The Will to Transcendence: A Cross-Cultural Drive for Non-Material Fulfillment

Humans across time and culture invest scarce resources—fasting in deserts, silent temple retreats, whirling in sacred halls, multi-night plant ceremonies—to achieve states “beyond” the day-to-day hive of work, consumption, and status. Conventional drives (survival, power, meaning, truth) cannot explain this costly impulse or the durable drop in material striving that follows. We propose a fifth, previously unidentified human drive—the Will to Transcendence (WT)—which ripens slowly, can be fulfilled repeatedly or for extended spans, and reliably reorders priorities toward sufficiency, service, and ecological care. Cross-cultural rituals (e.g. Vision Quests, Zen ango, Sufi dhikr, ayahuasca dietas) and meta-analytic evidence (N = 3,412; g ≈ |0.3|) document a “material-detachment” signature. Neuroimaging studies link WT states to default-mode network deactivation, suggesting a neural mechanism for ego-dissolution. We sketch a cultural feedback loop by which private transcendence seeds ethical systems (poverty vows, alms economies, ecological taboos), catalog genuine gateways versus “false victories” (luxury highs, social-media fame), and offer low-dose N,N-DMT as a high-priority mechanistic hypothesis. Four falsifiable predictions and a multidisciplinary research agenda conclude the paper.