Ray Moody and I talked far into the night on a bus ride. We had spent the last few days at the cave where Plato wrote his famous parable, the one that birthed Western Civilization. Although Ray loved Plato, he and I recognized that Plato and his progeny had led us into a form of critical thinking that eventually put humans at the center of everything. To summarize several hours of rich conversation, Ray and I agreed that we in our current patterns of thinking take ourselves too seriously.
Needed? From my viewpoint,(and I won’t speak for Ray): An upset of our current reductive thinking in order to make room for a larger perspective. Ray has an elaborate cure for our current societal ills he calls “nonsense,” and he has a book coming out on that subject. I can’t wait to read it. Together, Ray and I have so much fun it should be against the law, or, at least, the current laws of thinking. Pause. I feel better just experiencing so-called nonsense in the strange world of Will and Ray.
We fell into silence on the bus ride, did Ray and I. Then, it occurred to me that what we were experiencing was not nonsense at all. In fact, the fun and clarity of our thinking was something I came to call TRANS-SENSE. Trans-sense points to a breakdown in our current Western Civilization thought structures to make room for a new creativity, a shift of paradigms. Weird humor seems to be one starting point of “trans-sense.” Ray continues to prefer “nonsense” to describe his perspective, but I am going with trans-sense, at least for awhile.
Amit Goswami, a clear thinking physicist, calls this new thinking: do-be-do-be-do. Translated: when you laugh a lot with what appears to be nonsense, you learn a new way of doing-being-doing- being. In doing-being-doing so you can transcend your usual sense, which likely needs an upgrade.
I know mine does. Such trans-sense makes way for us to return to Plato’s cave and enjoy our deeper connections rather than running away in the name of enlightenment. And, best of all, trans-sense links the seen and the unseen worlds.