I take issue with your example that highways aren't typically sacred. I argue they're one of the most accessible modern sacred structures. Consider highway 1 or route 66, they have an almost mythic status in American pop culture. Maybe I'm getting the concept wrong but if a highway has been featured in multiple blues songs it's probably got some aspect of sacredness.
Really interesting counterpoint! I’d suggest that your word “mythic” is more accurate than “sacred” here though. (And, as the post says near the beginning, those are different things.)
I'd (naviely) think that everything that's mythic is sacred but not everything sacred is mythic. Can things be mythic but not sacred? What are some examples of that?
"For example, it’s common to rigidly categorize as sacred all and only those things designated as such by authority figures in your religion."
sharing some anecdotal thoughts, based on my experience
the quote seems like an overly rigid and narrow, but good entry point (similar to your ending). And it makes sense---authority figures aren't usually making arbitrary decisions, unless its some brand new cult. They are basing it off of generations of tradition (which is likely to be able to pick up and stick with things that are good vehicles for sacredness), or at the very least, they are a good cooperation point for a community.
One of my favorite exposures to sacredness is "man in G-d's image", which makes looking at people (sacred) a near mythic move. It's very powerful, but even though it's biblically explicit, and certainly a part of the Jewish Rabbinic tradition, it's very rare. Probably because it doesn't have any rituals. That said, I don't think it would have been accessible to me if I didn't first experience sacredness through an earlier 'metaphysical lens'--(this thing simply is sacred/holy, that's just the way it is.) The metaphysical lens lets you do the 'as if' way of living, without thinking of yourself as doing 'as if', and then once you find out it /was/ 'as if' you can recall it. But otherwise, it's seems really hard.
A lot of food for thought in this one. For me personally, while free engagement with sacredness as you described here rather resonates, feels pretty natural and something I do in general, I have problems with using the term "sacred". Because my particular confusion is probably closer to confusing it with the religious (or state-created, or even sometimes commonly-inculturated) phenomena that is basically closer to taboo. Pretty much, everything that is touched by "sacredness" can't be argued back and it has a tendency to spread and let unwholesome things fester under its cover.
Something I've been thinking about recently - there's a good reason to be apprehensive of sacredness, even if you don't confuse it with metaphysics/supernatural/etc - sacredness often acts as intensifier of other dimensions of meaning, and in cases when those meanings are mistaken/harmful (which isn't exactly uncommon) sacredness tends to ensure their fixation.
Probably this tendency was adaptive in the ancestral environment/"choiceless mode", and won't be much of an issue when culture gets significantly deconfused, but for now we seem to be in the uncanny valley when stuff changes quickly, and spurious nonsense gets entrenched/sacralized/fought over.
You suggest "interactive" as an alternative to the objective-versus-subjective dichotomy, but another alternative is "cultural." Since people learn different languages in each culture, human language is culture-specific. The usage of English words is not entirely objective in the sense of invariably following strict rules, but it's also not subjective in the sense of living in one person's head. We know now that human language usage can be learned by machines, through imitation! Aliens from Andromeda could learn to do it too, we assume, but they'd need source material to imitate.
Adding a new stone to a cairn is one of the simplest forms of cultural transmission via imitation. We place a stone *here* rather than *there* because others have done so before us. If there's nobody around to explain why they did it, what other people might have felt when they did this isn't known to us. Only the ritual itself is actually transmitted by the presence of a cairn.
More generally, once we have the idea of piling up rocks (which any child can learn), we can do it in other places. In some parks, where rock-piling has gotten out of hand, park management might put up a sign discouraging the practice.
Imitation often looks like a one-way transmission. We can imitate what someone did many years ago. However, even piling up rocks isn't entirely trivial, as people learn when they try to build a robot to do it. To actually *do* a ritual often requires a bit of problem-solving.
>Suppose you are willing to let go of worrying about metaphysics, and want to engage with sacredness freely, unconstrained by dogmas: how do you do that?
I'm kinda surprised that you don't emphasize the communal aspect here. Since sacredness is interactional, you need to find a community to do sacredness with, preferably a more sane than average. Easier said than done, of course.
