Is there anything sacred in life?
Is there anything sacred in this life? Of course we would have to define what sacred means for everyone first.
We created books, icons, statues, symbols, cathedrals, and other images that we worship and consider sacred which are only products of our own thinking and prejudices. Those things are not sacred but a mere manifestation of our limited mind. So what is sacred?
We created books, icons, statues, symbols, cathedrals, and other images that we worship and consider sacred which are only products of our own thinking and prejudices. Those things are not sacred but a mere manifestation of our limited mind. So what is sacred?
Comments (66)
Anything I post is but a mere manifestation of my limited mind. So do not expect either a definition or an answer. But perhaps in the silence that follows, the sacred will manifest itself.
Er ... yes ... that would be kinda helpful, so where's your take. At the moment you might as well be asking "Is there anything gezornenplat in life?" (Don't bother looking it up; I fabricated this word as a placeholder in a humorous article many years ago!) for all the context we have available to us.
Well, beauty is also difficult to define uncontroversially, but following my definition above, that form of beauty which cannot be denigrated or degraded without a concomitant degradation of something beautiful in the self can be considered sacred.
Not trying to avoid your question, but that's leading into a discussion of aesthetics, which seems a bit off-focus here. Anyway, the beauty is in how the painting, the poem, the story, the sculpture functions in the contexts in which it does so.
Oh, no problem, I think it's an interesting issue.
You are a troublemaker. Your question stirs up a lot of old debris and clouds of dust, but to what end?
We can dispense with your objection about mere manifestations of limited minds, since there are no other, unlimited, minds. We can also dispense with plea for a definition, since the word has a specific definition:
You also dismiss books, icons, statues, symbols, cathedrals, and other images which are only products of our own thinking and prejudices, so we can dispense with that too.
There's nothing left but the question.
I asked a question and stated my own opinion, therefore I was asking for other people's opinion about what is sacred, not someone to corect my question or beliefs.
I don't care what you think about my own opinion, but I care what you think of the subject itself... I want to see other perspectives. If you don't understand it there is no need to answer in the first place. Confused, we are / clarity we need... So please don't make it personal calling me troublemaker and so on.
In a secular -- desacralized -- world, nothing is sacred. Not Mecca, not Jerusalem, not Eleusis, not the Black Hills in South Dakota, not the Bible or Quran, not the Mona Lisa, not the earth itself. Nothing.
Take Eleusis, site of the Eleusinian Mysteries and the birthplace of Aeschylus. It is also the site of the largest oil refinery in Greece. The sacred bit is an excavated ruins; not much to look at. It was sacred, once. Once sacred, always sacred?
What about the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier? Sacred? Hallowed ground, the ultimate sacrifice, all that? John F. Kennedy's grave with the "eternal" gas-fed flame? How long is that eternal flame going to burn? The World Trade Center was hard to ignore, and a lot of people did not think it was an especially attractive building. Thanks to it's spectacular demise, and the deaths of several thousand people -- especially firefighters and policemen, the ruins became sacralized.
Sacredness doesn't last. It's transitory. Sacredness is always a product of our mere minds [see Richard Feynman: "nothing is 'mere'"] and only through multi-generational efforts is the sacred maintained. Interrupt the maintenance for a few generations, and it is gone.
Out in South Dakota the Lakota people are resisting an oil pipeline being laid to serve refineries in Chicago. They say it's sacred land. Is it really? I wouldn't want a big fat pipeline carrying noxious liquid hydrocarbons running under my yard (and nobody else does either). I'd be happy to claim that my patch of ground was sacred, if that served as an adequate obstruction. (There is a thin little pipeline carrying gaseous hydrocarbons under my yard, but I like natural gas. It fuels the sacred eternal flames in my furnace, hot water heater, and kitchen stove.) Whether their claim of sacred ground works or not remains to be seen. My guess is that the sacred rite of Eminent Domain will trump tribal religion.
