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Sacred

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09:03 / 28.03.06

I don't have much time to kick this off I'm afraid, but I'd like to discuss what 'sacred' means and what is sacred, to you.

Is everything sacred? Nothing? Do you make something sacred by setting it aside, or is inclusion the key? How do you express and defer to the sacred? Why? What is the basis of having something sacred at all? How does it benefit you and your brothers and sisters? How does it not? Wihtout the sacred, is anything different? What is the use of a paradigm which recognises and makes central the notion of sanctity and sacred-ness - in the Sun, Moon, Stars, Sea, Wind, Trees, Land and Sky...what else? What is sacred to you?

Particularly interested in non-Tempulars and sceptical input here, since in my world view, the absence of the sacred and the abandonment of connection to Spirit is root and cause of much of humanity's current problems as regards sustainability, environmental conservation and health. Without a powerful sense of the sacred, how do you avoid nihilism, solipsism or selfishness?

No time to expound properly at the moment, but I'll return later. Over to you.

00:45 / 29.03.06

Given my nature-centered, animistic leanings, it's tempting to say, "Well, everything's sacred, of course!", but that wouldn't be a very well thought-out response -- something I like to avoid whenever possible.

In my view, "sacred" implies "special" or set aside for special purpose. We create "sacred space" for our rituals in order to focus our minds and, to the extent possible, lower the barrier between our manifest reality and the higher planes. We also tend to invest certain places and objects with the mantle of sacredness but I think this, as well, is for the purpose of altering our consciousness when in these places or in the presence of said objects. It would seem to me that a sacred object locked away in a vault does nobody any good. Just an opinion.

There are other implications that might be considered under this rubric: is ALL life sacred -- or just some lives? Are trees sacred? Are some trees more sacred than others? Are . . . You get the idea.

My thought is that a balance must be struck between declaring everthing to be sacred and nothing. At one extreme, you become frozen in place in the effort to harm absolutely nothing and at the other, anything that gets in the way of your goal stands at risk of the axe (hmmm, reminds me of our present government . . .)

Anyhow, that's my two of disks and I bid you good evening.

01:25 / 29.03.06

God, M$, you always puts my brain in overload.

Now that you got me thinking, I realised I have spent my life disconnected from the Sacred. I was raised as a Catholic, but during my teens -as many teens do - I have abandoned my beliefs as a act of rebelion. No, not rebelion, just creation of a identity, is all. Anf there went I, towards a materialist view of everything, and here's what I got: depression, panic of death, utter loneliness.

In colege I got my first contact with magic. Castaneda, shrooms trips, debates about African-Brazilian religions, eventually I tried the Daime. I started to refer to myself as "agnostics, but it was default agnosis. As in, "I don't know what I am, I'm not worried, so, there it is. Even my mystical experiences were aproached as a novelty, something funny and cool to do. No commitment. I didn't care one way or another. Good? evil? What's the difference after all?

But here's what I found, even though I didn't quite realise: friendship. My friends were the piece of wood that kept me afloat in the shipwreck that was my spiritual life. Friends introduced me to the joy of living. To kung fu, which is now pretty important to me. To politics. To things that matter.

Now, as I aproach my 30s, I find myself praying, from time to time. But I noticed I pray for one thing, and only one thing: the wellbeing of people I care about. Nothing scares me like the possibility of them not being happy and healthy. Never ask for nothing for myself, me, who was so selfish and lonely once.

So, I guess that Love is Sacred to me, now. Love for my family. Love for my friends. Love for my old girlfriends (and one woman in particular) Love for my people. Love for my country. Love for humanity. Love for this planet Earth. Love for the Universe. Love for life and living. And, to a (much) lesser extend, but growing, Love for my work, my writing, my books. Love for my tottling magic. Love, period.

And now - and that's weird, because I never thought about it until right now, as I write this words - I find myself wishing I had a son or a daughter, so I could know how this ultimate Love feels like. Must be a trip. Absolute Sacredness.