"Metaphysical explanations are unconstrained by actuality, and therefore mainly false and harmful.
Metaphysics differs here from myth, which is imaginary but meaningfully grounded in concrete, embodied experience."
Hmm, I'm pretty sure that most philosophers would disagree and say that their metaphysics is very much grounded in concrete, embodied experience. I'd say that the difference is that metaphysics presupposes there being a Perfect Ultimate Truth that the mind can in principle apprehend (a stance that you call rationalist eternalism), while myth generally doesn't.
I love this piece, David. You describe this orientation so clearly and it resonates deeply as a description of how I've come to live, though I could never describe it so well. Some musing the piece sparks for me: 1) about our innate capacity for awe -- and its evolutionary value (something that, according to Goodall, we share with apes); 2) whether there's a connection between the capacity to experience and act on the sacred and a capacity to honor life; and 3) how gratitude, and its upwelling, can be a spark for blessing, then blessing as the gateway to kind and caring action. And more . . . .
"In monotheistic religions, the eternal ordering principle is God. Everything means whatever God makes it mean; no more, no less. So things are sacred if God makes them so, directly or indirectly through one of His representatives."
Yes, but that is the account of how sacredness is established, not the definition of the term. Things are sacred for theists because they are an expression of or conduit to the divinity of the deity. If there is no deity, a new definition is required.
>If there is no deity, a new definition is required.
What's wrong with a dictionary one? "Regarded with great respect and reverence by a particular religion, group, or individual" makes sense even when you take out "religion".
I laughed when I read this! Both were sacred to me, although differently so. The first tree is in such a manicured space, defined by human proportions and goals. Speaking of anthropomorphism (though no one was particularly), did you catch the human form made by overlapping leaves and shadows in the branches of the first tree? Has to count for something.
Still, I agree that the "sacred" isn't entirely subjective; if anything, it's perhaps an invitation beyond the limits of subjectivity, expanding what can be included. Or maybe not.....
This is all hopeful to me, but I understand only faintly. I want to understand some of what you understand. I have many questions!
(I'm hoping for paradigmatic answers to these, rather than definitional answers. I'm trying to locate sacredness in my own experience, not to draw definitions around it and be able to say that This Is It and That Is Not, which I already expect to be a mistake.)
What do you typically perceive when you perceive sacredness?
It seems like seeing-as-sacred yields different affordances than seeing-as-not-sacred. Can you describe the differences in what those affordances feel like?
Can sacredness be present without affecting your overt interactions? Or is sacredness in part comprised of a change to those interactions? Or might it just be interactional in affecting your non-overt interactions, like feeling, thinking, and perception? (Or is it "just" in a feedback loop with some of these kinds of interactions?
Does sacredness feel normative to you, like it yields ethical or practical duties? Does it always create a difference in your sense of rightness and wrongness in your actions? Does it create a difference in your sense of the rightness and wrongness of _others'_ actions?
From _inside_ the feeling of sacredness, are there reasons that some things are sacred? Do these share patterns?
... I now realize I'm asking for posts and posts of answers, such is real interest, I think. I'll appreciate whatever you feel up for!
These are great questions! I am sorry to have taken two weeks to reply at all, and also sorry that I'm not going to say anything substantive now, because (as you say) this opens out into what would be a book's worth of answering at minimum. And I'm really not sure of the answers anyway—sacredness is (almost by definition) somewhat mysterious and difficult to pin down. It's a "mysterium tremendum et fascinans": a sometimes-terrifying and fascinating mystery.
If it seems like it might be useful, you might attend the next Q&A, which is a week from today, and pose the questions there. I might be forced to try to give some sort of answers by being put on the spot! I'd also ask other participants for their takes, so you might get an interesting (or confusing) diversity of answers.
