In his book To Know As We Are Known, Parker Palmer writes:
"We must resist the popular tendency to think of transcendence as an upward and outward escape from the realities of self and world. Instead, transcendence is breaking-in, a breathing of the Spirit of love into the heart of our existence . . . To experience transcendence means to be removed - not from the self and the world, but from that hall of mirrors in which the two endlessly reflect and determine one another. Prayer takes us out - not of the self and the world, but out of their closed, circular logic."