Maybe a better question than "Is nothing sacred?" would be "How much sacred are we willing to tolerate?" There are some forests, river valleys, rocky outcroppings, and such that I am very fond of that I would like to see protected from oil wells, pipelines, refineries, mines, clear cutting, damming, urban subdividing, freeway construction, et al. There have been some blocks in downtown Minneapolis that attained mixed use perfection, that I deeply regret being leveled for highly uninspired monolithic buildings. Are these places sacred? No -- but that doesn't mean they are not desired greatly, loved, or sources of pleasure, contentment, and satisfaction.
Oops, a failure to communicate on my part. Calling you a "troublemaker" was meant as a salute, not a criticism. I took your post quite seriously. And eventually I got around to addressing the question. I had to go through some preliminaries first, the way a dog has to spin around a few times before it can lie down.
I believe we are taking the " sacred " word to much into our materialistic world.
For me personally Life itself seems sacred, however we are trashing it in the worst ways possible nowadays in our so called "society"- I can barely use this term because for me it has a majestic sound, a music, SOCIETY, it's something that in a different dimension actually means something and society lives morally. It sounds like something we should be proud of.. not like today.
We praise buildings and pictures .... and kill life (animals and plants)....
What specific sorts of things, or ideas, do you hold to have the quality of sacredness, Ben?
We didn't ask to have the world secularized, but we've been on a secularization track for quite a few years, at least since the Enlightenment. The Industrial Revolution, science, capitalism, et al have been desacralizing the world very energetically. This pervasive cultural process has created an enduring crisis for everything that is or was considered sacred.
Billions of people feel the effects of secularization and the loss of the sacred. Of course, it isn't all bad; some of the lost sacred stuff was oppressive. But with the loss of the sacred comes a devaluation of life, culture, society, the individual, religion, the arts, and so on. Everything has been, is being, or will be commodified (see Marx).
Secularization is not going to shift into reverse any time soon, short of world-wide cultural and economic collapse--something nobody should hope for. But there is nothing preventing people from building humane values within a secular society or actively seeking and constructing new expressions of sacredness or goodness.
It is very unclear for me too right now, because I am experiencing some very strange emotions after some deeper research into meditation and thinking. I have not felt this emptiness in my entire life, and I am no stranger to psychological pain.
Then whatever you find to be sacred is unknowable. You might as well make up some other word to represent "X" and say that it has some sort of impact on you. If what is sacred is outside of "time and thought" as you say, then what is there to be done about it?
Try and find it ?
You can try as much as you'd like, but you won't be able to find it.
Your formulation "beyond the field of thinking, because of the limits of thinking ... takes place in time ... is beyond time and thought" leaves you (and us) nowhere.
The sacred doesn't have to be unknowable, even can not be unknowable if we are to experience it, let alone carry on a discourse about it. When the Lakota say the Black Hills are a sacred landscape, they have a definite idea why: To the Lakota, they are Paha Sapa, “the heart of everything that is.” The Black Hills are the high point of the surrounding plains. For any people living in close relationship to the landscape (where landscape and people are one) sacralizing the landscape is first nature. As civilization progressed (thousands of years ago, already) agriculture -- using the land rather than living with the land or in the land undermined the land-people relationship. There are vestiges of this in the Old Testament where the indigenous Baal worshipers sacralized high places--hill tops, mountain tops, and built worship centers there. The Baalists also carried out fertility rituals in the form of temple prostitution. The God of the Israelites instructed the Jews to do away with all such relationships to high places and fertility. The Israelites we promised land, and oddly enough, the land was desacralized from the perspective of the people who already lived there (the Philistines).
The general thrust of many civilizations has been to desacralize the land.
Consider Bear Lodge or Bear's Tipi. To me, it is natural that Bear's Tipi would be a sacred site. Visually, it connects earth and sky n a very dramatic and singular way. There are not a dozen other features like it in the landscape. It stands alone. It looks "made" in a way that a plain or a hill doesn't look made. (Technically, it's a hard volcanic plug from which the surrounding softer land forms were eroded away.) I think a structure like this would be deemed sacred just about anywhere on earth among pre-modern, unsecularized people.
Bear's Tipi, aka Devil's Tower
Quoting Benjamin Dovano
You're probably depressed and should be on antidepressants. [JOKE ALERT]
Feelings of emptiness and psychological pain go with the territory of being a human. People who always feel full and totally happy have something seriously wrong with them. .