Sacredness without metaphysics hits because people recognize those rare moments when life suddenly feels deeper and more vivid. As everyday noise builds, our attention narrows and the world starts to feel thin, so anything that opens a sense of meaning stands out immediately. It’s describing a shift in perception where things regain weight and presence, the way they do when drift slows and the mind isn’t overloaded. These moments don’t depend on belief systems. They show up whenever awe, focus, or connection cuts through the synthetic realness of routine. People respond to that because it reconnects them with a kind of clarity that’s hard to reach in high-entropy modern environments.
Here's something I've mulled over for years, ever since we had our podcast episode about sacredness. I even spent several more days mulling it over since you posted this, just in case, because this is important to me.
But this isn't *sacred* to me, so I'll say it.
Your examples here, and the ones we discussed on the podcast, sound like importance, and loving something a lot. How does your conception of sacred differ from important or beloved?
The distinction I draw is consistent with how I hear the word constantly used (derogative connotation, as in "sacred cow", or positive connotation, when eternalists say it). The distinction doesn't have to to with metaphysics or superstition, but with how people talk and act; which seems similar to what you call "doing and seeing". Hear me out, but my argument is that doing and seeing is bad when it's sacred, and good when it's important and beloved.
Seeing something as sacred, and acting as such, is distinct from placing a lot of importance or loving something a lot, in that the doing and seeing involve the eternalistic ploys.
1. There is an off-limits quality to treating something as sacred, which is not true of it being important or beloved. A wall of DON'T. Don't be curious. Be careful how you talk about it. Don't look in the holy of holies. Don't touch. Don't think about it too hard. Don't draw the prophet. Don't skewer sacred cows.
2. People get stuck up about it in a way that they don't when it's very important or beloved. Like I said in the episode, as soon as someone says they treat sex as sacred, or music as sacred, or a dance as sacred, they turn snobbish.
3. They start to have absolutist all-or-nothing hang-ups about it in a way they don't when it's important or beloved.
These textures of seeing and doing might not detract from wonder, in some sense, but they often shut down curiosity, humor, play, enjoyment, and creation. Except as kitsch.
One might think, "well, it's just a word, and words have multiple meanings." That's also true of the word "philosophy", and you've convinced me to not use that to describe things except when they're bad. The main reason not to use it with multiple meanings (some good, some bad) is that when people hear it, they almost universally hear us to mean the list of bad traits I listed above about sacredness, and the bad traits which you listed in your posts about philosophy.
In those posts you were very careful to point out distinctions between philosophy and other things, which others had conflated because they just never brought it up. So, to me, it's a significant gap that you haven't addressed the distinction between sacred and very important and beloved.
Hmm, yes, well, it certainly could be useful to explain how I'm using "sacred." OTOH, there are endless things it might be useful for me to explain... and this doesn't seem to be in the top N.
Some people will misunderstand, but that's an inevitable fact about anything I write.
Most things I write won't be useful for most people! And that's unfixable.
Understandable. Fortunately, time is something I do have. Given how often it's on my mind, it's probably worthwhile to add this to what I'm looking into. If I discover an explanation, I'll probably post it somewhere publicly. If someone else asks this question, you can hook us up and have us talk amongst ourselves.
David, this piece was fantastic. I'd really love to hear more about the connection between sacredness and/or the mythic mode, and purpose. This comes mostly from a personal place, as I often struggle with feelings of purposelessness in my life, and have also experienced what I would probably describe as sacredness, and have a desire for more access to it.
Glad you liked it! I started writing a post about the sacredness/mythic mode/purpose connects three weeks ago, but it got complicated, so I set it aside. I'll probably return to it at some point!
As you anticipated, this post was confusing for me! The biggest issue seems to be - I'm not able to identify, in my own lived experience, sacredness as distinct from the other categories you mention. The images you included as examples of the sacred... could they not also be examples of the sublime? Much sublime art includes mountains and vast landscapes. Or, blessing things... that could easily be seen as merely 'spiritual', couldn't it? What kind of experience would be *purely* sacred and none of the other categories?
> The biggest issue seems to be - I'm not able to identify, in my own lived experience, sacredness as distinct from the other categories you mention.
Ah... is this a problem? This post only tried to distinguish sacredness (an embodied here-and-now interaction) from metaphysics (conceptual theories). For some people, that might come as a valuable realization.
