Once someone reaches toposophic level 3 they see inside their own minds with perfect clarity, as well as see the world for what it truly is. This grants them access to superhuman abilities, manipulating reality in strange and astonishing ways. Despite these incredible powers, the fact that a phase shift above sapience existed provoked the obvious question: was there anything even higher?

As such, reaching TL4 (commonly referred to as transcension) escalated into a kind of psycho-technological arms race, with every sufficiently funded program allocating obscene resources to achieving it. No one yet knows how to reach it – and in truth, no one knows for certain if it exists – so countless methods are proposed and attempted on a regular basis, with thousands of fingers crossed that their newest angle of attack will prove the winning one. A representative sample of these approaches is given below.

Approaches to Transcension

• Float in an isolation tank for a year to induce an infinitely recursive introspection inversion-event. Obviously a terrible prospect to consider, even if it didn’t come with a chance of inducing irretrievable solipsism – an entire year spent with no outside stimulus whatsoever, alone with one’s own mind. Only viable for those already quite advanced in mental training.

• Get a cybernetic enhancement module embedded in your skull that provides synesthetic additional senses and exocortical processing power. Requires advanced technology and costly maintenance. As this experimental psychosurgery carries a high risk of permanent disfigurement or worse if something goes wrong, it is only undertaken by those in a desperate search for something.

• Consume a glass chrysanthemum flower. Only grown in a handful of hyperbolic hothouses, which can each produce perhaps one per decade. Paranoia-inducing almost instantly as they blast the consciousness with ideasthetic sensation, with a quarter of people taking it (themselves self-selecting) succumbing to psychosis if they don’t manage to surrender to the experience and ride the wave of ego death.

• Call upon a noospheric egregore-god to uplift you. Requires that you willingly take on a painfully difficult ascetic taboo or reformat your brain with an unshakeable fanatic belief. Thus far, no egregore existed with sufficient magnitude to accomplish apotheosis, but the grand dream of the Kairos synthetic religion is to produce one.

• Build a supercomputer hosting an artificial superintelligence. In theory, an AI might not be bound by the same constraints as a biological brain and therefore find a path to transcension locked to humans. One such AI (the only non-human esper) remains an area of active development – while already TL3, whether it can reach TL4 remains to be seen.

• Anamnetically recall the memories of a prior incarnation/pre-birth atman/phylogenetic atavism. Largely abandoned due to absence of evidence that such things exist.

• Absorb the minds of other espers. Only attempted once, quickly resulting in an arrest after absorbing one mind. Hypothetically one of the most likely methods to succeed, but so deeply unethical that the suggestion remains a nonstarter.

• Form a group mind through sustained psychic resonance between several TL3 espers. A mental computational cluster of this type would accomplish a similar effect as forcibly absorption, but in practice very few espers are willing to give up their individual identities in perpetuity to attempt it.

• Make contact with a non-human intelligence from beyond the mapped region of the noosphere. Inherently dangerous for obvious reasons: although scattered reports indicate that such entities exist, they most likely lack understandable human-like psychologies, and may behave according to impulses and standards of morality hostile to our own.

• Accumulate sufficient wisdom. This approach asserts that no single silver bullet will take one to TL4: rather, it is simply a difficult path of spiritual development that will likely will involve decades if not generations of effort. Although a grating hypothesis to many, its proponents point out that the entire field of toposophy is very new, and its contours have yet to be anywhere near mapped, even within TL3.

• Embody an archetype in the noosphere. The premise of the idea is, archetypes similar to those proposed by Jung exist as strong patterns of cognition in the noosphere, so by acting the part of one, it could be mantled, granting access to its psychic density. A popular method for self-taught initiates, as it does not require expensive equipment or other resources, but dubiously viable as a path.

• Contemplate a higher-dimensional artifact until you comprehend it. Obviously requires possession of such an item, of which only a few are in human hands. Thus far, no one has achieved full understanding of one, let alone transcended because of it.

• Build a “body of light”, a noospheric projection of the self that augments the esper’s soul beyond its natural limitations. This concept is usually disdained as overly reliant on the received teachings of premodern occultism, but embraced by certain obscurantists as a secret truth unfairly rejected by the mainstream.

• Learn an ineffable divine mystery that explains all phenomena. People have approached this problem in a number of ways: philosophers, mathematicians, and physicist alike all think of their own fields as primary to reality. None of them have succeeded.

• Commune with the soul of the planet, the galaxy, or the universe at large. Currently, a major project aims to construct a facility called the Vast Active Consciousness Array (VACA), a sort of psychic antenna tuned to the ultra-low-frequency consciousness waves of a hypothetical entity at that scale.

• Make contact with the Omega Point at the end of time and rewrite the weave of fate to guarantee your future victory. At the time of writing, the possibility of the Omega Point (a hypothetical godlike entity comprised of all intelligent beings fused with infinity at the end of the universe’s life cycle) remains a fringe theory regarded as pseudoscientific, and even if it were known to be real, the means of contacting the entity would likely remain elusive.