It seems that there are at least two different senses in which the word 'scared' is used, and that there are at least two different answers to the question "What is sacred?".
In one sense the word is used for things made sacred, such as cultural, religious, or political symbols. For example, famous art works, saints, flags. In another sense the word is used for things we discover as deserving our veneration regardless of whether it satisfies a function in some cultural, religious, or political context. For example, something beautiful, graceful, strong, skilfully made, good, or someone being alive after some terrible ordeal. For some people life, a starry sky, or a friend may deserve veneration, and they are then sacred, because of what they are, as ends in themselves, not means for something else. In this sense discovery is sacred like beauty is sacred.
One and the same object may be sacred and deserve our veneration in one sense but not in the other. For example, a work of art might be sacred in some cultural tradition simply because it was made famous, yet without being sacred in the other sense, say, because it's neither good, beautiful nor skilfully made (the art world is full of people who believe that all would be a social construction). However, one may find a colour or a spiritual experience as sacred and deserving veneration regardless of whether anyone else finds it as such.
I don't believe this is true. Perhaps the sacred cannot be determined by any means, which would mean it cannot be found by either empirical (in the sense of intersubjectively or publicly empirical) or abstract thinking. Does it follow that it cannot be found at all?
On a secular basis man seems to need ideals, things to strive for, to hold as sacred. Baden's definition of the sacred, sounded very much like a description of virtue: that which
The problem is that all men are of "limited mind", the only actions which we are capable of fetishizing are the imperfect conceptions of an ideal. such as justice. Perhaps virtue's 'sacredness' lies in humanity's own imperfect conception of itself, since what we fetishize for (virtue/justice/...),,,we seem to require because of our own imperfections.
Well, I'd ask you as I asked Ben. How might you or I actually go about "finding" what is sacred, that which is outside of time and thought?
Sorry, but I'm just not seeing how we can suspend the natures of our being in order to somehow ascertain not only sacredness, but what is sacred in itself - and to do so without thought or under the confines of time. To suggest that we can remains utterly incomprehensible to me.
Quoting John
I'll go out on a limb here and put my foot down on this one - no, you or I cannot ever find what is sacred, if what is sacred remains hidden away in a realm governed not by time, nor thought. If indeed you figure out at some point how to find this without thinking about it, and without there having been any time to have passed, let me know. That sounds like an adventure. Might even be fun...although I'd never be able to remember it, alas.
My guess is that Benjamin Dovano thought he was merely emphasizing the specialness of the sacred by putting it beyond time and thought. In so doing, he made it so special it's the same thing as non-existent.
The sacred doesn't even have to be that special. The slightly secluded thicket where you first made love might be sacred to you but entirely ordinary otherwise,
To ask how we go about finding the sacred seems to be tantamount to asking how it can be found by thought. So I can't answer that, because I don't think we can, except to say find a great desire for the sacred and you will likely find it and then maybe you will know how you found it.
Can there be anything sacred if there is no sense of the sacred?
When you say " everything lies in the time and thought fields " then you automagically :) put borders around an say ( this is all we can ). And life is limitless in my opinion.
Inquire into stop thinking? Life is way more then we see or percieve with our human senses right? I would call thinking a sense, like the smell or sight - and if those senses can be educated, why can't thinking be educated in such a manner that would allow you to pause it when needed ?
Saying there is nothing beyond thought and time ( just because we are limited in visual spectre, lifetime, understanding and all the other limitations that we have as humans ), sounds a bit vain, and I would rather apporach this with a more humble state. If I say there is nothing beyond that, then that's that. We stop.
But a more open approach like ( let's find out ), will probably lead to success.
I'm optimistic :)
I like to see the glass refillable not half empty or half full :)
Also I would like to thank you for your answers, because they bring a new perfume to my thinking and I find it very usefull.
See, I'd agree, but you haven't found what is sacred in itself, only imperfect and personal representations of it. Those we can experience and find meaning from all the time, but it doesn't make it any less impossible for us to find sacred perfectly in itself.