> The images you included as examples of the sacred... could they not also be examples of the sublime?
Oh, yes, they definitely are. Sacredness does typically overlap with some of the other categories, although it need not.
I didn't give an example of sacredness as a non-example of anything sacredness might be confused with. Examples might be difficult to communicate, because anything *can* be sacred or non-sacred. So, for example, I related with the willow tree by the pond I mentioned as sacred, and not as anything else on the list. But that was just how the two of us were at the time, and there's not much I can think of to explain beyond that. "You had to be there" (and quite likely you wouldn't have interacted the same way if you had been, although you might have!).
The experience of the sacred, as you describe it here, is something I am not sure I have ever experienced. And judging from your advice it sounds like an awful lot of work. It is not clear to me that it is worth the effort.
Well... This doesn't seem like a lot of effort? And might be valuable even if you reject "sacredness" as the result:
> As a matter of attitude, you can bring to bear wonderment, open-ended curiosity, humor, play, enjoyment, and creation. You can simply notice these as they arise, and allow them to persist and intensify.
In my experience, "allowing [positive emotions] to intensify" is a very slow process that takes dozens if not hundreds of hours of meditation. I have been doing exactly that for several months, and I intend to continue that work, because it has made me obviously happier.
Oh, really glad to hear it is working for you, even if slowly!
I find it helpful to complement meditation with inspiring reading. Descriptions of sacred experience may help point out what to look for, and then you see that it was there all along (unnoticed, and therefore weak).
I take issue with your example that highways aren't typically sacred. I argue they're one of the most accessible modern sacred structures. Consider highway 1 or route 66, they have an almost mythic status in American pop culture. Maybe I'm getting the concept wrong but if a highway has been featured in multiple blues songs it's probably got some aspect of sacredness.
Really interesting counterpoint! I’d suggest that your word “mythic” is more accurate than “sacred” here though. (And, as the post says near the beginning, those are different things.)
I'd (naviely) think that everything that's mythic is sacred but not everything sacred is mythic. Can things be mythic but not sacred? What are some examples of that?
Paul Bunyan. Secular Halloween. QAnon.
I'd think qanon is sacred to its followers but I do see what you're getting at
"For example, it’s common to rigidly categorize as sacred all and only those things designated as such by authority figures in your religion."
sharing some anecdotal thoughts, based on my experience
the quote seems like an overly rigid and narrow, but good entry point (similar to your ending). And it makes sense---authority figures aren't usually making arbitrary decisions, unless its some brand new cult. They are basing it off of generations of tradition (which is likely to be able to pick up and stick with things that are good vehicles for sacredness), or at the very least, they are a good cooperation point for a community.
One of my favorite exposures to sacredness is "man in G-d's image", which makes looking at people (sacred) a near mythic move. It's very powerful, but even though it's biblically explicit, and certainly a part of the Jewish Rabbinic tradition, it's very rare. Probably because it doesn't have any rituals. That said, I don't think it would have been accessible to me if I didn't first experience sacredness through an earlier 'metaphysical lens'--(this thing simply is sacred/holy, that's just the way it is.) The metaphysical lens lets you do the 'as if' way of living, without thinking of yourself as doing 'as if', and then once you find out it /was/ 'as if' you can recall it. But otherwise, it's seems really hard.
Interesting insights, thank you!
A lot of food for thought in this one. For me personally, while free engagement with sacredness as you described here rather resonates, feels pretty natural and something I do in general, I have problems with using the term "sacred". Because my particular confusion is probably closer to confusing it with the religious (or state-created, or even sometimes commonly-inculturated) phenomena that is basically closer to taboo. Pretty much, everything that is touched by "sacredness" can't be argued back and it has a tendency to spread and let unwholesome things fester under its cover.
Something I've been thinking about recently - there's a good reason to be apprehensive of sacredness, even if you don't confuse it with metaphysics/supernatural/etc - sacredness often acts as intensifier of other dimensions of meaning, and in cases when those meanings are mistaken/harmful (which isn't exactly uncommon) sacredness tends to ensure their fixation.
