"What does it mean to be human?" is the question that began a forty-year quest that inspired an exploration into the entire width and breadth of human history and spiritual experience. The answer to this fundamental question reveals the importance of transcendence in our lives. Taking transcendence down to its bare bones, provides a way to find common language and a spiritual understanding that can communicate across different cultures and belief systems, at the same time that it offers the world of science the simplest possible explanation of what a spiritual life is really all about.