Quoting John
I would tentatively say yes. However, I do believe one can experience what is sacred with an imperfect sense of it, so I wouldn't set up your question with your terms. Your question would be answered with a yes were you to replace sacred with God.
Quoting Benjamin Dovano
I do so simply out of a statement of fact. I'm not meaning to be too judgmental, friend.
What makes you think that it is or could be limitless? And by limitless, what do you mean?
Quoting Benjamin Dovano
One would cease being human at this point. You've essentially requested me and you to be like the usually conceptualized God, something that doesn't play by any rules. Humans do play by certain rules, however, which I can't see ever going away and us still being regarded as human. This is why I disagree that you and I can actually do what you think that we can in our current states. It'd be like a mountain deciding that it could think, yet how could it know that without thinking it first? The mountain's trying to get at something that it can't, just as we would be were we to search after something we can't think or know about.
Quoting Benjamin Dovano
I'm not saying that there is nothing outside of time or thought, only that that something is incomprehensible and has no bearing on whether I acknowledge this fact or not. If I say that there is indeed "something" outside of time and thought...okay. Great. What then is there for me to do about it? I can't find it because my being prohibits it. If what is sacred exists in this realm outside of time and thought, then it has to find me, not the other way around.
Quoting Benjamin Dovano
This example has never made any sense to me. Half-empty would mean not in the glass anymore, and somewhere in negative space, perhaps below the table the glass was sitting on. *shrug*
d) Fame
I might not be understanding you, but it seems you are suggesting we might be able to find what is sacred (or anything for that matter) outside of experience. I can't make sense of that because it seems to me that the act or process of finding anything would necessarily be an experience. How could you tell the difference between "imperfect and personal representations of it" and the "sacred in itself"?
Quoting Heister Eggcart
I don't know what it could mean to "experience what is sacred with an imperfect sense of it". The only way I can parse this is that you mean to say that there can be more or less sacred experiences, or experiences that are more or less filled with a sense of the sacred. You say there could be a God without any sense of a God. Again I don't know what it could mean to say there could be a God without any being anywhere have any sense of God. You don't think God depends on Man as much as Man depends on God? ( I am using Man here in the broadest possible sense to refer to any conscious being that experiences a sense of God, and thus has an idea of God).
Without the sacred only the scared remains.
Heh, yeah, scared and dyslexic :p
Don't you mean 'scared and anagrammatic'.
;)
Anagrammatic, or simply a mistake because the two words look alike :)
I was also thinking about another word, 'sanctuary': it's longer than 'sacred' or 'scared', but its meaning seems closely related. For example, when sacred places or churches are used as sanctuaries by the scared, or when symbols, rituals, or simply thoughts about something sacred, say Mother Mary, are used as consolation.
The scared seek inviolability and consolation by the sacred.
Apologies for my being confusing.
Quoting John
Precisely the opposite. This is what the OP appears to think, though, hence the "outside of thought and time" bit that he brought up originally.
Quoting John
If I say that I've experienced love, have I then experienced an absolute love? As with what is sacred, I think there to be a proper distinction between sacredness and sacred. I could just be too knee-deep in semantics, though.
Quoting John
To me, God is a hollow word that, however defined, reveals nothing about what it supposedly is on its own. This is why I say that there may be a God, yet we cannot get a sense of "one."
I think that sense of 'desacralized' or 'demystified' is very typical of the secular age in which we live. Some people (for example, Terrapin Station) are at home in that; others (like Benjamin Devano) are searching for something beyond it.
I was reading an essay by a Catholic philosopher of science, who noted that:
Retelling the Story of Science
Note however that the world is not thereby made devoid of the sacred, but that the locus of the sacred is shifted from the ancient pagan dieties to one God; the world is then sacred as a creation of God, not due to the presence of spirits or holy places (although it's also notable that in traditional Christianity, room is left for both.)
For me the sacred can only consist in the co-arising of God, Self and World. The notion of the sacred being in virtue of an impossibly distant God makes no sense at all to me.
I know what you mean, but I tend to think that nature, the world, is, prior to rationalistic thought, aboriginally sacred and replete with God.
I think this kind of notion of original participatory perception is the thesis of Barfield's Saving the Appearances, if I remember correctly. And he thinks much rides on humanity's ability to effect a return to that kind of participation. I tend to find myself agreeing more and more with this these days.