Probably this tendency was adaptive in the ancestral environment/"choiceless mode", and won't be much of an issue when culture gets significantly deconfused, but for now we seem to be in the uncanny valley when stuff changes quickly, and spurious nonsense gets entrenched/sacralized/fought over.
Yes, I think this is an accurate and important point!
You suggest "interactive" as an alternative to the objective-versus-subjective dichotomy, but another alternative is "cultural." Since people learn different languages in each culture, human language is culture-specific. The usage of English words is not entirely objective in the sense of invariably following strict rules, but it's also not subjective in the sense of living in one person's head. We know now that human language usage can be learned by machines, through imitation! Aliens from Andromeda could learn to do it too, we assume, but they'd need source material to imitate.
Adding a new stone to a cairn is one of the simplest forms of cultural transmission via imitation. We place a stone *here* rather than *there* because others have done so before us. If there's nobody around to explain why they did it, what other people might have felt when they did this isn't known to us. Only the ritual itself is actually transmitted by the presence of a cairn.
More generally, once we have the idea of piling up rocks (which any child can learn), we can do it in other places. In some parks, where rock-piling has gotten out of hand, park management might put up a sign discouraging the practice.
Imitation often looks like a one-way transmission. We can imitate what someone did many years ago. However, even piling up rocks isn't entirely trivial, as people learn when they try to build a robot to do it. To actually *do* a ritual often requires a bit of problem-solving.
>Suppose you are willing to let go of worrying about metaphysics, and want to engage with sacredness freely, unconstrained by dogmas: how do you do that?
I'm kinda surprised that you don't emphasize the communal aspect here. Since sacredness is interactional, you need to find a community to do sacredness with, preferably a more sane than average. Easier said than done, of course.
Yeah, I was going to say more near the end, but it was already a long post. So it boiled down to:
I’ve come to practice Vajrayana religiously: as including relationships with https://vividness.live/yidams-a-godless-approach-naturally, and as communal ritual.
"Metaphysical explanations are unconstrained by actuality, and therefore mainly false and harmful.
Metaphysics differs here from myth, which is imaginary but meaningfully grounded in concrete, embodied experience."
Hmm, I'm pretty sure that most philosophers would disagree and say that their metaphysics is very much grounded in concrete, embodied experience. I'd say that the difference is that metaphysics presupposes there being a Perfect Ultimate Truth that the mind can in principle apprehend (a stance that you call rationalist eternalism), while myth generally doesn't.
I love this piece, David. You describe this orientation so clearly and it resonates deeply as a description of how I've come to live, though I could never describe it so well. Some musing the piece sparks for me: 1) about our innate capacity for awe -- and its evolutionary value (something that, according to Goodall, we share with apes); 2) whether there's a connection between the capacity to experience and act on the sacred and a capacity to honor life; and 3) how gratitude, and its upwelling, can be a spark for blessing, then blessing as the gateway to kind and caring action. And more . . . .
"In monotheistic religions, the eternal ordering principle is God. Everything means whatever God makes it mean; no more, no less. So things are sacred if God makes them so, directly or indirectly through one of His representatives."
Yes, but that is the account of how sacredness is established, not the definition of the term. Things are sacred for theists because they are an expression of or conduit to the divinity of the deity. If there is no deity, a new definition is required.
>If there is no deity, a new definition is required.
What's wrong with a dictionary one? "Regarded with great respect and reverence by a particular religion, group, or individual" makes sense even when you take out "religion".
That is a rather secondary definition. It doesn't say anything about what the basis for the great respect and reverence is.
Chapman says this isn't entirely subjective, but I had no idea which tree was supposed to be sacred until he told me.
I laughed when I read this! Both were sacred to me, although differently so. The first tree is in such a manicured space, defined by human proportions and goals. Speaking of anthropomorphism (though no one was particularly), did you catch the human form made by overlapping leaves and shadows in the branches of the first tree? Has to count for something.
Still, I agree that the "sacred" isn't entirely subjective; if anything, it's perhaps an invitation beyond the limits of subjectivity, expanding what can be included. Or maybe not.....