My heart is pumping hard and fast. Weird.

Love

10:26 / 29.03.06

Sacred vs Profane.
For me sacred things are those imbued with Meaning or Value or whatever you choose to call it. Things you treat with respect beyond politeness.
Profane and mundane are largely synonyms in my mind, the stuff that's meaningless to you, background dross.

Here's an example- my Tarot cards are sacred to me, I treat them with exceptional care and reverence as they are a talismanic object that means a lot to me. I thank them after a reading, take them to events and sacred sites, and generally treat them like a favoured friend or pet. Even though they're just objects, almost identical to thousands of other decks, it's like the scene from Platoon where they sleep with their rifles (This is my Tarot deck! There are many like it but this one is mine!).
Profane things- the TV, pavement grit, Daily Mail, empty milk cartons etc. Not to say these things can't be sacred (the pavement could be an altar during a cityworking for example) but generally the grey background stuff we don't pay attention to.

So what I'm saying is that to me, 'sacred' is what we project most meaning and value onto, what we treat with reverence, the things we love.

17:32 / 29.03.06

I’m not sure how much I can contribute after this, however, as a… secular non templar(?) my views were invited, so here goes. I sort of want to take the path Woodsurfer did not: everything is sacred. Or nothing is. To understand it as a false division of what you include or exclude, spatially, thematically, however. So, at least practically, I personally don’t find sacred a useful term, and were I to employ “everything’s sacred” I think I would already be using it in a very different way than it’s normally understood. Escaping “nihilism, solipsism or selfishness”… well, short answer: personal responsibility and attachment/reverence. However you do that. And within that of course I see certain things as special: objects, relationships, feelings. I’m not sure, however, if that attachment is really different or set apart from (if one were to cede that all things are / are not sacred) what I mean by sacredness as a way of addressing all things in the manner appropriate to your understanding of them. Which is a garbled way of saying that, within individual responsibility, it might still be possible to structure a pluralistic response to the world, without anything being definitively excluded or necessarily invoking an external source. But a way of not seeing the Daily Mail, Scottish weather, internet flamewars, and so on, as reductively profane, banal background stuff – just seeing them in considered relation to other things one might subjectively value more or in a different way, even negatively. There is, indeed, a balance which needs to be struck, regarding when it is time to take the axe to a tree and when not to, but it’s a constant process of interpretation of the world. Apologies, maybe that was implicit and I’m just turning semantic tricks; if my words have been unconsidered please read them within a larger structure of meaning – remember that background dross need exist to define those objects and understandings we charge with greater meaning!

For everything that lives is Holy

(Sorry, couldn’t resist!)

power vacuums & pure moments

21:51 / 29.03.06

I aspire to realising everything as being sacred. For me that constitutes a state of conciousness rather than an ideal. I really have slipped a hell of a long way now, but roughly a year ago my meditation practice [in particular laya yoga energy work] had got to the stage when i could stare at a takeaway curry on my plate for a long time before eating it because it was so beautiful! When your seeing things that way everything is sacred not because you think it should be but because the ordinary becomes overwhelming. The perceptual enhancement that psychedelics provide was my normal view of the world at the time, but in a far more natural and less contrived way..detail rather than visions [bit of a shit explanation but its very difficult to describe]. I unfortunately didnt persit until that way of percieving really changed my interactions with other people, but i do think that could have been a logical consequence.

22:23 / 29.03.06

In light of the last couple of posts -- and my last couple of hours -- I'd assess my previous post as excessively dry and that's not really my intent. Reverence for and understanding of the Sacred is at the core of my life these days. Though, depending on the context and the mood, my thoughts on the subject might come out in different ways.

Tonight f'rinstance: I celebrate 20 years of magical partnership with the most amazing woman in all the universes: my muse, best friend and lover who treads with me the path of spirit and service to our community. She is one face of the sacred. Our home in the forest is sacred -- the fruit of much love and loss plus a lot of back-breaking work. And how can I tell you how treasured and sacred are moments like the one we shared a just before I sat down to type this when she called me outside to hear a lone wild turkey calling in the dusk?

