The Seba library treats Transiency in 9 passages, across 7 authors (including Yaden, David Bryce, James, William, Govinda, Lama Anagarika).
transiency (they are brief), ineffability (they are difficult or impossible to fully describe in language), passivity (they feel overwhelming), and have a noetic quality (they feel real)
This passage formally catalogues transiency as one of four defining marks of mystical and self-transcendent experience, drawing directly on James’s phenomenological taxonomy.
, The Varieties of Self-Transcendent Experience, 2017thesis
One word, before I close this lecture, on the question of the transiency or permanence of these abrupt conversions… It misses the point of serious interest, which is not so much the duration as the nature and quality of these shiftings of character to higher levels.
James argues that transiency does not diminish the significance of conversion experiences, insisting that duration is subordinate to quality in assessing spiritual transformation.
, The Varieties of Religious Experience Amazon, 1902thesis
Transiency hurls itself everywhere into a deep state of being… these phenomena and things should be understood and transformed by
Govinda, citing Rilke, advances a mystical-affirmative reading of transiency as a dynamic force that deepens earthly existence rather than devaluing it in favour of a transcendent beyond.
, Foundations of Tibetan Mysticism, 1960thesis
This connection forms a bridge between the ongoing process of core consciousness, condemned to sisyphal transiency, and a progressively larger array of established, rock-solid memories pertaining to unique historical facts
Damasio introduces transiency as a neurological condition of core consciousness, which is perpetually renewed in each lived instant and must be bridged to autobiographical memory to produce a continuous self.
, The Feeling of What Happens: Body and Emotion in the Making of Consciousness, 1999thesis
Reflecting on the transiency of your bodily life, practice as diligently as the Buddha did when he stood on tiptoe for seven days.
Dōgen invokes transiency as the meditative ground of urgency, directing the practitioner to use the body’s impermanence as the very spur for concentrated spiritual effort.
thesis
Serious illness evokes fundamental questions about the meaning of life, death, transiency, responsibility, and our place in the universe.
Yalom positions transiency within the existential cluster that medical illness brings into unavoidable awareness, treating it as a therapeutic datum central to group psychotherapy with the seriously ill.
, The Theory and Practice of Group Psychotherapy, Fifth Edition, 2008supporting
that sense of transiency which accepts that the wheel on which we turn can never truly be in our own hands.
Hillman, as reported by Russell, employs transiency as an architectural and civic wisdom — the acceptance that human existence is always in passage and beyond full individual mastery.
, Life and Ideas of James Hillman, 2023supporting
The fact that we can die, that we can be ill at all, is what perplexes us; the fact that we now for a moment live and are well is irrelevant to that perplexity.
James gestures toward the existential weight of life’s brevity as a perplexity that superficial optimism cannot resolve, contextually adjacent to his formal treatment of transiency in mystical states.
, The Varieties of Religious Experience Amazon, 1902aside
Our life begins with loss… This birth trauma marks the beginning of the journey which ends with the loss of life itself.
Hollis frames the life course as a series of losses that implicitly enact transiency at the biographical level, treating impermanence as the structural condition of human development.
, Swamplands of the Soul: New Life in Dismal Places, 1996aside