat to theism, take for example the following case.

...we can focus on how spirituality exists in the same manner that we focus on how music exists

There is a question that exists within the anthropological framework which will likely remain endlessly unanswered: "Who invented music?"

We will never know the answer to this question. We won't know if it was one single individual, group, or no one really at all. We can only suppose the answer to this question, but we don't get to know who organized sound into intentionality repeatable melodic syntaxes conceptually understood as music.

What we do have is the ability to enjoy and inspect music as we understand it today in all of its various forms. But more similar, we can study and reflect how we react to music; how music affects us, and how we interact with music biologically. As well, we can create music in various manners of approaches: intuitively, accidentally, or contrivedly.

It would strike us as odd, indeed, to think of a world whereby all musicians and composers spent a large amount of their practice proving how music developed to begin with.

Instead, we readily take it as a given that music simply exists and instead enjoy, study, and play in the aforementioned brief description of such.

If such a thing existed as musism and amusim, those believing in a first developer(s) of music and those believing that there was no such thing as the first developer(s) of music, then our current way of thinking of music would be transmusim.
This is because we simply do not care about where music came from in our study and enjoyment of music itself. We simply love studying and enjoying music as it exists.

Focusing on Existing

With the above example in mind, reconsider the idea of, "focusing on existing". Do so in the same manner we consider focusing on music. As just mentioned, we focus on music as it exists and not where it came from. Similarly if music is life, just as the toy at the beginning represented, then the focus is on how life exists as it does.

Except, "how", is not a question that requires a chain of events such as evolution or creation. Instead, "how", is more a question as one thinks of the question, "How does a light bulb work?"

In the transtheist view, what is important about spirituality of any format is how the spirituality works, why it works, and what we can learn from how and why that spirituality works.
Does that mean we jump to negating or including divinities; no. It means we only work with what we have and go from there.
What we have is the observational affect of what spirituality does in human beings, and we can study the manners in which spirituality has been displayed and practiced in private and group religious formats over an amazing array of time.

The interest isn't to understand how spirituality may exist without divinities, but instead to understand how spirituality must exist due to our human nature.
This is akin to stating that a current of electricity exists in the manner of how it does due to the electric nature. Meaning, if you study a battery, you are going to be studying how a battery facilitates a charge. You are learning the nature of the batteries design by observing how it reacts and facilitates an electrical charge.

Spirituality can be thought of, in metaphor, as this electrical charge and we can be thought of as the battery.
Thereby, the transtheist view is to be interested in how exactly the spirituality of humanity works by studying the facilitation of spirituality within the human.

As I put it: If a god or gods made man, then that god or gods obviously made man in a manner which facilitated spirituality in a reactive fashion we observe today. If evolution eventually lead to man, then the evolutionary path lead to man in a manner which facilitated spirituality in a reactive fashion we observe today.

Either way, we can focus on how spirituality exists in the same manner that we focus on how music exists and in return, we can better perform and enjoy our spiritual existences; regardless of which genre and style they come from, and regardless of how existence became existence.