That's funny, but also a bit chastening! Apparently I generalized my pattern of perception mistakenly.
It took me a second before it became very clear. I think it’s a great example to learn to distinguish between beautiful and sacred.
This is all hopeful to me, but I understand only faintly. I want to understand some of what you understand. I have many questions!
(I'm hoping for paradigmatic answers to these, rather than definitional answers. I'm trying to locate sacredness in my own experience, not to draw definitions around it and be able to say that This Is It and That Is Not, which I already expect to be a mistake.)
What do you typically perceive when you perceive sacredness?
It seems like seeing-as-sacred yields different affordances than seeing-as-not-sacred. Can you describe the differences in what those affordances feel like?
Can sacredness be present without affecting your overt interactions? Or is sacredness in part comprised of a change to those interactions? Or might it just be interactional in affecting your non-overt interactions, like feeling, thinking, and perception? (Or is it "just" in a feedback loop with some of these kinds of interactions?
Does sacredness feel normative to you, like it yields ethical or practical duties? Does it always create a difference in your sense of rightness and wrongness in your actions? Does it create a difference in your sense of the rightness and wrongness of _others'_ actions?
From _inside_ the feeling of sacredness, are there reasons that some things are sacred? Do these share patterns?
... I now realize I'm asking for posts and posts of answers, such is real interest, I think. I'll appreciate whatever you feel up for!
These are great questions! I am sorry to have taken two weeks to reply at all, and also sorry that I'm not going to say anything substantive now, because (as you say) this opens out into what would be a book's worth of answering at minimum. And I'm really not sure of the answers anyway—sacredness is (almost by definition) somewhat mysterious and difficult to pin down. It's a "mysterium tremendum et fascinans": a sometimes-terrifying and fascinating mystery.
If you haven't already seen it—today's post *might* give some sense: https://meaningness.substack.com/p/personal-experiences-of-sacredness
If it seems like it might be useful, you might attend the next Q&A, which is a week from today, and pose the questions there. I might be forced to try to give some sort of answers by being put on the spot! I'd also ask other participants for their takes, so you might get an interesting (or confusing) diversity of answers.
Sacredness without metaphysics hits because people recognize those rare moments when life suddenly feels deeper and more vivid. As everyday noise builds, our attention narrows and the world starts to feel thin, so anything that opens a sense of meaning stands out immediately. It’s describing a shift in perception where things regain weight and presence, the way they do when drift slows and the mind isn’t overloaded. These moments don’t depend on belief systems. They show up whenever awe, focus, or connection cuts through the synthetic realness of routine. People respond to that because it reconnects them with a kind of clarity that’s hard to reach in high-entropy modern environments.
I like that very much, thank you!
Here's something I've mulled over for years, ever since we had our podcast episode about sacredness. I even spent several more days mulling it over since you posted this, just in case, because this is important to me.
But this isn't *sacred* to me, so I'll say it.
Your examples here, and the ones we discussed on the podcast, sound like importance, and loving something a lot. How does your conception of sacred differ from important or beloved?
The distinction I draw is consistent with how I hear the word constantly used (derogative connotation, as in "sacred cow", or positive connotation, when eternalists say it). The distinction doesn't have to to with metaphysics or superstition, but with how people talk and act; which seems similar to what you call "doing and seeing". Hear me out, but my argument is that doing and seeing is bad when it's sacred, and good when it's important and beloved.
Seeing something as sacred, and acting as such, is distinct from placing a lot of importance or loving something a lot, in that the doing and seeing involve the eternalistic ploys.
1. There is an off-limits quality to treating something as sacred, which is not true of it being important or beloved. A wall of DON'T. Don't be curious. Be careful how you talk about it. Don't look in the holy of holies. Don't touch. Don't think about it too hard. Don't draw the prophet. Don't skewer sacred cows.
2. People get stuck up about it in a way that they don't when it's very important or beloved. Like I said in the episode, as soon as someone says they treat sex as sacred, or music as sacred, or a dance as sacred, they turn snobbish.