In some ways, whatever you focus your attention on can assume a sacred quality. You exist with this person/creature/object in the unique now and your awareness endows it with a special quality, just for that time. If you allow yourself to feel the joy of this, then how better to describe it than as sacred?

22:57 / 29.03.06

I quoted this on my blog a couple months back: One of the first things to appreciate about Asatru is that it is a religion of the holy, as opposed to the sacred. (Keep in mind that although these words are used synonymously in modern English, their meanings are actually opposite in nature.) Sacred means "set apart". The concept is that a thing is dedicated to the gods or numinous powers by keeping it away from the mundane, the profane, the things of this world. An example of this kind of religion is Christianity, and it is why their holy places are buildings, called "houses of God". This gives them a god set apart from the world, unreachable. Holy means simply "whole". Summer and winter, night and day, health and sickness. A thing is the sum of all those things which affect it, and everything is a part of some larger whole, and affects everything. Thus everything is seen as holy, and our holy places are groves, and springs, and rocks. This gives us a concept of "imminent deity". Everything has a spirit, a minor god. And this is one of the pillars of the Asatru religion.

This holiness gives us a rather different perspective than that found in many other religions, such as Christianity, Islam, Wicca, or New Age. There is no "problem of evil", for example. The universe was once void. From this fire and ice, polar opposites arose, and from these the worlds did.

It's one of those bits that makes me wonder about Daoism's connection to European paganism.

00:53 / 30.03.06

Excellent passage Grant, it put over my own views (broadly speaking) far more succinctly than I did, and made my lazy muddling of sacred and holy look as uninformed as it probably was. Interesting link too, but 'tis late here so: no more. The only object I have immediate reverence for has sheets and two pillows...

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09:31 / 30.03.06

Fascinating responses so far, thanks.

That's a good passage there, grant, and very much where my head and heart are at the moment. Indeed, I would suggest that the Daoists had very much this spirit (or Spirit!) in their teachings and notions, if Stephen Karcher is to be believed...highly recommend his 'Total I Ching', it's beautiful.

The Daoists, undoubtedly, as well as other ancients, lived in a Living, Breathing, Alive World, a world born of and expresssing the myth and narrative of Spirit, they had absolutely no mind/matter duality, no Spirit/Flesh or Spirit/Matter dichotomy to speak of, and so considered the planet and natural world to be as alive and sacred and holy as they themselves, to possess a soul and purpose as important and essential as their own existence. I myself find this paradigm to far more healthy and easy to foster respect within for the living world which is the whole world than any of the alternatives presented to me in my life so far.

I think alienation from this notion of Universal inclusion, from a sense of the numinous wholeness of the biosphere, from a sense of oneself and ones environment as a simultaneous arising in a continuum of whol(y)eness and Spirit very much indicates a process of having thrown the baby out with the bath water in the modern tendency to accept the pure rational-brain sermons of science totally at the expense of any sense of the sacredness or holiness of apparently 'inanimate objects' or 'non-living material'...

For myself, I have begun to view absolutely everything as sacred, although obviously some things are more distractingly and compellingly so than others...I was compelled to start this thread after a 3 day trabalho in the forest. The sense of awe towards and sacredness of the sky and trees and wind and stars was totally all-consuming, totally humbling, I was practically reduced to humble tears after the closure of the works upon walking outside, and was powerfully struck by how important and essential this sense of the world as extension of self and, ultimately, Self, really is. Well, for me, anyway.

Hence the thread, like.

Thanks to all of you for your contributions so far.

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09:44 / 30.03.06

Interesting footnote:

From that Aramaic translation of the Lord's Prayer it's intriguing to note that the purpose of the second line is to make the experience and gnosis of the first process useful.

Hence, in the first instance the essential Unity and Oneness of the Universe is declared and recognised, the potential of all things and the manifestation of all that has passed 'rising and shining in space' is celebrated as possible and recognisable by virtue of our conscious manifestation as part of the perfect Universe.