"Sacred" has a specific meaning to religiois people. If you are not religious there are a great number of words that require redefining because of there colloquial use.
Yellow rose petals
thunder—
a waterfall
(Basho)
Realization of the impermanence of life enables us to rever each moment as something sacred.
According to christians didn't god become man in order to understand what it is to be an imperfect being, to save us, so that we could become perfect, but that perfection does not take place in this world.
Was there anything sacred then before humans existed ? Or we invented sacredness ?
I feel like I released a monster with this topic but I will not stop here on this topic :) - this was merely an introduction so I can get to know some of you and how you're thinking.
And again thank you for sharing your thoughts in regard to this matter.
Am I doing something wrong? :) If I am not satisfied with the curent version of " reality " presented by society and media and education and all that is involved, and I want to go beyond, what should stop me? Nothing as far as I am concerned.
I tested this reality, I got a good grasp of it, i find it a second hand reality... so I wanna meet the REAL reality, in which truth resides.
It is nothing outside of this world, it is only prohibited because we are limited and keep playing the game in the same limits and accept them as default.
Can we say Life is a dance of elementary particles?
If so, who plays the music ? And how many songs did we listen to so far? Who can change the record?
What if life - the animation we have by being alive is a code that can be decrypted? Our lives today are like an encoded message that we can copy paste and it does what it has to do, but we don't see the source code, we only see the results, (you know you can make a baby with your spouse, but what goes behind the curtains of the procreation act?)
How do the cells and chemicals tango so that they become " alive and aware "?
I think if we are ever to find GOD, it must be a mix between Science (reasoning) and Curiosity ( innocence) and not the current Spirituality(believe with no questions). Probably a different state or essence of Spirituality.
Thanks for these.
Tolkien's Middle Earth was a thoroughly sacralized place until the end of the Third Age, with the final defeat of a particular Evil, and then magic and the sacred departed, not to return again, in the Fourth Age of Man's kingship. (Tolkien managed to stuff quite a bit into his non-existent world.)
While 'the world' has been desacralized, there are recurrent, scattered, and on-going efforts to smuggle the sacred back in, to re-sacralize 'the world'. (But the world is what the world is, whether it is sacralized, secularized, or sodomized.) In some future century we may find that the world is sacred again, that gods are again worshipped on high places, inhabit mountains, oozing landfills, collapsed glowing nuclear reactors, et al.
Come what may, I don't think we will succeed in re-establishing the sacred. There are too many forces arrayed against such an outcome, and it isn't just the obvious secular devils of science, bureaucracy, technology, commerce, and so on. The dominant religion on earth (the Abrahamic trinity from Judaism to Christianity and Islam) are theologically complicit.
The local gods are all pretty much gone, and were defeated long before anybody started worrying about secularization. The Celtic religion, for instance, was suppressed many centuries ago by Christian teaching, and the same thing happened elsewhere under Christian and Islamic teaching.
Many do, and we all ought to have mixed feelings about this process. Secularization and desacralization have allowed us to pillage the only shelter we have in the cosmos (10,000 science fiction novels to the contrary). I wouldn't reverse secularization even if I could, but there is no doubt it is a mixed blessing--and it is, in part, a blesséd thing.
Perhaps secularization contains some seeds for its own destruction, or at least its minimization. I tried venturing a guess as to how that might be, but everything I thought of sounded too corny or flimsy.
In a secular society more people get to use their own will to power, which, I suppose, could make the secular society less stable as there might be more candidates for power than in a theocracy in which more people obey the will of some other power.
Not at all! That is of great interest to me, also. I have been pursuing such ideas all my life. Here's a few resources:
Science and Nonduality
Closer to Truth
There are many video presentation and links in those sites which you might find of interest.
I don't think the sacred can be 're-established', all that is missing is the sense of the sacred.
I'm not sure it can make any sense to ask if there was anything sacred prior to humans. I certainly don't think we could have "invented" sacredness. How could I possibly convince you that something is sacred of you don't feel it yourself?
