The Sacred Essence

An experience of the sacred orders the world because it not only provides a channel for man to come into contact with the really real, the numinous; it also enables him to share in the work of ordering reality. 

(Unsecular Man: 167) 

            Learning starts with perceiving difference, with making distinctions. What is identical to you cannot be known by you.  All knowledge is of distinction and difference.  But the most important distinction is the distinction between the sacred and the ordinary worlds, the holy and unholy worlds.  But I am not using holy and unholy in a strictly religious sense.  A holy world is a whole one, for holiness comes from wholeness.  An unholy world is one that is disconnected and fragmented.  We see in our fragmenting world not only the eclipse of spiritual thought within human consciousness, but also, as a consequence, the fracturing of a unified culture.  Likewise, when it loses connection with the spiritual dimension the inner world of human consciousness is fractured.

            A complete world does not exist where “nothing is sacred.”  Both the spiritual and the material are available to our perception, material and spiritual being two strategic levels at which reality is accessible by human inquiry.  To see both at once is what the poet William Blake indicated when he wrote: “When the doors of perception are cleansed, man will see things as they truly are, infinite.”  He put this double-perspective into almost every poem he wrote.  For example, when gazing upon a thistle by the lane:

Double the vision my Eyes do see,

And a double vision is always with me.

With my inward Eye ‘tis an Old man grey;

With my outward, a Thistle across my way.

Or, in this poem titled Auguries of Innocence:

To see a World in a Grain of Sand

And a heaven in a Wild Flower

Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand

And Eternity in an Hour.

            The spiritual surrounds and shines through shimmering matter, illuminating it from within.  We may see the sacred in and through the everyday object and event as children do, if, in Blake’s phrase, “the doors of perception” are cleansed.  This spiritual perception is to see directly “face to face” not materially “as through a glass darkly.”  In a material consciousness we “know in part” but, in a spiritual consciousness we shall “know even as also I am known.”(1 Corinthians 13:12)

            Knowledge of the spiritual is to see spiritual energy animating matter, to see each form of matter in its “essential form” not just its elemental forms, and to experience the divinity of the Source of that energy.  Matter becomes more spiritual when we see it that way, for matter is realized spirit.  In the same vein, we must strive to see each human being through the same spiritual prism.  When we do, as Maslow asserts” “the eternal becomes visible in and through the particular, the symbolic and platonic can be experienced in and through the concrete instance, the sacred can fuse with the profane, and one can transcend the universe of time and space while being in it.” (Religion, Values, and Peak Experiences:116.)

            I believe that Reality has three levels or dimensions, spiritual, mental and material, but for the secular-minded Reality has only two dimensions, nature (material) and human (intellectual), leaving nowhere “real” to locate anything else.  I suggest that this belief persists because our dominant secularist thought is based upon materialist assumptions about Reality.  Materialism does not know how to perceive sacredness and divinity, except as the highest that human beings feel, think and do. 

            Secular understanding is human knowledge that has been stripped of the sacred dimension.  There is no transcendence to it, and as sociologist Daniel Bell remarks: “To understand the transcendent, man requires a sense of the sacred.” (The Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism:171)  Where for the spiritually-minded the sacred exists “within” the organic, living creation, the secular-minded only observes a mechanically revolving universe.  The secular mind does not acknowledge powers higher than human, only higher human powers and so, compensates, by deifying the objective powers of Nature.  But such minds fail to recognize that only powers higher than human can activate the higher human powers.  A desacralized creation is a smaller, colder, more indifferent universe, one almost impenetrable by human thought and feeling, except mathematically.  Only humans have real consciousness in it.  It is one where every living thing appears without its aura of sacredness.

            But despite centuries of effort to completely desacralize the universe, something of it must have remained within human consciousness and is being rediscovered.   For example, psychologist and self-styled “Jewish atheist” Jonathan Haidt, writes: “My claim is that the human mind perceives a third dimension, a specifically moral dimension that I will call ‘divinity’….  In choosing the label ‘divinity’, I am not assuming that God exists and is there to be perceived.  Rather my research on the moral emotions has lead me to conclude that the human mind simply does perceive divinity and sacredness, whether or not God exists.” (The Happiness Hypothesis: 183-184)

            Now, one cannot perceive something that is not there, unless one is hallucinating.  To perceive “a third dimension, a specifically moral dimension” means there is an objective dimension there to perceive. How did it get there?  Where did it come from, since it pre-existed our perception of it?  Even if we say that it is only a dimension of the human reality, who put that moral dimension there within us to be experienced?  God, or some ordering power that is not itself perceptible, must have put it there.  We can assert this because, like a photograph of someone who is not present, the photo proves that the one in the photo exists, or existed.  The image is proof of the Reality, as the swaying tree proves the presence of the invisible wind. 

            Perhaps the human mind perceives divinity outside it because there is divinity within it, as Blake believed.  Divinity is the name given to that extra-ordinary consciousness within the human reality that perceives and encounters the sacred, and knows it to be Sacred.  It is the divine within perceiving and responding to the divinity without, that divine spark within every human being that is enkindled by the sacred Fire of the Word, as Buddha presents in his Fire Sermon.  Both the divine spark within the human essence and the Fire within all creation are necessary for connection and to prevent, on the one hand, the sacred from being Itself so “totally other” that it has no relation to human beings, and, on the other hand, from psychologizing the sacred into just a projection of humanity’s own subjectivity.  

            In the apocryphal Gospel of Thomas (saying #70) Jesus is recorded as stating: "If you bring forth what is within you, what you bring forth will save you.  If you do not bring forth what is within you, what you do not bring forth will destroy you."  Whether he said this or not, this is a valid psychological and educational principle.  We are destroying ourselves because for centuries we have not brought out the sacred within us, but have, rather, denied it.  Should we “educe” our sacred essence, we will understand something of what Bahá’u’lláh meant when He wrote: “Turn thy sight unto thyself, that thou mayest find Me standing within thee, mighty, powerful and self-subsisting.”(Arabic Hidden Words #13)  Experiencing the Sacred Essence within us—that same Power that animates and orders the cosmos outside--enables us, as sociologist Andrew Greeley states in the opening quote, “to share in the work of ordering reality.”   The next post will present some thoughts on that experience.