But, then, immediately we affirm that that this light, sound, vibration and name will become "holy", qadash from which the Hebrew word kasher (with lines over the 'a' and 'e', "kosher") is drawn. In Aramaic one makes a thing holy or sacred by setting it apart, separating it for a specific purpose....however this occurrs inside of us, as well as outside, so we effectively hold it inviolate, creating a space inside for it to live, a 'room of one's own' as Virginia Woolf might have it. An inner temple, a heart-shrine, a very common mystical concept, and one which can only be created by a certain amount of letting go, a shedding of 'busy forgetfulness' in order to clear space inside for the name to come to live. Without this act, any discussion of 'sacredness' is nought but empty proselytizing.

The roots of the phrase, nethqadash shmakh also evoke the images of clearing or sweeping and preparing ground for an important plant. The roots show a person bending his or her head over a special place where seeds are sown, indicating also that one bends over the heart and plants devotion and perseverance at the same time.

Hence the prayer always directs in a practical fashion - to make the experience of Abwoon useful, to incorporate the numinous experience of Satori, Nirvanao f Tat Tvam Asi into your life, a place must be created inside for this Oneness to live. Then the light of shem - the clarity or intelligence that arises in the ultimate peace of this realisation - becomes practically useful on an everyday basis, like the light of a torch.

Anyhoo.

trouser the trouserian

11:06 / 30.03.06

What does "sacred" mean?

Is it something which is held to be inviolate - which must be protected, or not challenged? For example, in a press briefing a couple of years ago, one of GWB's press officers stated very clearly that Bush believes marriage to be a "sacred institution" - something which had to be defended and protected.

Woodsurfer's comment: In my view, "sacred" implies "special" or set aside for special purpose. immediately reminded me of Mircea Eliade's explanation of sacrality, which is its opposition to the profane - for Eliade the sacred & the profane are two distinct existential categories. That which is "sacred" reveals itself through a Heirophany - a manifestation or encounter. It also brought to mind Peter Brook's definition of theatre as a place set apart from the mundane.

It's a distinction that we're very familiar with - if only 'cos of the Cartesian seperation of mind & matter so prelevant in Western thought and other oppositional categories.

For myself, I rather like Quantum's perspective on 'sacred' as that which we ascribe a particular special meaning to - which implies that sacred can be relational and transitory. My Tarot cards, which I haven't used for - oooh at least five years - are probably 'less sacred' to me than when I used them more or less continually.

And Honey, yes, the (Western) dichotomies are absent (or at least not as rigidly drawn) in other cultures - in some Indian and African forms of magical religosity. In the nondual perspective which I locate myself in - there is no sacred/profane distinction. There may be other modalities present - impure/pure, or auspicious/inaspicious - but these are relative continua rather than rigid oppositions.

Lately, I have been looking into Gregory Bateson's approach to the 'sacred'. Bateson is sharply critical of the Cartesian dualism so prevalent in Western thought:

If we continue to operate in terms of a Cartesian dualism of mind versus matter, we shall probably also come to see the world in terms of God versus man; élite versus people; chosen race versus others; nation versus nation and man versus environment. It is doubtful whether a species having both an advanced technology and this strange way of looking at the world can endure...

article discussing Bateson's concept of the sacred here

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13:02 / 30.03.06

Thanks, trouser, that looks great. Will give it a good read later.

13:39 / 30.03.06

There may be other modalities present - impure/pure, or auspicious/inaspicious - but these are relative continua rather than rigid oppositions. Trouserian

I think in my mind the sacred/profane distinction is more like that, a continuum from one to the other. Like aesthetics, it's a personal (though often shared) ascription of value. But I don't think everything is sacred. I can think of some profanities right now (insert smiley here).

13:46 / 30.03.06

Great soundbite from the article on Bateson-
...there is a lot more to life and mind than meets consciousness.

