Demystifying the Sacred

Sacred can be a heavy word for many people, sometimes bringing up feelings of resistance or repulsion. Setting aside negative religious associations some people develop even as early as childhood, in the West there can be a lot of expectation and pressure that comes with the word sacred. 

But the idea of sacredness is actually a very simple thing. To be sacred is to be meaningful and woven in with the deepest level of truth in one’s reality. If God is the heart of your reality, then God is sacred. If for you there is no externalized God, but a field of oneness instead, then that is sacred – or science, or nature, or the vast potential of all humans. What is sacred is that which lets us personally tap into the truth of ourselves and reality itself. That is it.

Two Lenses into the Sublime

There are two main approaches to talking about the Sacred. In the West, we have traditionally focused on sacredness being beyond basic humaning. To paraphrase the religious philosopher Mircea Eliade, the Sacred is what transcends ordinary everyday life. If what is sacred is only beyond the normal human realm, sacredness can feel distant and mysterious, and maybe inaccessible to some people.

But, there is another approach present in wisdom traditions around the world, one where the sacred is immanent, or baked into everyday things and moments.

When we experience the sacredness in children’s learning tears, in the pattern of rain falling on a pond, or in the careful wrist movements made in making tea, we are witnessing sacredness in the mundane.

We are accessing the profundity of simply being embodied and aware in this reality – that this very reality and all it contains is sacred. 

Both of these understandings of sacred – the transcendent and the immanent – are valuable in today’s world. Ceremony can be a big official-feeling merging with the Divine, and the daily practice of embodying the truth of yourself and your path can be a way of participating in the sacredness of being human on this planet. The sacredness does not stop. This whole life is a ceremony from beginning to end, and everything in it gets to be sacred if we let it. 

Sacredness in Action - Beyond the Limits of What Is Possible

You don’t have to earn the Sacred. It simply is. It can serve as fuel and inspiration, nourishing the soul and guiding innovation that serves the liberation of all life and beauty. When the everyday moments are sacred, when we are sacred, it suddenly becomes easier to transcend the perceived limits of what is possible.

Religions and big institutions are no longer gatekeepers of the Sacred. Now, waves of visionaries and builders – architects of a better world – are finding the Sacred in every tiny corner imaginable. As our shared reality is quickly morphing, we get to choose how we are building new structures. We get to choose to illuminate, first ourselves and then the world, with the light of aligned truth – the light of how sacred it is to be a human in this strange and beautiful world.

If you’re curious and ready to bring the Sacred into your life in meaning and action, join us for the Sacred YES, an initiatory container culminating in retreat at Joshua Tree September 25-28.