3. They start to have absolutist all-or-nothing hang-ups about it in a way they don't when it's important or beloved.
These textures of seeing and doing might not detract from wonder, in some sense, but they often shut down curiosity, humor, play, enjoyment, and creation. Except as kitsch.
One might think, "well, it's just a word, and words have multiple meanings." That's also true of the word "philosophy", and you've convinced me to not use that to describe things except when they're bad. The main reason not to use it with multiple meanings (some good, some bad) is that when people hear it, they almost universally hear us to mean the list of bad traits I listed above about sacredness, and the bad traits which you listed in your posts about philosophy.
In those posts you were very careful to point out distinctions between philosophy and other things, which others had conflated because they just never brought it up. So, to me, it's a significant gap that you haven't addressed the distinction between sacred and very important and beloved.
Hmm, yes, well, it certainly could be useful to explain how I'm using "sacred." OTOH, there are endless things it might be useful for me to explain... and this doesn't seem to be in the top N.
Some people will misunderstand, but that's an inevitable fact about anything I write.
Most things I write won't be useful for most people! And that's unfixable.
Understandable. Fortunately, time is something I do have. Given how often it's on my mind, it's probably worthwhile to add this to what I'm looking into. If I discover an explanation, I'll probably post it somewhere publicly. If someone else asks this question, you can hook us up and have us talk amongst ourselves.
David, this piece was fantastic. I'd really love to hear more about the connection between sacredness and/or the mythic mode, and purpose. This comes mostly from a personal place, as I often struggle with feelings of purposelessness in my life, and have also experienced what I would probably describe as sacredness, and have a desire for more access to it.
Glad you liked it! I started writing a post about the sacredness/mythic mode/purpose connects three weeks ago, but it got complicated, so I set it aside. I'll probably return to it at some point!
Looking forward to it if you get around to it.
As you anticipated, this post was confusing for me! The biggest issue seems to be - I'm not able to identify, in my own lived experience, sacredness as distinct from the other categories you mention. The images you included as examples of the sacred... could they not also be examples of the sublime? Much sublime art includes mountains and vast landscapes. Or, blessing things... that could easily be seen as merely 'spiritual', couldn't it? What kind of experience would be *purely* sacred and none of the other categories?
> The biggest issue seems to be - I'm not able to identify, in my own lived experience, sacredness as distinct from the other categories you mention.
Ah... is this a problem? This post only tried to distinguish sacredness (an embodied here-and-now interaction) from metaphysics (conceptual theories). For some people, that might come as a valuable realization.
> The images you included as examples of the sacred... could they not also be examples of the sublime?
Oh, yes, they definitely are. Sacredness does typically overlap with some of the other categories, although it need not.
I didn't give an example of sacredness as a non-example of anything sacredness might be confused with. Examples might be difficult to communicate, because anything *can* be sacred or non-sacred. So, for example, I related with the willow tree by the pond I mentioned as sacred, and not as anything else on the list. But that was just how the two of us were at the time, and there's not much I can think of to explain beyond that. "You had to be there" (and quite likely you wouldn't have interacted the same way if you had been, although you might have!).
The experience of the sacred, as you describe it here, is something I am not sure I have ever experienced. And judging from your advice it sounds like an awful lot of work. It is not clear to me that it is worth the effort.
Well... This doesn't seem like a lot of effort? And might be valuable even if you reject "sacredness" as the result:
> As a matter of attitude, you can bring to bear wonderment, open-ended curiosity, humor, play, enjoyment, and creation. You can simply notice these as they arise, and allow them to persist and intensify.
In my experience, "allowing [positive emotions] to intensify" is a very slow process that takes dozens if not hundreds of hours of meditation. I have been doing exactly that for several months, and I intend to continue that work, because it has made me obviously happier.
But it has not helped me experience sacredness.
Oh, really glad to hear it is working for you, even if slowly!
I find it helpful to complement meditation with inspiring reading. Descriptions of sacred experience may help point out what to look for, and then you see that it was there all along (unnoticed, and therefore weak).