Sacredness Exists, But Nothing The Human Mind Makes Is Sacred

There’s a great oak at the entrance to the upper end of the park that runs through town. It has seven huge branches reaching down to the grass on one side, and is as magnificent as ever on I walk in for a meditation.

The old oak anchors three miles of the quarter-mile wide parkland that lies on both sides of the creek. It must be very old, a mature tree even when indigenous people lived here, before Europeans came and drove them out in the mid-19th and early 20th centuries. They probably gathered its acorns, which they ground, leached and cooked into their staple food.

It will be five dry months before the rainy season returns. The foothills are already brown, and a truly dangerous fire season now begins.

The day is hot, but it’s green and well shaded beside the stream. Kids shout and play at ‘the beach,’ a narrow strip of sand and hip deep water (for an adult) 100 meters upstream from where I take a meditation.

Across the stream, a thudding bass noise, exuding from an unseen house, reverberates over the music of the rippling current and the gleeful voices of the children. Just as the mind-as-thought yields to inclusive, undirected attention however, it stops.

A strange indifference to the world comes over me. When the separate ‘I’ and thought end, the world recedes into insignificance, psychological time ceases, and one’s problems appear as the petty things they are.

One of America’s greatest ecological writers and philosophers, John Muir, once said: “Presently you lose consciousness of your own separate existence: you blend with the landscape, and become part and parcel of nature.”

Advertisement - scroll to continue reading

When thought and time end, one sees and feels the ever-present actuality of death, without a trace of morbidity or fear. Death is in every exhalation, and in the continuous termination of the cells within the body. It’s an inextricable part of everything in nature. In fact, death is the ground not only of nature’s continuous renewal, but the wellspring of the ongoing creation of the universe.

Psychological thought, by its very nature, divides life from death, and so fears it. But when thought spontaneously falls silent in undirected attention to its movement in the mirror of nature, a reverence for life as well as death arise within one. A benediction comes, a sacredness completely beyond words, emotions and the intellect.

That’s the only thing worthy of veneration. Never adore another person, or put them on a pedestal, however illumined they may be. Reserve your reverence for life, death and the immeasurable beauty of nature and the universe, and the unknowable creative source within and behind the cosmos.

The human brain is the only brain on this planet with the capacity for such conscious awareness, for communion and participation in the sacredness that imbues the universe. So why is it so rare to “bring the benediction?”

Is it because few modern people have relationship with nature? Is it because we have no feeling for what is actually sacred, but imbue things the human mind has with false sacredness?

The philosopher Moshe Halbertal writes, “When you lose the realm of the sacred, that realm of the common good outside of politics, that is when societies collapse.”

If he had left it at, “When you lose the realm of the sacred, that is when societies collapse,” it would have given pregnant pause. But by adding, “that realm of the common good outside of politics,” he defines and delimits the sacred.

The sacred is beyond the world and the word, without being separate from anything. It has nothing to do with the “common good.”

If I had any doubt about what Halbertal means by the sacred, he dispelled it by asking, who are the leaders many of us still respect and yearn for — even when we disagree with them?

Halbertal answers his rhetorical question: “They are the leaders who believe that there is a realm of the sacred — of the common good — that is outside of politics and who make big decisions based on their best judgment of the common good — not their naked power interests.’’

“The common good” is not sacred. It is, rightly, at the core of the political dimension. And as recently as a few decades ago, the common good could be defined in national terms without being nationalistic.

That is no longer possible however. The common good now refers to the global commons—the common good of humanity.

Even so, it is still in the realm of the political dimension, not contemplative insight and direct experiencing. To my mind, awakening our intrinsic capacity to perceive and receive the sacred is why we’re alive on this beautiful planet.

We cannot define what is sacred, for if we could, it wouldn’t be sacred, it would be another plaything of thought and the intellect.

The human brain has the capacity to be in communion with the sacred, but the mind-as-thought must fall completely, spontaneously silent for a deep reverence for life and death to be, and for the benediction to come.

Martin LeFevre

© Scoop Media