22:03 / 31.03.06

I would like to suggest that Taoism in the 'glorious past' was as beset with a world that had no more or less connection to the sacresness of all things as it has today.

There are many passages throughout the Tao teh Jing that point out how separation is nonreality and the it is a lifelong work to reside in the Tao (let go of duality).

I think this is why the Tao speaks to modern society so well. It still applies because the human condition hasn't much changed. We have potential, but it takes work.

All things are sacred. The human condition keeps us from this realization because we want power over our environment, therefore we begin to assign names and connotation as a means of control. While that makes us feel secure, it is only temporary or ......something

One
"while it is true that we employ words and labels to outline our experience
they are not absolute and cannot define the absolute

when it all began there were no words or labels

these things were created out of the union of preception and perception

wheather a person who is awake in play
sees the heart of life or its surface manifestations is hardly
important because they are exactly the same point in space and time"
Trans: Bright Fey

that last line blows my mind.
does it say that sacred/nonsacred is unknowable? or unreal? or .........

Hallo, Paper Spaceboy

22:28 / 31.03.06

xytar: that last line blows my mind.
does it say that sacred/nonsacred is unknowable? or unreal? or .........

...or maybe irrelevant? It's quiet beautiful, and seems to suggest that part of the "problem" is that we tend to impose meaning on it, to moralize about it? If that makes sense. I'd argue that whether or not we impose that meaning and sacred quality on it is irrelevant, because we're doing so to fulfil a certain spiritual requirement in ourselves, even if part of that is to eventually move past that need, or possibly simply to recognize that the world doesn't need us to define sacred/nonsacred?

For what it's worth, I quite like that definition of "holy" as being whole and full and tend to view everything as "holy" in that sense.

18:15 / 01.04.06

......Or a state of non-dual sacred profanity.

15:39 / 04.04.06

... a state of non-dual sacred profanity - well, not to me. Nondual yes, sacred yes, profane no. How ironic. It probably sounds laughably nonsensical to make a difference between sacred and profane and then claim that nondual is what sacred is, but none-the-less, that's my understanding at present.

To me these lines before quoted - whether a person who is awake in play sees the heart of life or its surface manifestations is hardly important because they are exactly the same point in space and time" - describe the sense I have of sacredness. It is absolutely about the real but crucially a real lit up from within by love/honour/trust/truth. The firm grounding in reality, the lightness of the heart “awake in play” - these are parts of the incredible strength of the real Divine nature.

The sacred to me is my refuge and my compass-needle.

Sacred to me means worthy of honour, wholesome, sustainable, awe-inspiring, it is the presence of the Divine and it is the ultimate safety.

When I am in the state of sacred relationship, the answers unfold by themselves.

If I am outside the sacred, I feel it is urgent to find myself in it again.

The sacred is what brings the mightily arrogant to dust, and raises up those who are humble.

It is the gravity of love, and a vast river running through time.

'How to respond to it' is a core part of my own worldview - because participating in the sacred is my top priority. I believe that through sacred relationship peace can break out. I think that sacred relationship or immersion in the Divine Presence is what makes peace, sustainable life, creativity, possible.

The profane is anything which isn't that.

15:46 / 04.04.06

And, thanks to trouser for pointing out the Bateson article, yum.

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21:10 / 04.04.06

Especially appreciate the closing story:

"The little girl, not yet having entered into languaging, is free to spontaneously be in the sacred. We, on the other side of the languaging barrier, are no longer free to do so - unless we are very lucky, and we find ourselves in astonishment before some phenomenon of nature. We must impossibly struggle to free ourselves of the grasp of language in order to be able to sense the systemic complexity of our living."

I guess I'm very lucky to have a fairly regular restorative of total astonishment before nature and existence. Vi, as the saying goes, va!

Daemon est Deus Inversus

00:44 / 10.04.06

Of course, sacred and profane are polarities; and, by definition meet. "... opposites are identical in nature, but different in degree...."- "The Kybalion."