Speaking about being on the path, I came upon this, quoted in The Rhythym of Being: The Unbroken Trinity by Raimon Panikkar:
[i]Caminante, son tus huellas
el camino, y nada más;
caminante, no hay camino,
se hace camino al andar.[/i]
—Antonio Machado
Wayfarer, your footsteps are
the way, and nothing more;
Wayfarer, there is no way,
the way is in the walking.
Let me put it this way: " How can we be alive, if life started before humans? - Are we forbid to experience something from before our existence?
Quoting John
If I can feel it and experience it, then it is from the past, and I recognize it, otherwise it cannot be experienced right ? Unless you recognize it, how can you know if it was any experience ? So it must be something that happened in the past, but what if that past is billions of years ago, and the experience of IT is stored in a sort of Universal consciousness, where all things reside and we borrow and give back constantly without even knowing? "
Did mathematics existed before humans ? Was mathematics expressed in the form of creation and galaxies and every phenomena that exists ? If so, we merely discoverd it right ? But it was there with the original creation act ?
Quoting John
What makes you so sure? Maybe we invented it because of our fear of death ? We certainly invented the word for it, but what is it and why are we so affraid to face it ?
Thank you! Will go into it and get back :)
It means life can't be put in a box with 6 walls like " thought and time " life is more then that, existence is more then that.
This one's a kind of mind-bender that has had the power to confound philosophers for millenia. I don't think I can answer it to your satisfaction. My feeling is actually that I don't want to touch it even with a barge pole.
Quoting Benjamin Dovano
Theosophists have claimed that everything that has ever happened is written forever in the Akashic Records, and that if you access the right degree of contemplation you can access those records. Honestly, I simply don't know what to make of such an idea.
Quoting Benjamin Dovano
Are you asking whether God is a mathematician or at least had an appreciation of mathematics?
Quoting Benjamin Dovano
Invention of the sacred due to fear of death? How do you think that might work? Yes, there are probably many words in many languages that mean 'sacred'. Do you think we are really afraid to face it? Kant says the supreme sense of beauty is the sense of the sublime. The most beautiful thing of all is that before which we are most helpless. But can the most uplifting sense of beauty derive from nought but fear? Why should we think so?
That is why I think the remedy has to be counter-cultural and why environmentalism and alternative spirituality are intrinsic to the solution. (But to be fair, there is and always has been a counter-cultural element in Christianity as a social movement.)
My view is impossible to summarise in a forum post, but it is along the lines of an Hegelian dialectic: that at the time of the formation of the Christian Church, some of the essential attributes of spirituality were excluded by Church dogma, for complex historical reasons. The victorious party, who then edited the various teachings into what is now 'The Bible', were first and foremost intent on maintaining their monopoly on the means to salvation - 'no-one comes to the Father but by us' ('no salvation outside the Church').
Alternative spiritualities were ruthlessly suppressed and exterminated. This continued even through the Middle Ages and the Inquisition (i.e. the suppression of the Cathars in Langue'Doc.)
So that is one pole of the dialectic. The other pole is the rejection of religion by scientific materialism. God vs Not God, sacred vs secular, and all the other dichotomies then exist between these two poles. That is the underlying dynamic between so many of these debates. Now of course that is only one view, only one 'version of the truth'.
How do you know about that which you cannot think?
The means with which to know.
Ok, ill come with another version, that is more clear, I see everyone tends to go insanely abstract and with no clarity, as far as I am concerned ( is just an opinion, you can totally ignore it ).
Thinking is a response of our memory, think of it like a 'heartbeat' in the brain, that keeps pomping electrical signals that translate into ideas(thinking) , rather then blood like the heart does.
It is no different then breathing, only harder to understand and contain because you can easily control your nose and mouth and air intake - you can hold your breath for a few seconds and the general population does it too, but there are some who can hold their breathing for minutes ( lots of them ), now try to imagine thinking again, if you try to stop it as a MEANS ( beacause I want to ), you will fail because you are trying to exercise a method of suppression on something that evolved in millions of years and we still strive to understand what it is and how it works.
But if we go with understanding thinking and all the facts that are related to it maybe we can reach a new destination in our journey. I am not stating anything.